With the candidate experience movement gaining more traction inside corporate talent organizations, TA leaders should start to rethink the Recruiter job title.

One company is already doing this. Root is a mobile app based car insurance company that is highly funded. They recently raised an additional funding round of $350 Million.

Their VP of People, Clara Kridler, has rebranded their recruiters into “Candidate Experience Managers” in order to focus that function into its number one job, create a wonderful experience to those they recruit.

On a recent episode of the Talk Talent To Me podcast, she told host Rob Stevens that… “our current practice is to call our recruiters candidate experience managers, each of them have primary and secondary functions that they oversee… They are First Line.”

She explains further…“we call our recruiters, candidate experience managers to emphasize to ourselves every day that we are here to optimize for the candidates experience. Recruiters to me have some sort of a negative connotation to them that makes it feel very much company versus candidate. And I wanted to flip that. I wanted to make it so the candidate and recruiter are working together to understand one another and I’m walking back towards the opportunity to hopefully come to a decision together.”

If you are a passive candidate and you get approached by a ‘recruiter’ versus a ‘Candidate Experience Manager’ which would you respond to first?

The latter I bet.

Kridler thinks it also helps to motivate their recruiters. “Since they’re owning this entire experience, it’s very empowering to them as well. Their white glove treatment for the candidate, but also for the hiring manager. All are tied together with a specific hiring managers that they serve as directly and consistently over time. And so they form a really good relationship.”

Today’s employers who take a candidate first approach to recruiting like the team at Root are differentiating themselves in this tight talent market.

Candidate experience is free to implement. You just gotta put in the effort.