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There’s a cost to bad recruiting practices

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4 minute read

We all hear about the frustration job seekers feel when they submit their job application online and never hear another word.  But how much does this damage your brand? Here is some really good advice from a contributor from Edmonton.

The cost of a bad experience – by Shane Calder

(Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash)

“In 2015, Virgin Media received approximately 150,000 job applications, translating into 3,500 new hires. The company estimated that 27,000 (18%) of those applicants were also customers—and that poor candidate experiences led 7416 of those applicant customers to churn from Virgin Media.”

Bad experience costs you?

Virgin Media lost 6 million dollars in revenue as a result of their candidates experience.

(Photo by Robin Worrall on Unsplash)

How is it costing your company?

It’s simple.  It’s negatively impacting your brand.

“Nearly 60% of Job Seekers have had a poor candidate experience & 72% talk about it.”

Candidates want to be contacted with progress of their application. 80% of applicants are discouraged to reapply if they received no feedback. Poor experience can be detrimental to your candidate search and your company’s online reputation. Candidates actually value knowing about the status of their application more than a polished website or a well-designed careers page.

Source: https://workplacetrends.com/candidate-experience-study/

Technology Woes 

(Photo by Adam Birkett on Unsplash)

Have you lost the personal touch?

Candidates who were unsuccessful in a job application doubt a person even reviewed their application. If 85% of the applicants who apply to a job posting doubt that it was ever reviewed by an actual person, imagine the negative impact on your brand and how you are viewed. Will this activity help attract talent?

Add the personal touch.

Augment your resources. Don’t remove your HR professionals from the conversation.  Build a rapport with your candidates. Use emails, live chats and social media.

Source: https://www.thetalentboard.org/cande-awards/cande-research-reports/

Rejected offers

(Photo by Ian Tuck on Unsplash)

In the IBM white paper “The far reaching impact of candidate experience” it was discovered that if a candidate has a good experience there is a 54% chance they will accept an offer. If the experience was a disappointment only 39% would accept an offer of employment. Candidates with a positive experience are 2 times more likely to become a customer. The candidate experience is your company’s opportunity to build brand advocates even if no offer is given.

Source: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/YMOARJJG

Social License To Operate

Photo by Nicole Honeywill on Unsplash

The candidate experience impacts your company and is an opportunity to showcase your company. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to improve the experience. The rewards of increased revenue, reduced costs, advocates and finding good talent are within your control.

Treat job candidates well, give them a great experience and you will be rewarded.

Shane Calder is Principal, 132 ENG Inc.  He can be reached at [email protected]

132 ENG is an exclusive Engineering and Technical Services Company, providing placement and recruiting services. Discover our real results. 132Eng experts have proven expertise and depth of knowledge that is powerful. Let us make it easy, save you time and make you look amazing. It will be our secret.

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Bad Research Still Costs Good Money

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  By David Clinton

I have my opinions about which academic research is worth funding with public money and which isn’t. I also understand if you couldn’t care less about what I think. But I expect we’ll all share similar feelings about research that’s actually been retracted by the academic journals where it was published.

Globally, millions of academic papers are published each year. Many – perhaps most – were funded by universities, charitable organizations, or governments. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of those papers contain serious errors, irreproducible results, or straight-up plagiarized or false content.

Not only are those papers useless, but they clog up the system and slow down the real business of science. Keeping up with the serious literature coming out in your field is hard enough, but when genuine breakthroughs are buried under thick layers of trash, there’s no hope.

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Society doesn’t need those papers and taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for their creation. The trick, however, is figuring out how to identify likely trash before we approve a grant proposal.

I just discovered a fantastic tool that can help. The good people behind the Retraction Watch site also provide a large dataset currently containing full descriptions and metadata for more than 60,000 retracted papers. The records include publication authors, titles, and subjects; reasons for the retractions; and any institutions with which the papers were associated.

Using that information, I can tell you that 798 of those 60,000 papers have an obvious Canadian connection. Around half of those papers were retracted in the last five years – so the dataset is still timely.

