Dive Brief:

• Bryan Adams, Founder and CEO of Ph. Creative shared how Virgin Media plans to generate revenue from revamping the candidate experience. Adams talks about how Virgin had received around 150,000 job applications, but that they hired around 3,500 in 2015; unintentionally upsetting nearly 7,500 applicants who also happened to be paying customers of Virgin Media – costing the company around $6 million, Inc. reports.

• In typical Richard Branson fashion, Ph. Creative’s team of consultants were challenged by the Virgin Media team to ‘make Virgin famous for the candidate experience’, which ultimately led to the idea that a positive candidate experience could be an opportunity to impress and acquire more customers from the people they engage with. Graeme Johnson (Virgin Media Head of Resourcing) came up with ideas for making the candidate experience world-class.

• The new effort to improve the candidate experience could produce around $7 million in additional revenue streams for Virgin Media comes from the 89% of applicants who are not currently customers. 

Dive Insight:

When Virgin Media dreams up a new idea, its impact can be felt like ripples throughout the business community. It seems that they have discovered another key benefit of creating a more positive candidate experience and an opportunity to not only continue to build brand fanatics, but also convert some candidates to paid customers.

Adams shares some of the ways that his team is working with Virgin to make this happen, including: researching the personas of candidates, quantifying and measuring everything, mapping the current candidate experience, and developing a brand new experience. Lastly, throwing in a bit of timely and relevant marketing can help to spur new customer signups.