Candidate Experience Takeaway

When screening hundreds or maybe even thousands of candidates, traditional recruitment processes can begin to break down. CV screening becomes overwhelming, and interview scheduling seems endless. In the midst of these processes, hiring managers/recruiters can sometimes forget about the candidate experience.

We need to shout it from the rooftops..the importance of your candidate experience cannot be understated!!

Slow processes, lack of communication, ghosting, or simply a failure to market yourself as an organization through your process can cause you to miss out on candidates. Time and time again, delivering a fast, engaging, and informative recruitment experience has become a competitive advantage.

How do you ensure that both the candidate and the talent team are having an enjoyable experience during the recruitment process?

Firstly, let’s look at the most common hiring process:

Review Applications – CV Screen – Schedule Interviews – Interview – Hiring Decision – Candidate Follow Up – Job Offer – Hire

Straight forward enough? Well, candidate expectations are rising, competition for talent is as fierce as ever, and recruitment teams are often trying to keep more than one plate spinning whilst carrying out this process multiple times. But no matter how many times you go through this process, each and every time has to offer the candidate a top experience. The facts to support this are in black and white. 94% of candidates surveyed reported that their recruitment experience impacts their decision to accept or deny and 58% report that they are even more likely to accept a role because of a positive recruitment experience. This means that your ability to hire talent is directly tied to the candidate experience that you are delivering.

Typically, candidates have a primary goal – job security. They want to secure a position and a paycheck, and they want to do so quickly. In addition to speed, candidates are often looking for transparency about the process, role, and organization. At each step, candidates are constantly providing information about themselves with their CV and interview answers. However, rarely do they get that same amount of information in return.

So, how can you deliver an experience that wins talent and boosts your status as an employer of choice?

Make the process fast, easy to apply, mobile-friendly and offer job security fast. It sounds simple in practice, but it takes a fundamental shift in how you conduct recruitment. And remember, your candidate experience is just that — an experience. It is about the touch points your applicants have with your organization, team and process. The feeling those three things leave them with is how they’ll decide if that experience was positive or negative, or whether or not they’ll join the team.

Recruiter workloads are rising, as are candidate expectations, and this becomes even more complex when trying to deliver multiple hires across a variety of departments. The exact steps in the process will vary — but every recruitment process will lean on candidate experience, automation, assessments and business intelligence to operate most effectively.

The best way to remember all this: Your recruitment experience is the beginning of your employee experience.

Other News