“It seems to me, while it’s true that every dog will have his day — when all the bones are buried there is barely time to go outside and play…” —Neil Peart

At least we all agree that 50 clicks to apply for a job online is frustrating, even egregious. Mercy, 10 clicks is like 49 years in dog years these days — millions of automated job application processes painfully processed each year. It’s “customer service” crystal clear that the more hoops you make prospects and customers jump through, the less likely they’re going to jump. Same with job candidates and current employees — it’s also “customer service” crystal clear that job candidates on any level just want to be acknowledged that they applied, whether they make it through the screening process or not.

But what they don’t need are flowers, rainbows, unicorns and tons of smiley faces when it comes to their job application experience. In fact, recent research highlighted in a Freakonomics report I came across revealed that “customers don’t really care about all those in-your-face niceties that some retailers seem to think are important.” This is from the Customer Contact Council, a division of the Corporate Executive Board, which conducted a study of more than 75,000 people who had interacted over the phone with contact-center representatives or through self-service channels such as the web, voice prompts, chat and e-mail.

Granted, that was specific to retail, but I’d argue that customers just want you to give it to them straight — acknowledgement and closure.

I wrote some of the following last week, but it bears repeating here. …

Mark Stelzner put it very well last night, during #TChat, when he wrote, “The candidates are underwhelmed and the recruiters are overwhelmed.” But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Give candidates acknowledgement and closure — the same, and especially with, internal candidates who already work for you.

Screw the smiles, rainbows and unicorns. Give it to us straight, baby.

Did you miss the preview? Click here. And thank you, Sarah White, for moderating #TChat! We all look forward to this year’s Candidate Experience Awards, to see who’s getting it right. In the meantime, the World of Work community’s tweets last night got a lot right. Check out the following slide show, a cross-section of wisdom. We’ll see you next week.

[javascript src=”//storify.com/TalentCulture/tchat-insights-2012-job-candidate-experience-firs.js?template=slideshow”]

#TChat INSIGHTS: 2012 Job Candidate Experience First Contact

Storified by TalentCulture · Thu, Jun 21 2012 00:29:56

Mercy, to be a data scientist. The new geek is chic. That is where the world is going–big data is a big deal, but getting to the big insight is the trick.

According to a recent The Economist article:

Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

What is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them, like the very nature of evaluating future employees and current ones. Assessments have been around for decades — personality, skills, behavioral, role-based — and I/O psychologists have been involved in developing reliable and valid ones, many of which are used by most mid-sized to large enterprises.

As the global economy pushes and pulls itself beyond the post-apocalyptic, businesses big and small are looking inside as much as outside their organizations for the highest quality of fit and productivity possible with their full-time, part-time and contingent workforce. And that means assessments galore measuring myriad hard and soft skills — super powers, if you will, that will propel the business into the stratosphere. Predictive assessments that take a bunch of data, analyze it and create projections of whether or not you and I will be compatible with an employer, with its employees, with its positions.

However, according to one of our #TChat Radio Show guests last night — Charles Handler, Ph.D., President/Founder of Rocket-Hire — Effective prediction requires precision; precision requires detailed effort. The more corners you cut, the less effective the results.

Properly administered assessments are critical in selecting the right people for an organization as well as moving them around inside the org. However, understanding what you’re looking for in applicants outside and in and what you’re trying to measure are even more important before you start administering assessments willy-nilly. Yes, I wrote willy-nilly. And then why the combined human interviewing element with correctly identified and applied assessment is what elevates the final predictive results.

Extracting assessment wisdom is a human endeavor.

Thanks again to our wonderful panelists last night – Charles Handler PhD, President/Founder of Rocket-Hire; Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, President, CAS, Inc; and Julie Moreland, President of PeopleClues — the lovely Meghan M. Biro and Maren Hogan, and our ever-supportive Sean Charles and Kyle Lagunas for a wonderful #TChat Radio last night. Join myself and the rest of the #TChat team next week when we discuss video in  your workforce–training, recruiting, onboarding & collaboration! Same time (7:00p ET, 6:00p CT, 4:00p PT or wherever you are), same place. Right on.

Yesterday Time magazine named the collective “Protestor” as Person of the Year for 2011. Social technologies played a fairly significant role in fueling the worldwide protests and the dramatic “call for change” we’ve seen politically and economically.

According to Time, “Social networks did not cause these movements, but they kept them alive and connected. Technology allowed us to watch, and it spread the virus of protest, but this was not a wired revolution; it was a human one, of hearts and minds, the oldest technology of all.”

Last night during our latest #TChat Radio Show with John Sumser, Principal Analyst of HRxAnalysts and founder and managing editor of The HRExaminer Online Magazine, I asked John to contrast this with how social technologies have impacted the workplace. What we discussed is the fact that, although not nearly as dramatic, social technologies have played a pervasive role in changing the world of work–slowly, but quite deliberately.

Again, think of it as moving into the old “new” west of social at work…

Two employees walk slowly into a break room and sit down. Along the wall, “Wanted” posters cover the bulletin boards:

“Remember, visiting social media sites are forbidden during business hours. Violators will be held accountable.”

The employees laugh, then stare each other down.

“Draw,” one says to the other.

They whip out their new smart phones and shoot onto Twitter and Facebook. Social technology outlaws working for companies that never saw it coming.

Or, never wanted to see it coming. According to HRxAnalysts’ recently published 2012 Index of Social Technology in HR and Recruiting, over 50% of companies still prohibit social media in the workplace, HR and recruiting social penetration is still less than 20%, and an even much smaller percentage are the true innovators driving social tech change from the bottom up.

But social is certainly in the midst of a world of work revolution, and John, Maren and I all agreed last night that true disruption has only just begun. However, we didn’t all agree on the level of true social in social technologies; John’s research showing that social today is more about data and data collection, but Maren and I argued that there are platforms, both outside and inside the enterprise, that facilitate collaborative communication, even “face” time.

As I’ve written before, we’re all part of interconnected communities — inter-coms — and it’s these inter-coms that keep humans connected and real in work and in play and in protest. Social technologies finally give us the ebb and flow reality for communities that otherwise would never know the others existed.

Revolutions are human. Always have been, always will be. The social one has only just begun.

***

Again, a very special thank you to our guest John Sumser!

The #TChat Twitter chat and the #TChat Radio Show are created by @MeghanMBiro and @KevinWGrossman; hosted by them and @MarenHogan; powered by @SocialMediaSean and @CatyKobe; and our partners include @HRmarketer, @talentmgmttech, and @Focus

Look for one more holiday #TChat next week, 12/21, 7 pm ET (4 pm PT). Join us!