Q&A with Trevor Higgs, Director of Candidate Experience at Johnson & Johnson
Our first ever free virtual conference, RallyFwd™ Let’s Humanize the Candidate Experience, is drawing nearer (May 1, 2018 – mark your calendar)! Over the next few weeks, leading up to the big day, we’ll provide sneak peeks into our speakers, their topics and what you won’t want to miss.
Trevor Higgs, Director of Candidate Experience at Johnson & Johnson
As the Director of Candidate Experience, Trevor helps re-invent Talent Acquisition at Johnson & Johnson by identifying the moments that matter most to candidates, and by building exceptional experiences that attract and engage candidates.
Johnson & Johnson is 2017 Winner of the Talent Board’s Candidate Experience Awards (CandEs). (Learn more about the CandEs here)
Rally: Hi Trevor. Can you share what you’ll be speaking about at RallyFwd on May 1?
My session is called “How a Transparent Candidate Experience Helps J&J Shine.” I’ll be diving into our new candidate experience platform, called Shine. The session will cover how and why Shine was built, some of the results we’ve seen to date and future plans for our candidate experience.
Rally: Very exciting! Can you explain what the Shine platform is?
Shine is a first of its kind, custom-built candidate experience platform. We co-created the platform in partnership with Jibe and it features resources we created with our partners at The Muse. In essence, Shine is intended to improve our team’s ability to communicate with candidates in order to eliminate the dreaded “black hole” experience.
During my Closing Keynote presentation, I’ll give the RallyFwd audience a demo and behind-the-scenes look at how the platform works!
Rally: Sounds great. Will you cover anything else besides for Shine?
At J&J we’re lucky to have great resources and executive buy-in; although I recognize that not all organizations are quite at that stage yet. To keep things relevant to smaller organizations, or teams just starting out on a candidate experience improvement journey, I also provide some tips on where to start. I’ll cover a few low-cost ways, outside of Shine, that we communicate with candidates to stay as accessible and transparent as possible.
Rally: Lastly, Trevor, can you tell us why you think humanizing the candidate experience is an important topic to talk through for Recruitment Marketers and other TA and HR professionals?
At J&J, we strongly feel that we have a responsibility to everyone who uses our products. It’s built right into our Credo.
Since our candidates are also our consumers, that responsibility certainly extends to our hiring process experience. Treating our candidates as humans rather than numbers, like how we treat our customers, is the right thing to do. As a bonus, it also positively impacts our bottom line since we’re not deterring rejected candidates from continuing to purchase our products.
It’s particularly important for talent acquisition though because humanizing the candidate experience helps you attract, engage and acquire the best talent. A great candidate experience encourages candidates to spend their most valuable resource with you: their time.
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You can hear Trevor’s Closing Keynote presentation for free on May 1, 2018, by registering for the RallyFwd Virtual Conference at rallyfwd.com/register.
