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It is crucial to showcase your value to the talent market, regardless of whether or not you have talent flooding through the doors.
Giving candidates the best possible hiring experience protects your employment brand and reduces the risk of losing top talent.
With growing review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, and more opportunity to voice our comments to wider audiences, it has never been more crucial to protect it, even more so in harder climates.
Candidates will soon make bad experiences known to their network, affecting your future hiring opportunities by damaging your reputation.
Instead, what we want to do is create candidate loyalty, more offer acceptance and the chance to be referred as a valued employer.
So, how do we do it?
These are the ten main steps to improve candidate experience…
As the first piece to the puzzle, this is crucial to get right. Not doing so will potentially dampen your candidate uptake and there is not much point of that! This needs to be an easy to read format that effectively markets your company while providing the candidates with all of the information they need to know. Include benefit info, requirements to be met, company values, job role info, possible opportunities and more. Make them intuitive.
A great job description, paired with an effective recruitment marketing strategy, and candidates should automatically be drawn to find out more about you. And where do they go to find it? Your Careers Website. This is the hook, which means first impressions are crucial. Unfriendly, hard to use websites such as those not mobile optimised, are not sufficient. Showcase your company values, what it is like to work for you and provide informative and engaging content.
Good content should be used at every stage of the hiring process, from the very start when they look at your online presence, through to the moment you onboard to keep the candidate engaged throughout. The aim is to represent your employment brand and captivate your audience to target both that of an active and passive job seeker. By doing so, those who may not have originally been looking for a new role may consider you for their next career move.
As we touched on earlier, making the whole process as easy as possible is crucial, especially in a more technology-driven world. This particularly applies to the application process. Did you know… 80% of candidates quit online applications if they are time-consuming, long, and unfriendly to complete? But it makes sense right? Consider how many other roles they may have applied to before yours. Imagine if every application took hours at a time to complete. With no guaranteed interview let alone job offer, it is no wonder many drop off here. For further information on the reasons, candidates drop off, have a read of our blog post.
The next stage is the interview. The point at which both parties get to know one another. Let’s call it the make or break scenario. The employer wants to win over top talent and the candidate to win over the employer, both equally deciding if it is a match. But note that a negative experience can make that decision much easier. If you create the best possible interview environment, you can set up for an ideological success, and if it still does not work then at least you know it was truly not meant to be.
Being fluid in your communication is imperative to create a great candidate experience. This is an issue many candidates express as one of their biggest frustrations. All parties should be updated at every stage, and with more automated tools available, it is not hard to do. There are plenty of resources on the market, so not only can you keep in continuous communication, but you can still use personalisation tools to humanise the recruitment process with even more time to focus on the important stuff.
Communication and transparency work hand in hand. Providing a roadmap at the early stages of the application process ensures candidates know what is to be expected. After all, candidates spend a lot of time applying to vacancies, the least we can do is be organised about it when they do. Make the process easy, so candidates are not confused, stressed or nervous, creating better results for everyone. We never want candidates to become doubtful of our offering.
Reducing time to hire is favourable for all parties, and it can be done at every stage of the recruitment process. As we said, too long of an application process causes candidates to drop off, but there is no saying this is any different further down the line. Let’s say you take weeks, and weeks to make your final decision. On average, candidates are on the market for 10 days, so when you finally go to contact that candidate again, chances are, that top talent has already been snatched up.
As we discussed, communication is a big frustration with candidates, and this especially applies to feedback as 94% of job seekers say they would like feedback, according to LinkedIn. This a simple way to improve the candidate experience beyond the hiring opportunity, something we will discuss in the next point. These candidates will be more likely to recommend you and uphold your reputation, so let them know if they have been successful or not. Thank them for their time and consider asking for feedback yourself to show your commitment to continue to improve.
As candidates exit the hiring process, remember that the relationship does not have to end there. In a few months, they could be perfect for another role. Within GDPR guidelines and the candidate's acceptance, add them into your talent pool for future communication. Also, allow them the opportunity to sign up to job alerts. Reducing your future recruitment costs and further nurturing the candidate experience. Take a look at our blog post on how to effectively build and your talent pools here.
Need any more help? Contact our team today on 0800 0485 785 or email us at info@careerkinetics.com.
