Folks have been talk­ing about ‘the can­di­date expe­ri­ence‘ since, well, for­ev­er (although Ger­ry Crispin cer­tain­ly had a lot to do with for­mal­iz­ing and focus­ing on what it real­ly means!). But the employ­ment mar­ket has been var­ied and uneven since I’ve been involved (yep, late 90s, ack!), so the can­di­date expe­ri­ence has been just as var­ied.

Enter the pan­dem­ic.

COVID-19 has had the most sig­nif­i­cant impact on employ­ment since World War II and the Great Depres­sion. The virus has killed hun­dreds of thou­sands world­wide, and it’s just get­ting start­ed. In an effort to slow it down, nations every­where have put their economies in a deep freeze. It has inor­di­nate­ly affect­ed the poor and com­mu­ni­ties of col­or, yet it has also reached into the upper class. For the fore­see­able future, we are all in the same boat, virus-wise.

Did I men­tion the eco­nom­ic deep freeze? That means mil­lions of folks who were doing well, doing ok, or just scrap­ing by, are now on shaky employ­ment ground. Some have been able to move to remote work; oth­ers don’t have that option. Some are dis­cov­er­ing that their indus­try may nev­er be the same again (think: restau­rants and hotels). Some are won­der­ing if they real­ly want to go back to their old jobs.

But whether some­one is employed or not, they are prob­a­bly expe­ri­enc­ing fear. And right now there is a uni­ver­sal feel to that fear – a fear that the employ­ment land­scape has changed and is chang­ing in some fun­da­men­tal ways that no one – employ­ees or employ­ers – actu­al­ly under­stands yet. Uncer­tain­ty breeds fear – and for the aver­age per­son out there, the way for­ward is murky and scary.

Maybe you buy my analy­sis – or maybe you think I’m full of it! But I can promise you – any­thing that your site can do to help can­di­dates feel less fear­ful is wel­come. It’s times like these when com­pa­nies and the ser­vices they pro­vide can become trust­ed friends. If your job board can take away even a lit­tle of the fear by show­ing your users a path for­ward, you’ll earn some grat­i­tude and loy­al­ty from those same users.

Plus: it’s bet­ter to do some­thing than to just let things hap­pen, right? Right! So I encour­age you to do your part to make fear a much small­er part of the can­di­date expe­ri­ence.

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