Has your hiring process evolved in response to the candidate-driven market? Does it emphasize on providing an easy and engaging application experience to every job-seeker? Does your sourcing process allow you to form positive relationships with prospective candidates for future hiring?
The quality of experience has a significant impact on the candidate’s perception of your company. So, if you don’t want to lose top talent to your competitors, give your candidates a compelling reason to choose your company over others.
What Is Candidate Experience?
Candidate experience refers to your applicants’ overall impression of your recruiting process or agency. Every encounter a candidate has had with your business during the recruiting process contributes to their candidate experience. These interactions cover the whole employment process, from the initial touchpoint, and the job application, to the screening process, interviewing, and onboarding.
Everything you do influences your prospect’s perspective and decision to continue connecting with your team or not, therefore a positive candidate experience is critical to your success.
How a Bad Candidate Experience Can Hurt Your Hiring Process in the Long-Term
According to a study conducted by CareerBuilder, 75% of candidates never heard back from the HR teams of companies they proactively reached out to for a job opportunity.
This is a major reason candidates have started to develop negative views about the organizations that fail to communicate their decisions to interested candidates. Every candidate that goes beyond submitting the resume and undergoes several interview rounds wants to know the company’s final decision, even if it is a rejection.
Lack of consistent communication and no follow-ups leave your candidates feeling they made a big mistake by investing their time and effort applying for a job in your organization.
What if this candidate who was left hanging either due to a budgeting issue or due to lack of communication, forms a strongly negative opinion of your organization and vents about his bad experience on a prominent social platform like GlassDoor? This negative publicity from a disgruntled applicant can devastate your brand identity.
What Defines a Poor Candidate Experience?
- When the employer does not bother to update the candidate about the final decision following the interview.
- When they find out during the interview that the job description has little correlation with the actual job. When the recruiter or the company representative does not express a positive work culture or does not seem to be knowledgeable.
- When the recruiter fails to acknowledge receiving the application.
- When candidates are faced with such experiences, they not only tell others to not apply at that particular company but also ask them to boycott their products or services. So, if you don’t want to frustrate your potential candidates, don’t ever fail to follow-up and keep in constant touch.
Mistakes That Kill the Candidate Experience
Ignoring Mobile Responsiveness
More than half of your potential employees are searching for better prospects and applying for jobs using their mobile phones. So, if your careers site is not mobile responsive, you are negatively impacting the application experience of your potential candidates and driving them to your competitors.
Not Pre-Screening Candidates Properly
Pre-screening candidates can save you from making bad hiring decisions in haste later. If it is taking you too long to gauge the ability of your potential candidates, take the screening time from hours to minutes with online recruiting software. Using online recruiting software, you can screen applicants in a jiffy and stay focused on bringing the best onboard.
Failing to Follow-up
According to a report by the Career Arc, almost 80% of candidates will never consider any future job openings at the same organization if the recruiter failed to follow up on their first application status.
Boring Your Busy Candidates to Death with a Complicated Application Process
Using a standard, lengthy application form for every job opening makes the process tedious and time-consuming for your candidates. Also, you cannot rule out the possibility that job seekers often quit lengthy application forms in the middle.
This makes it very clear that a slow and cumbersome recruitment process frequently misses top industry talent. But, the question now is – what can be done to improve the candidate’s experience?
7 Ways to Improve Candidate Experience
Make your Job Openings Easy to Find
You must have a “Careers” page on your website. If not, get one right now. Whenever someone visits your website, they should be able to clearly differentiate and spot different tabs; they should not feel lost. List your openings very clearly on the careers page.
Go Mobile
Needless to say, make your website and job application mobile-optimized. Research suggests that nearly half of the job seekers prefer to apply via some mobile interface. Cloud-based recruitment software makes it much easier for your tech-savvy candidates to apply from any device, on the go!
Put Yourself in the Shoes of the Applicant
Think about how you would feel about the entire recruitment process of your company as a job seeker. Then design the recruitment process keeping the candidate experience on priority. You can be a successful recruiter if the candidates are happy and satisfied with your application process.
Know your Candidate Better through Personalized Questions
This is needed when your hiring process is really long. While you will get the basic information about a candidate in first few interactions, you may now want to know the candidate personally. Ask them some personalized open-ended questions and let them answer freely. Be sure to keep these questions interesting and unique.
Be Consistent With Your Communication
There are so many candidates who never receive a reply to their application or they never get to know officially if they got rejected. This creates a negative image. Candidates feel as if their application has fallen into a black hole.
Show Up in your Candidate’s Emails with Some Important Information
The hiring process can take a lot of time. To keep your candidates interested, show up in their inbox once in a while with some important piece of information or some tips.
Seek Feedback From the Candidates
Among all the other questions that you ask the candidates, including a question that connects to them and makes them feel better. For example, “Did we miss out on anything? Tell us what we should definitely know about you.”
The Candidate Experience Doesn’t End with Hiring
Once the process is over, don’t forget your candidates. Ask them how they felt about the whole process. This makes them feel connected while they wait for their results.
A lot has been said above about how you can improve your candidate experience. However, the key to making your candidate feel best is taking just the right steps in the right situations. Recognize your needs and make the changes accordingly or ask us.
Jobsoid offers one of the finest applicant tracking systems which will allow your candidates have the best experience. For all the resources and efforts you spend in this direction, Jobsoid promises the most meaningful changes to your website and gives to you just the right thing.