There’s no single Canadian institution that’s responsible for a disproportionate number of clunkers. The data contains papers associated with 168 Canadian university faculties and 400 hospital departments. University of Toronto overall has 26 references, University of British Columbia has 18, and McMaster and University of Ottawa both have nine. Research associated with various departments of Toronto’s Sick Children’s Hospital combined account for 27 retractions.

To be sure, just because your paper shows up on the list doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. For example, while 20 of the retractions were from the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada, those were all pulled because they were out of date. That’s perfectly reasonable.

I focused on Canadian retractions identified by designations like Falsification (38 papers), Plagiarism (41), Results Not Reproducible (21), and Unreliable (130). It’s worth noting that some of those papers could have been flagged for more than one issue.

Of the 798 Canadian retractions, 218 were flagged for issues of serious concern. Here are the subjects that have been the heaviest targets for concerns about quality:

You many have noticed that the total of those counts comes to far more than 218. That’s because many papers touch on multiple topics.

For those of you keeping track at home, there were 1,263 individual authors involved in those 218 questionable papers. None of them had more than five such papers and only a very small handful showed up in four or five cases. Although there would likely be value in looking a bit more closely at their publishing histories.

This is just about as deep as I’m going to dig into this data right now. But the papers I’ve identified are probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lousy (and expensive) research. So we’ve got an interest in identifying potentially problematic disciplines or institutions. And, thanks to Retraction Watch, we now have the tools.

Kyle Briggs over at CanInnovate has been thinking and writing about these issues for years. He suggests that stemming the crippling flow of bad research will require a serious realigning of the incentives that currently power the academic world.

That, according to Briggs, is most likely to happen by forcing funding agencies to enforce open data requirements – and that includes providing access to the programming code used by the original researchers. It’ll also be critical to truly open up access to research to allow meaningful crowd-sourced review.

Those would be excellent first steps.

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DOGE asks all federal employees: “What did you do last week?”

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MXM logo  MxM News

Quick Hit:

Elon Musk said Saturday that all federal employees must submit a productivity report if they wish to keep their jobs. Employees received an email requesting details on what they accomplished in the past week, with failure to respond being treated as a resignation.

Key Details:

  • Musk stated that federal employees must submit their reports by 11:59 p.m. on Monday or be considered as having resigned.

  • Musk emphasized that the process should take under five minutes, stating that “an email with some bullet points that make any sense at all is acceptable.”

  • FBI Director Kash Patel instructed agency employees not to comply with the request for now, stating that the bureau will handle reviews internally according to FBI procedures.

Diving Deeper:

Federal employees have been given a strict deadline to justify their jobs, as DOGE pushes for greater accountability within the government. The email came late Saturday, explaining that all federal workers would be required to submit a brief productivity report detailing their accomplishments from the previous week. Those who do not respond will be deemed to have resigned.

Musk framed the requirement as a minimal effort, writing on X that “the bar is very low.” He assured employees that simply providing bullet points that “make any sense at all” would suffice and that the report should take less than five minutes to complete.

The policy aligns with President Trump’s push for increased efficiency in government. The Office of Personnel Management confirmed the initiative, stating that agencies would determine any further steps following the reports. Meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel pushed back, advising bureau employees not to comply for the time being, stating that the FBI would handle its own review process.

The policy has drawn sharp criticism from the American Federation of Government Employees, which blasted Musk’s involvement, accusing him of disrespecting public servants. The union vowed to fight any terminations resulting from the initiative.

Musk also took aim at the White House’s Rapid Response account after it listed recent Trump administration actions, including expanding IVF access and cutting benefits for illegal immigrants. In response, Musk quipped that simply sending an email with coherent words was enough to meet the requirement, reiterating that expectations for the reports were low.

The directive comes as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency seeks to eliminate waste across federal agencies, signaling a broader crackdown on bureaucratic inefficiencies under the Trump administration.

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