What Happens With “Candidate Experience” In Turbulent Economic Times?

It’s a little bit complicated, right?

I’ve personally long thought “candidate experience” was a buzzword, but for a while there we were discussing it a good deal and people were getting nice $75,000 per annum jobs to pretend to “manage” it, which typically means they went to a few meetings per week and did 1–2 presentations to executives per year; those presentations were put in a virtual drawer roughly 14 seconds after they were completed, and KPI Kevin groused aloud, “Isn’t that some HR shit? I’m too busy to sit through another one of those.” I digress.

But now the damn economy is wildin’, y’all. To recap:

• We had COVID, and about 22M Americans lost their job or some form of it.
• We had the “remote work” pivot.
• We had the “you need to come back in, no you can stay remote, no come back in now” hokey pokey.
• We had “The Great Resignation,” i.e. “The Great Reconsideration.”
• We had a downturn in the economy.
• We had pretty massive inflation.
• The Tech Emperors had no clothes.
• We have a lot of white-collar hiring freezes at notable employers, and some blue-collar ones too (for…