Best Place to Work awards measure how employees feel after they're hired. What they don't measure is how candidates are treated before they join. And sometimes those two experiences aren't even close. So here's the question worth asking every time one of those "Best Place to Work in Insurance" press releases goes out. Sure, but what's it actually like to try to get in the door?
Here's a real story. Fully deidentified. Completely true.
A well regarded insurance firm, badge proudly displayed on the careers page, recently put a candidate through this.
The first meeting was with the a Business Unit President. They canceled. An opportunity came up to attend the Masters. Going to Augusta isn't a crime. It's April, it's insurance, client entertainment is part of the business. Keep reading.
The next meeting was in person with a unit Sr. manager. Except no conference room had been reserved. The candidate sat down, got bumped when someone else claimed the room, moved, got bumped again, moved a second time, and spent the whole interview being shuffled through whatever space was open in a building that was supposedly deciding whether to hire them. 3 rooms total.
A second meeting with that same manager got scheduled, then canceled because he was sick, then rescheduled again. It was going around!
Then came what was supposed to be a close to final conversation. A Zoom call with a sr. member from the sales team, who asked to push the start time back fifteen minutes. He joined wearing a backwards baseball hat and mentioned it was his vacation day. He was in the middle of doing yard work. Four interviews in, and the company still couldn't find fifteen uninterrupted minutes that didn't compete with somebody's landscaping.
An email followed. Good news, a final round was in order! The final round never got scheduled. Two weeks passed with no interim word at all. Then the message came through. We've decided to go in another direction.
You might read all that and think, that's extreme, that's not us. Fair enough. But before you let yourself off the hook completely, ask yourself a few honest questions. Has anyone on your team ever walked into an interview without reading the resume first? Promised a decision by Friday and then gone quiet for two weeks? Taken a candidate call half distracted, answering emails the whole time? Let a senior leader push back an interview and never circled back personally to apologize? Those are smaller versions of the same problem, and they happen far more often than the extreme version above.
None of this is really about the recruiting team. TA can build the process, set the timeline, prep the interviewers, and follow up on the firm's behalf. What they can't do is make a senior leader choose a candidate call over a trip to Augusta. They can't make a manager book a room. They can't make a sales rep step away from the mower for a final round.
The numbers back up just how common this is. 80% of hiring managers admit to ghosting candidates at some point in the process. Not coordinators. Not recruiters. Hiring managers, the same people whose feedback fills out the engagement survey and helps earn the badge in the first place.
Every moment in that story was owned by a hiring leader. Three different people, three different levels, one consistent message about how much the candidate's time was actually worth.
That message is the culture. Just not the side anyone bothered to survey.
It helps to understand what these rankings actually measure. The Business Insurance Best Places to Work program, the most recognized one in our industry, scores firms on a self-reported employer questionnaire plus an employee survey. The employee survey makes up 75% of the total score, covering pay and benefits, role satisfaction, work environment, culture, communication, and engagement. Companies have to register and pay a participation fee just to be considered, which means the entire pool is self-selected. Firms that never opt in are invisible, no matter how they actually operate.
No candidate has ever been surveyed. Not once, in any version of this award. The people rating the culture already work there. They have a desk, a manager, a paycheck. They're not the one getting bounced through a third borrowed conference room.
And on the candidate's side of the desk, only 26% of North American job seekers say they had a great candidate experience. One in four, across companies of every size, reputation, and award history. 61% report being ghosted after an interview, up nine points from the year before, and post interview ghosting is the most damaging communication failure a hiring process can produce, because it lands after the candidate has already put in real time and energy.
So, here's the actual question worth sitting with, badge on the wall or not. Would the last person you didn't hire say your process respected their time? Not your best process. Your actual, most recent one.
Patterns at the top don't stay at the top. A senior leader who skips a call for a golf tournament, a manager who can't book a room in his own office, a rep who logs onto a final round from the backyard, that's three levels of leadership showing a candidate exactly how the place runs, probably without even realizing it.
So if you're a hiring manager reading this, and there's a decent chance you are, here's the ask, and it isn't complicated. Show up to the meeting you booked. Reserve the room. If you need to reschedule, do it yourself instead of letting an assistant handle it three days later. Give the candidate an honest timeline, even when the honest answer is I don't know yet. None of that costs a dollar or needs anyone's permission. You don't need an award to get this right. You just need to do better, starting with your next first round call.
Your recruiting team can only run the process you're actually willing to show up for. The award measures how employees feel once they're already in. The candidate experience measures how you behave when you think nobody's grading you. Those two things should match. Most of the time, they don't.
Bror David Johnson
Founder & Executive Recruiter, Retention Search
773-573-5942 | bdjohnson@retentionsearch.com
www.retentionsearch.com