Candidate experience is key for the success of your hiring process. The job market is highly competitive, there’s a shortage of talent and top candidates look at the overall candidate experience as an indicator of how a company values its people and take it into consideration when deciding whether to accept or decline a job offer.
However, providing a positive candidate experience can be hard given that there’s a major gap between how both employers and candidates perceive the experience. Hence providing a positive candidate experience requires companies to put themselves in the candidate’s shoes, so they can evaluate the hiring process and identify what should be improved.
Unfortunately, negative candidate experiences are frequent and candidates are prone to share their experiences, good or bad, publicly on social media. Needless to say that this can really damage your employer branding, driving top talent away from your company.
There are several aspects of the recruitment process that can frustrate candidates and lead to a poor experience. Providing a complicated application process, the lack of relevant information about your company culture in the career page, low engagement and absence of feedback are just some of them.
It’s time to shift your company’s mentality and acknowledge that recruitment became a candidate-centric process. You need to treat candidates as customers to whom you want to sell your jobs.
Here are some of the best practices you should apply to your recruitment process:
According to a research by Careerbuilder, only 1 in 3 employers have applied to one of their own company’s jobs to see what the process is like. Of those, nearly half ( 46 percent ) say the process was “very good”. But only 32 percent of candidates rated their most recent experience as “very good”.
This shows clearly why it is important to understand which stages of your application process candidates find most frustrating so that you can solve them and improve the candidate experience.
Help your candidates understanding their progress throughout the application process. Optimise your application form and include a progress indicator showing percentage completed and an option to save the application as draft and complete later.
According to Careerbuilder’s study, most candidates (83 percent) say it would greatly improve the overall experience if employers could set expectations by providing a clear timeline of the hiring process.
Most candidates agree that their biggest frustration during the hiring process is the lack of feedback. Maintaining constant communication and providing feedback at every stage of the process is equally important and can make a big difference.
A poor career page can also frustrate your prospective candidates as they try to know more about your company and find key information about how it would be to work for you. That’s why it’s of utmost importance to assess whether your career page provides relevant information to candidates and whether they can learn what it would be like to work for your company through the content you provide.
Mobile-friendly job applications are essential for successful recruiting. According to comScore, an Internet analytics company, mobile-only internet users have outnumbered desktop-only users. Not surprisingly, 9 out of 10 job seekers conduct their search from their mobile devices and 70% of job seekers want to apply to jobs directly from their phones.
So, you need to make sure that mobile users that wish to apply for a job in your company, can do it seamlessly on their mobile devices. Or else, you risk driving good candidates away from your company.
Using the right recruitment software is fundamental. Although most classic ATS may help you organising your internal procedures, they may not be an adequate solution to solve most of your candidate experience problems.
So, when assessing an ATS you have to make sure that you also test the applicant side to see if it meets your ideal experience standards. Is it mobile-friendly? Does it offer useful features that expedite the application process? Does it allow you to send personalised mass emails to all candidates, in all the recruitment stages? Does it include social recruiting features?
By using a system that includes email templates for scheduling video or in-person interviews and provide application follow-up, you’ll save time and keep candidates continuously engaged until the end of the recruitment process.
Improving your candidate experience is a continuous process. You need to stay vigilant, measure candidate engagement level, candidate dropout rate and other relevant metrics. And never forget that there is always room for improvement. And who better than your candidates to tell you what you can improve in your recruitment process? Invite all the candidates to answer a survey to help you improve and let them know that you care about their opinion.
Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages for further information.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Your team here at skeeled