Attracting the Best Part 2: The Candidate Experience
Debbie Morrison • September 7, 2021

Attracting the Best Part 2: The Candidate Experience

How do you attract the very best candidates for every position?


This is the second in a two-part series focused on the question of how to attract the very best candidates for every position. In the first, we looked at the employee experience, because attracting the best begins with retaining the best. Here, we’ll focus on the candidate experience.

 

The ‘candidate experience’ is the sum total of every point of contact between your organisation and a prospective employee. This is an important principle, because every single element of that start-to-finish lifecycle contributes to the candidate’s experience, and therefore their perception of your organisation. Handled well, this works in your favour. If it’s not, it can result in candidates dropping out of the process, or declining offers. The candidate experience is comprised of four primary elements: the initial impression through employment marketing, the application stage, interviews and communication between them, and the hiring and onboarding process.

 

Employment Marketing

Smart companies understand that a job posting and a job description are two different things. A job description is an internal HR document. A job posting is a marketing piece; it’s your opportunity to sell your company, and your opportunity, to the candidates you’re trying to recruit. Great candidates are attracted by postings that speak to them about what it’s like to work for your company, and about some of the more positive – even exciting – elements of the work they’ll get to do there. If there are clear paths for progression, even better; top employees want to see that they can learn, grow, and develop further in their career. Your company website is also a recruitment tool – the best candidates thoroughly research companies they’re considering, so every part of your website (not just the ‘Employment Opportunities’ page) should be viewed through that lens. Good recruiters seek to understand the unique value of working for your company, so we can sell the opportunity in a compelling way when we’re speaking with prospective candidates.

 

Application Process

Have you ever tried to apply to work for your own company? It can be an interesting experiment that helps you see firsthand how easy or difficult it is, and the kind of first impression it leaves with applicants. If you invite candidates to email resumes and cover letters, do they receive a confirmation letting them know their application was received, and perhaps even what to expect next? If you ask candidates to fill in a form with their experience, is the form clean and visually appealing, and does it work properly? When a submission is made, does the applicant get confirmation that it was successful? Some companies – particularly those that have recently begun using applicant tracking systems – ask candidates to do both: submit a resume and cover letter, and also to enter the same information in a form. Redundancies like this are frustrating to applicants, and can cost you the candidate you really want. Ideally, it should be just as easy for a person to apply to work for you, as it is for a new customer to work with you.

 

Interviews and Communication

Before starting a recruitment process for any position, it pays to think about who needs to be involved in the interview process, and when. High performing candidates often have to take time away from a current job to interview, and this can become difficult and frustrating when an interview process has too many separate steps. Group interviews, or having shortlisted candidates move through several back-to-back interviews in one day, can be helpful ways of streamlining the process for everyone. It’s also helpful to determine what you’re looking for at each stage of the interview process. This way, the questions each interviewer asks will be more strategic and intentional, making the interviews more focused and productive.


Throughout the process, one person – an employee, or a recruiter if you’re using a firm – should be the main point of contact with candidates, keeping lines of communication open. If someone is no longer being considered, delivering the news promptly (and compassionately) leaves as positive an impression as possible. If you want a candidate to move ahead, it’s even more important to stay closely in touch, being clear about timelines and next steps.


 

Hiring and Onboarding

The final step in a successful hiring process is, of course, the hire. Smart companies plan beyond day one, though. The experience that a brand new employee has in their first few weeks with your company sets the tone for their time with you, and in fact can cement their decision to stay or to keep their eyes open. Onboarding differs vastly from one company to the next; there’s no single formula for success, but a new hire should feel welcomed, and should have a clear sense of structure and organisation: that the role and the company were ready for them to start. Take advantage of the opportunity you and your new hire have to make a great mutual first impression that turns into a lasting relationship.


Paying attention to these four stages of the candidate experience pays dividends. You’ll attract and successfully hire more of your first-choice candidates, winning the race for the high-performing employees you need on your team

