Candidate Experience !!

Yogi was happy to be invited for the position of research analyst with “Terrifin”. To be well prepared and reach on time he took the day off. After all this was one of his dream companies. While seated in a crowded train, his mind rehearsed what he would say. Lost in his thoughts, he was suddenly jolted by screeching halt of the train. A technical fault has occurred, train doesn’t move further!! He was stuck. Anxious, he hurriedly pulls out his mobile phone to discover bad signal zone. Finally late by an hour when Yogi reached the place, he was informed that interview stands cancelled. He never heard them back.

How many of us have had such unpleasant experience? No acknowledgement after you apply for a job. A cold interviewer who keeps looking at the mobile screen during interview. Complete silence from the recruiter post interview. Undue delay in receiving offer letter. No team members to meet or greet you on the first day of on-boarding. The list of bad candidate experience is long. Organisations who consider “customer centricity” as one of the core values, astonishingly fail the basic test on "candidate centricity"!

Every opportunity to interact with a candidate is actually an opportunity to spread the goodness of your brand. Hence savvy organisations are giving complete make-over to recruitment process keeping “ good candidate experience” as the core theme. Offering superlative candidate experience is not a quick fix. It’s a lot of hard work. It’s a journey from ideation to solution.

The first important step towards transformation starts with asking recruiters to share their good and bad experiences and  mapping-out what can be ideal candidate experience. It can start as a role play or a focused group discussion. Where a recruiter needs to think like a candidate. The ideation stage is pure innovation, which demands lots of freedom without being constrained by existing policy, processes or budgets. Ideas come first, solutions come later. A great deal of process by process detailing is needed to prepare list of raw ideas. A candidate feels valued when you go that extra mile to offer a distinctly different experience to a standard hiring process. Candidate delight can happen at each stage, it can be as simple as how do you treat your candidates when they come for an interview, or the ease with which the candidates can communicate to the recruiter, or the smooth offer process. Positive candidate experience at every step of hiring process can give that extra edge to employer branding.

“Communication” is the front end of candidate experience. There is a lot of innovation happening in candidate communication. Whether it is career website, response notifications, job advertisements or social media hiring, the content and delivery mechanism is changing rapidly. Candidates are looking for more personalized engaging conversations, video aided explanations and accessibility from multiple devices like mobile etc. Gone are those days when an auto acknowledgement mail was considered communication, today candidates look forward to know why he/she has been shortlisted, why should he/she consider the job offer, what are the future prospects of the job even before they hit the interview stage.  A candidate doesn’t enjoy being lost in a huge multi floor office space but looks forward to receive help from an interview concierge. Organisations have gone further in providing tie-up with local taxi services, traffic alert on the day of interview, providing recruitment lounges which gives adequate personal space and digitalized job collateral and virtual facilities tour with voice, images and tone while a candidate is waiting for the interview to start. There are organisations who even offer coupons, badges, memoirs etc. after a candidate crosses certain rounds of interviews. 

In a hyper-connected world the number of candidates who are following social media happening is a reflection that candidates want to know about what is happening inside the organisation. These are steps towards transparency. Recruiters have started giving embedded links to Glassdoor and many other social sites to help candidates discover more about the organisation culture. The possibilities to improve communication with candidates is limitless. I found the LinkedIn  blog [https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/2014/05/12-small-ways-to-delight-your-candidates] useful to learn more.

Sometimes things which appear trivial and small can be great source of candidate delight. For example in social hiring, though candidates can log-in to company website through Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts, they are required to create profile in company website. Organisations have started investing in technology which can  seamlessly integrate social media profiles with company website by parsing most of your key information thus avoiding duplication of time and effort. This is delight.

 A great candidate experience is very intricately linked to digitization. Creating a catalog of candidate notifications, or video aided introduction, or tying-up with taxi services are relatively easy. But giving it a digital platform and weaving it into the technical architecture is difficult. Thankfully a  number of recruiting and engagement tools have started offering multi-device connecting platforms. Technology is the game changer. Mobile recruiting is becoming a key differentiation. Digitization can make the recruitment process simple and effective, however it can never replace the human touch.

Recruitment experts along with senior leadership act as “talent magnets”. Candidates do a lot of research before applying for a job which eventually takes them to professional pages of recruiters and leaders. Hence their professional pages need to be developed carefully to send appropriate messaging. The recruiter-candidate relationship is ever evolving. These days candidates look up to recruiters to share both bad and good feedback and guide for future success as a career coach. This is human side of recruitment which is irreplaceable. No one can ever forget the pleasure of interacting with a skillful interviewer. A trained team of recruiters who can handle such delicate situation and adhere to values of "candidate centricity" contribute immensely in establishing long term relationship with candidates.

With advancement of social presence, organisations are exposed to a new set of people who simply follow your company. They are called passive candidates. It’s a head ache for the organisations to stay connected with passive candidates. Many app based solutions have come up to track these candidates thereby helping organisations to maintain healthy talent pipeline for future career opportunities. These apps are also proving to be good source for staying in touch with alumni and multiple batches of campus  graduates to track their industry journey.

The proof of pudding is in the eating. The best way to experience results is by seeking honest feedback from candidates.  Candidate experience survey score can be an important metrics for recruiters’ performance. Hiring is heart of HR. Organisations who are hiring aggressively are competing for scarce talent. To hire the best talent and help them to assimilate quickly, candidate experience needs to be the core theme of success.