The “employee experience” has been a core part of my work during my career. Not “candidate experience” but employee experience, which the candidate experience is a part of. The employee experience represents every single phase of the lifecycle that all employees go through when working in an organization.

Each employee moves through the lifecycle at different speeds, which is dependent on many different factors including leadership, personality, work/life blending preferences, career path, and the list goes on. The goal for employers, which at times seems more like a theoretical concept than a reality, is to deliver a consistent experience throughout the lifecycle. That is, you may be 3 years into your career with a particular company and how you feel about that company as a great place to work is similar to the new hire who started yesterday, or the 4^th year MBA student who your organization is trying to hire. Whatever the case may be, the idea is that the entire organization from top to bottom operates in alignment with its core purpose, core values and everything that flows from this.

But, this post is NOT about how to deliver a consistently awesome employee experience. It’s about how Recruiters absolutely rock at delivering a fantastic candidate experience (i.e. see above—phase 1 of the lifecycle) and the rest of any organization royally sucks. Honestly, they are horrible at best, and here’s why.

Ask yourself this question. Would you say that in your organization how people feel after they start day #1 on the job is at the same high level as it was when they were going through the recruitment process? This is not a trick question. The typical trend is that how connected people feel to their organizations starts to decline after they move from phase 1 to phase 2 of the employee experience lifecycle. This transition occurs when a candidate starts their new job—they are no longer a candidate, but an employee.

The many touch-points between candidate and Recruiter basically vanish. The Recruiter effectively hands over the candidate to the Hiring Manager to continue the employee experience responsibility. But, as we know from working in HR and Recruitment, and being recruited ourselves, Hiring Managers, our superiors are not wired to do this like Recruiters are. Recruiters are brand ambassadors by trade—they sell, influence, persuade, educate, engage and the many other great things that successful Marketers and Salespeople do. The rest of the organization stinks at this, and this is why we have employee engagement problems in our organizations, and why we have seen a noticeable increase in undesirable turnover within all industries.

Jason Averbrook of Appirio talked a little bit about this idea at HireVue‘s Digital Disruption User Conference in Park City, Utah on June 3^rd. He calls this the “cultural continuum”, and the idea that regardless of where each employee is along the cultural continuum their overall experience needs to be consistent, and those that are in leadership roles need to all be internal cultural ambassadors. Makes perfect sense… and… the entire organization should really start learning from our Recruiters on how to do this.

What do you think? Do I make any sense at all? Do you agree? Disagree?