The Quiet Collapse of Australian Vegetable Farming

By John Elliott • June 26, 2025
You don’t hear about it on the nightly news. There’s no breaking story. No panic. No protests. Just rows of vegetables being pulled out of the ground with no plan to replant. Just farmers who no longer believe there’s a future for them here. Just quiet decisions — to sell, to walk away, to stop. And if you ask around the industry, they’ll tell you the same thing: It’s not just one bad season. It’s a slow death by a thousand margins. 1 in 3 growers are preparing to leaveIn September 2024, AUSVEG released a national sentiment report with a statistic that should have set off alarms in every capital city: 34% of Australian vegetable growers were considering exiting the industry in the next 12 months. Another one-third said they’d leave if offered a fair price for their farm. Source: AUSVEG Industry Sentiment Report 2024 (PDF) These aren’t abstract hypotheticals. These are real decisions, already in motion. For many, it’s not about profitability anymore, it’s about survival. This isn’t burnout. It’s entrapment. Behind the numbers are people whose entire identity is tied to a profession that no longer feeds them. Many are asset-rich but cash-poor. They own the land. But the land owns them back. Selling means walking away from decades of history. Staying means bleeding capital, month by month, in a system where working harder delivers less. Every year, input costs rise, fuel, fertiliser, compliance. But the farmgate price doesn’t move. Or worse, it drops. Retail World Magazine reports that even though national vegetable production increased 3% in 2023–24, the total farmgate value fell by $140 million. Growers produced more and earned less. That’s not a market. That’s a trap. What no one wants to say aloud The truth is this: many growers are only staying because they can’t leave. If you’re deep in debt, if your farm is tied to multi-generational ownership, if you’ve invested everything in equipment, infrastructure, or land access, walking away isn’t easy. It’s a last resort. So instead, you stay. You cut your hours. Delay maintenance. Avoid upgrades. Cancel the next round of planting. You wait for something to shift, interest rates, weather, prices and you pretend that waiting is strategy. According to the latest fruitnet.com survey, over 50% of vegetable growers say they’re financially worse off than a year ago. And nearly 40% expect conditions to deteriorate further. This isn’t about optimism or resilience. It’s about dignity and the quiet erosion of it. Supermarkets won’t save them, and they never planned to In the current model, supermarket pricing doesn’t reflect real-world farm economics. Retailers demand year-round consistency, aesthetic perfection, and lower prices. They don’t absorb rising input costs, they externalise them. They offer promotions funded not by their marketing budgets, but by the growers’ margins. Farmers take the risk. Retailers take the profit. And because the power imbalance is so deeply entrenched, there’s no real negotiation, just quiet coercion dressed up as "category planning." Let’s talk about what’s actually broken This isn’t just a market failure. It’s a policy failure. Australia’s horticulture system has been built on: Decades of deregulated wholesale markets Lack of collective bargaining power for growers Retailer consolidation that has created a virtual duopoly Export-focused incentives that bypass smaller domestic producers There’s no meaningful floor price for key produce lines. No national enforcement of fair dealing. No public database that links supermarket shelf price to farmgate return. Which means growers, like James, can be driven into loss-making supply contracts without ever seeing the true economics of their product downstream. But the real silence? It’s from consumers. Here’s what no one wants to admit: We say we care about “buying local.” We say we value the farmer’s role. We share those viral posts about strawberries going unsold or milk prices being unfair. And then we complain about a $4 lettuce. We opt for the cheapest bag of carrots. We walk past the "imperfect" produce bin. We frown at the cost of organic and click “Add to Cart” on whatever’s half price. We’re not just bystanders. We’re part of the equation. What happens when the growers go? At first, very little. Supermarkets will find substitutes. Importers will fill gaps. Large agribusinesses will expand into spaces vacated by smaller players. Prices will stay low, until they don’t. But over time, we’ll notice: Produce that travels further and lasts less. Fewer independent growers at farmer’s markets. Entire regions losing their growing identity. National food security becoming a campaign promise instead of a reality. And when the climate throws something serious at us, drought, flood, global supply shock, we’ll realise how little resilience we’ve preserved. So what do we do? We start by telling the truth. Australia is not food secure. Not if 1 in 3 growers are planning to exit. The market isn’t working. Not when prices rise at the shelf and fall at the farmgate. The solution isn’t scale. It’s fairness, visibility, and rebalancing power. That means: Mandating cost-reflective contracts between retailers and suppliers Enabling collective bargaining rights for growers Building transparent data systems linking production costs to consumer prices Introducing transition finance for smaller producers navigating reform and climate pressure And holding supermarkets publicly accountable for margin extraction But more than anything, it means recognising what we’re losing, before it's gone. Final word If you ate a vegetable today, it likely came from someone who’s considered giving up in the past year. Not because they don’t care. But because caring doesn’t pay. This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about sovereignty, over what we eat, how we grow it, and who gets to stay in the system.  Because the next time you see rows of green stretching to the horizon, you might want to ask: How many of these fields are already planning their last harvest?

Recession Is Coming for FMCG and Most Leaders Are Pretending It’s Not

By John Elliott • June 20, 2025
If you're leading an FMCG or food manufacturing business right now, you're probably still talking about growth. Your board might be chasing headcount approvals. Your marketing team’s pitching a new brand campaign. Your category team’s assuming spend will bounce. But your customer? They’ve already moved on. Quietly. Like they always do. The illusion of resilience FMCG has always felt protected, “essential” by nature. People still eat, wash, shop. It’s easy to assume downturns pass around us, not through us. But this isn’t 2020. Recessions in 2025 won’t look like lockdowns. They’ll look like volume drops that no promo can fix. Shrinking margins on products that no longer carry their premium. Quiet shelf deletions you weren’t warned about. The data’s already there. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, consumer spending is slowing in real terms , even as inflation eases. The Reserve Bank confirmed in May: household consumption remains subdued amid weak real income growth . And over 80% of Australians have cut back on discretionary food spending , according to Finder. They’re still shopping, just not like they used to. A managing director at a national food manufacturer told me recently: “We won a new product listing in April. By July, it was marked for deletion. The velocity wasn’t there, but neither was the shopper. We’d forecasted like 2022 never ended. Rookie mistake.” That one stuck with me. Because I’ve heard it before, just in different words.