Candidate Experience - Definition, Why is it important, What's improving, What's moving in the wrong direction, Other important Trends and Conclusion.

What is Candidate Experience?

Candidate experience is everything. It is the totality of every interaction and activity between your company and a candidate. This is much more than someone scrutinizing your company career page or applying to a job.

Why is Candidate Experience important?

Candidates are your customers. The importance of the candidate experience is a trending focus among businesses today. Yet, nearly 60% of candidates have had a poor candidate experience when applying for jobs.

This is the time for the hiring manager’s and every one involved to step back to identify how the current and previous candidates are treated during the hiring process.

9 key takeaways from the 2018 candidate experience research report – Courtesy Talent Board Report

Every year the Talent Board surveys more than 100,000 candidates applying to roles at 200 companies. The resulting research report is the most comprehensive annual study of candidate experience.

Let’s delve into what’s improving, what’s moving in the wrong direction, and other important trends that came out of the report.

What’s Improving?

More Opportunities to Share Feedback than Ever Before:

Candidates are receiving the opportunity to share more feedback across the hiring process than ever before. Effectively every survey opportunity is up year-over-year from 2017.

20.8% of employers said they were not surveying candidates about their experience.

Candidate surveys set the stage for evaluating what’s working, what’s not, and how to continually improve.

Time to Complete Online Applications is Shrinking:

Only 20% of candidates reported that their application took under 15 minutes to complete, down from 26% in 2016.

36.6% of candidates said their application took less than 15 minutes.

Very few candidates enjoy filling out long forms. 

Mobile Application is at an All-Time High:

Employers offering a mobile-enabled application is at an all-time high.

It jumped from 79% to 91%; in 2018, it pushed up to 93%. We’re probably reaching a saturation point here, with only a few legacy ATS's lagging behind.

Interestingly, only 18.4% of candidates took advantage of this feature.

What’s Moving in the Wrong Direction:

Giving Feedback to Candidates is Less than Stellar:

46% of candidates did not hear back from employers 2 months after they applied.

Applicants who are unqualified for certain roles may be a perfect fit for others (and may simply be confused by poorly-worded job titles and descriptions), and are frequently customers.

“Poor Rapport with Recruiting Professionals” becomes a Major Reason why Candidates Withdraw from the Hiring Process:

Last year, 72% of candidates who withdrew from the recruiting process did so for one of two reasons:

• Time Disrespected During Interviews (46%)
• Process Took Too Long (26%)

This year, the second-most cited reason for withdrawal seemingly came out of nowhere (last year it was the fifth-most cited reason): Poor Rapport with Recruiting Professionals.

Again, this is an area where surveying candidates becomes critical. It seems unlikely that recruiting teams became less pleasant overnight so, fixes here will be highly individualized for each organization

Time to Offer Post-Interview is Stagnant:

Candidates generally lose interest in a job within two or so weeks post-interview. For the past three years, the time candidates spend in limbo has stagnated.

The shorter Offer process is the Key to employ A listers for your company.

Other Important Trends:

Candidate Experience Delivers Provable ROI:

Proving the ROI of a candidate experience initiative has always been a bit imprecise. Basically, the math goes like this:

For example, if a company’s average revenue generated per customer is $100 per year, and they reject 100,000 candidates a year, they should expect their candidate experience to influence ~$58,800 in new revenue (100,000 * (100*0.15) * (0.14*0.28)).

These are just aggregate numbers – A better candidate experience will have an increased benefit, and a worse one may have a negative impact.

Emerging Methods of Engaging Candidates Gain Ground:

Only 50% of candidates surveyed by the Talent Board said that the job description was valuable (down from 55% in 2017, and from 77% in 2014), so this is clearly an area for improvement.

60% of employers said they were considering video job descriptions for 2019.

Last year, 28% of TA teams said they were leveraging texting to interact with candidates. This year, that number jumped to 48%. It’s well known that texting delivers very high read rates (98% is the number usually cited), so this leap makes sense as the job market remains hot.

Other Benchmark Stats:

Some other interesting benchmark stats that came out of the Talent Board’s latest research report include:

92% of candidates did not get hired

? – ? of candidates who apply for all position types are not qualified

Candidates cited “Company Values” as the most useful marketing content (44%)

81% of companies use Facebook and 78% use Twitter to cater to candidates; only 17% of candidates use Facebook and 4% use Twitter to search for jobs.

Conclusion:

Every ATS can send all candidates rejection templates, and it will take you only a few minutes to send these rejection e-mails. Don’t worry; most people will understand that they weren’t accepted for a particular position if they receive a constructive feedback.

Honesty is highly valuable in such cases, allowing a person to know where to work on his or her personal development because, who knows, maybe he or she will become the candidate you’re looking for in a year or two from now.

Next time you think you don’t have time to give feedback to all of your candidates try to consider how many resources you will need to invest for your next search and how much it will cost you not to give feedback to them.

Treat every candidate as you would your employee or your best customer because every candidate could refer a strong candidate even if they don’t get hired! And it costs $0.00 to respect your candidates and give them feedback.

The impact on employer brand can be difficult to measure, but give candidates a bad experience, and word can spread.

How you treat your candidates matters!

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to add your own thoughts, tips, ideas and questions in the comments below.