Budget airline Ryanair is an unlikely benchmark against which the quality of candidate experience in a recruitment process is held up against.

This is according to recruitment personality Keith Robinson, who says: “Ryanair has a very interesting philosophy – we’re going to get you from A to B, we’re going to do it very cheaply but we’re not going to do it very well.”

But while the Ryanair customer experience might not be described as pleasurable, he went to say that at the very least they get across the necessary information in a timely fashion to customers, and people are relatively happy with this “even though you’re actually spending money”, and therefore have potentially higher expectations than when applying for jobs, which doesn’t mean getting out the wallet.

Robinson made his comments at a London debate in the Monster Buzz series.

The need to keep all candidates happy was emphasised by Colin Minto, a panellist on the night and security provider G4S’s global head of resourcing by day. “As a business you’re only as good as the last experience you’ve provided,” he said.

Gary Franklin, co-founder of The Forum for In-House Recruitment Managers (The FIRM), also on the panel, noted that this is easier said than done: “You’re not going to please everyone with the same experience, because it’s subjective, so the experience as we present it doesn’t exist, it becomes an experience or one experience.”

The debate, which also played on via a live Twitter feed using the #mbuzz hashtag, also asked whether or not automated email responses to candidates were a necessary evil – or whether such impersonal feedback was better than no response at all.

For panellist Julia Briggs, the director of interim HR community Interimity, feedback was a basic courtesy. “Is it worth investing in a good candidate experience from a finance perspective… or just because we’re decent human beings?” she asked. She once responded to 800 candidates applying for a job, many of whom were somewhat wide of the mark. “They honestly think they might have a chance,” she noted.