There’s been a lot of buzz happening around the candidate experience lately—but it’s more than just a buzzword. The candidate experience is an essential element in the current marketplace. In this article we will explore why that is and how you can provide a positive candidate experience during your recruitment process.
The current marketplace conditions
The current marketplace is the candidate’s market. With the effects of the Great Resignation many organzations have struggled to find and fill the open roles.
Organizations have had to adjust their approach toward the employee to attract them leading to a job-market wide emphasis on providing a positive candidate experience. Those not providing this experience won’t have success in attracting the best possible applicants on the marketplace. Let’s look at some statistics to back this up:
- 69% of candidates who applied for the job would never reapply in the same company if they had a negative candidate experience
- 75% of candidates want to see a friendly and more casual tone when applying for a job
- 82% consider employer brand and reputation before applying for a job
It’s a candidate’s market and the companies have to adapt to it or they will struggle to fill even the junior roles in their organization.
How can you provide a positive candidate experience?
There are a variety of elements that can create a positive candidate experience. By addressing the following elements, your organization will be on the path to an improved candidate experience.
Agility
Your company needs to be agile in the marketplace and the candidates need to feel that in the hiring process.
The average time-to-hire for most jobs out there is more than three weeks, but the candidates are expecting for the recruitment process to last for a maximum of two weeks. The companies that are operating faster will provide a better candidate experience and will get the candidate. If you asked a candidate if they want to wait for three weeks or five days to receive an answer from the hiring manager, they would opt in for the five-day option. So you will need to create agile recruitment processes in your company if you want to hire the best possible candidates.
Communication
The second thing companies with great candidate experience do exceptionally well is communication with their candidates. The candidates need to know where they are in the hiring process, how many more steps there are, what’s the next step, and when it will happen.
Long gone are days when you would have a candidate do an assessment and then simply wait for the company to give them any response. Today, you need to move fast in the recruitment process and you need to communicate that with your candidates. Everything from regular email communication to SMS notifications, but you need to keep your candidates in the loop.
Using tech
To improve and speed up your hiring process, you will need to start using technology in the recruiting process. If you have ten candidates in the process, you can do CV screening by hand and give every CV enough attention. But you can’t do the same thing if you have 100 or 250 applications.
That’s why you should use technology to help make better (and faster) hiring decisions, like using pre-employment tests, having the ability to upload their own resume, and removing the cover letter from the recruitment process. On top of that, you can text applications to communicate with your candidates and provide notifications for future steps in the hiring process.
Having a good brand
Recruiting is harder than it looks and most companies are underperforming in that area. One of the reasons for that is that the candidates have become more educated and they’re doing better research. Today, most candidates research the company they’re applying for and if you have a low score on platforms such as Glassdoor or Indeed, you will have problems attracting employees to your organization.
That’s why having a good brand is so important to the recruitment process— it’s difficult to have a good employer brand if you’re not providing a good employee experience. If you have satisfied employees, they will become brand ambassadors and they will spread the word about your company, attracting new talent to apply for the open roles in the organization.
Conclusion
Today, providing a good candidate experience is more important than ever. That’s why we created a webinar Assessing Your Candidate Experience: Exploring 5 Key Factors that Will Keep Your Recruitment Pipeline Full that will help you improve the candidate experience in your company. Join our webinar on Thursday, May 26th at 1 pm EDT to see how you can use the resources and capabilities already at your disposal to enhance your recruiting efforts.
