Recruiting Technology Innovation: Mystery Applicant

A couple of weeks back I had the honor of serving as a member of the judging panel for the Recruiting Innovation Summit's first ever recruiting technology startup competition, held in conjunction with the Summit at the Computer History Museum Mountain View, California.

There were six innovative and interesting solutions in the competition; Goood Job, a solution for empowering employee referral programs with social network connections; Lab of Apps, a mobile-only app for more efficient and effective mobile recruiting; ONGIG; a recruitment marketing solution that enables interactive and multi-media job advertising; trait perception; a platform for candidates and employers to solicit and receive thorough rankings of skills and virtues; Venturocket, a skills-based marketplace designed to match talent with opportunity; and finally the ultimate winner of the startup contest, Mystery Applicant, a solution to capture, measure, and report on candidate experience with the organization's application process, a topic that continues to grow in relevance and importance.

Mystery Applicant, a startup from the UK impressed the judging panel and the audience at the Recruiting Innovation Summit with its simple to deploy, elegant, and powerful solution that cuts directly to a real business problem that many organizations are experiencing, namely, a poorly designed or inefficient application process and experience that is likely turning away as many good candidates as it captures.Mystery Applicant Recruiter Dashboard

Mystery Applicant integrates with an organization's Applicant Tracking System, and knows when someone has applied. The candidate is then asked for their feedback about the recruiting and applications process. The organization can also request similar feedback at the end of the recruitment process.

The system collates all of the responses and presents aggregated information to the recruiter via a dynamic and filterable dashboard. The organization can immediately see how they are performing across the entire organization, or if they prefer at a more granular level. Ideally, the organization can take this data, examine the candidate feedback and the trends over time, and make the needed adjustments to systems, processes, communications, recruiter strategy, and more in order to improve the overall candidate experience, and strengthen the organization's employment brand.

If you are one of the many organization's interested in how your employment brand is perceived, and what candidates and applicants really think of your company, the process, and the interactions they have with your recruitment staff, then I do encourage you to give Mystery Applicant a look. They do represent a real innovation in the recruiting technology space, and even better, one that can have direct and immediate impact to help address a real business problem.

Congratulations to Mystery Applicant's founders, Mike Cook and Nick Price, and the entire team. And thanks again to the Recruiting Innovation Summit for letting me participate in a fantastic event.

Comments

[David Manaster]

Thanks for serving as a judge, Steve! You always take the time to give back to the profession, which is rare and appreciated.

[Steve]

Thanks again David for the invitation to participate and also thanks to the entire ERE team, especially my man Lance Haun for putting on an excellent event. The startup competition was an outstanding addition to the line up and I hope that it will be something that can continue in the future.