Create a Great Candidate Experience

Create a Great Candidate Experience through Great Communication

Most companies put a ton of effort into crafting their customer experience, but much less effort into crafting their candidate experience.

Yet a great candidate experience is critical for many of the same reasons that a great customer experience is critical: you care about these people, you have a lot of competition for them, and your brand perception is shaped by them.

Plus, connecting the dots is easy here: your candidates turn into employees, and employees are on the front lines of the customer experience.

Plus plus, the effects of a bad candidate experience extend way beyond just that candidate. Through networking and social media, candidates share their experiences. Their negative impression becomes your brand identity. Other candidates are then discouraged from applying to your company and even from giving it any business at all. This can cost you real money. Just ask Virgin Media.

Luckily, you can start creating a great candidate experience or improving the one you have today, without any new technologies or organizational overhauls. The key is communication – in fact, the lack of communication from companies is the number one complaint that candidates have, in my experience.

Here’s what good communication looks like all along the candidate’s journey with you:

1. Advertise only those positions that you are actually hiring for.

Update your job postings, everyone. Delete old posts, and posts that you’ve filled, from your website, and work with third-party job sites to remove outdated posts as soon as possible.

This serves two purposes: it enhances your authenticity and transparency (which 90% of job seekers say is important to them), and makes your job easier by reducing the number of applications you need to respond to.

If your company wants to build a candidate pipeline by advertising for a position that isn’t available now but will be in the future, then make the job posting clear about that. Most candidates don’t want to sit in a pipeline, but they’ll appreciate your honesty, and the ones who do apply are likely the ones most passionate about your mission.

2. Write a compelling job description.

I covered this in a previous post, and I encourage you to check it out before you copy and paste your next job posting. A lot of companies are phoning in their job descriptions, and candidates can tell. The excellent ones you want to hire will take a pass. Job descriptions are marketing documents, and your company deserves to be championed in them. You work for a great company, right? Tell the candidate all about it in the job description.

3. Make your application process as easy and clear as possible.

The longer and more complex your application form, the more candidates will bail. Sixty percent of candidates say they have quit an application process because it was too long. Let’s dive into this one:

• Design your website’s career page so that it’s easy to find and engaging, because 77% of job seekers go to company websites as the first stop on their job search. I could devote a whole post to this topic, but in the meantime, have a look at Greenhouse’s list of some of the best career pages out there.
• If your job posting on a third-party site takes the candidate to your website, make sure that applicants land on a page featuring that job, and not on a general careers page.
• Make your application mobile friendly. Glassdoor tells us that 58% of candidates are looking for jobs on their phones, and this trend is only continuing.
• If your application process asks for a resume and asks candidates to enter all the same information separately, save everyone all the work and invest in a resume parser.
• Don’t ask for documentation that you will handle later in the hiring process anyway, and references that you will contact later in the hiring process anyway. These kinds of requests are not only unnecessary burdens on the candidate, but also turnoffs for them. At the beginning of a job search, when candidates are thinking that they may never hear from you again (but we’ll cover that in a minute), they are simply not ready to share private or personal information or loop in their references.
• Minimize the number of required fields in your application. The ability to require field entries is a great tool for you and a great help for candidates – we’ve all missed an important field from time to time, and we’re glad for the (hopefully friendly) error message that stops us from submitting an incomplete form. But in an application, not all fields need to be required. Salary expectation is a good example here – you may want to include it in the application, but don’t require candidates to complete it.
• Allow free response answers in most (if not all) of your fields. We’ve all had the annoying experience of entering our phone number in a field and having it rejected because we didn’t enter dashes. Or because we did enter dashes. Don’t micromanage your field entries.
• Don’t overly restrict the size of uploaded files that you will accept. Yes, candidates should be smart about file compression, but a sharp resume that includes portfolio snippets, for example, needs some space. A limit of 2MB or even 5MB should be okay. Work with your IT team here.
• Consider using the LinkedIn “Easy Apply” button – but candidates, this is for you: optimize your LinkedIn profile before using it.
• Whew, we’re done with this list-within-a-list. If you have any questions or tips we can add, we’d love to hear from you.

4. Respond to every application quickly.

So you’ve streamlined your application process, and you’re getting submissions. Great! Make sure to set up an automated reply for each application through your website or whatever platform you use. Good communication doesn’t have to be individually crafted for each applicant (until later; we’ll get to that). But it has to be prompt, friendly, and informative.

In your automated reply, thank the candidate (obviously) and tell them as specifically as you can what will happen next, and approximately when it will happen. Then follow through. Make sure that the resume evaluation process you describe in your reply matches the process on the ground.

Also consider using your automated reply to invite the candidate to know more about your company while they wait to hear from you. Ask them to follow you on social media and suggest that they read your blog, news, or event pages, if you have those. Include links of course.

Whatever you include in your automated reply, give it some personality. Make it more of a conversation than a cold form letter. One of the best automated replies to candidates has to be Trello’s, which manages to be entertaining, funny, and unique (if a little long!).

5. Evaluate and act.

If you’re posting only the positions that you are currently seeking to fill, then there’s an urgency for talent at your organization. Honor this urgency by proactively evaluating resumes and sending either a rejection email or an interview invitation as soon as you can.

I recommend a company standard of two to four days from the time you receive the application to this next step. This is a fast turnaround, and it is superior candidate management and care.

For candidates whom you have to reject, a truly personalized email is best. A standard email can also be appropriate, but include personalization (such as with their first name, at a minimum), and make the email friendly and encouraging. Invite the candidate to apply again to other positions in the future. Indeed has a good template to follow.

6. Set the stage for an excellent interview.

How to conduct excellent interviews is a topic worthy of its own post. In this post, I’d like to cover how to prepare for interviews so that they enhance both the candidate experience and your company reputation. Time for another list within a list!

• Whether you invite the candidate for an interview by phone or email, try to be flexible with your time. Give the candidate a few different options. Their time is as valuable as yours.
• Send the candidate information on the interviewer. A link to the interviewer’s LinkedIn profile is one of my favorites, and super simple.
• If your interview process includes an online assessment or assignment, let the candidate know ahead of time what this looks like, what skills you’ll be evaluating, and the amount of time they’ll have to complete it. Sending an assessment without any explanation can make your company seem cold and impersonal, which is exactly the opposite impression you’re trying to give.
• If you haven’t already, consider implementing a collaborative hiring process, where team members participate in interviewing as well. This gives you a chance to show the candidate, live and in person (or even on video), your company culture and a glimpse into what team dynamics look like.
•  Start all your interviews on time. This is an underestimated way to show candidates that you respect them and that you have your act together. It’s powerful in shaping candidates’ perception of your company, yet easy to let slip if you’re not proactive about it. I’ve seen candidates accept offers and decline others based on whether the interview started on time. It’s not that they’re petty; it’s that they notice when they’re valued and when they’re not.

A candidate I recently worked with arrived 15 minutes early for an interview but had to wait for an extra 15 minutes for the interview to start. You might say that 15 minutes is not a big deal. But this candidate ended up with an offer from this company, and another offer from a company that started the interview promptly. His exact words to me about the company that started late: “I felt like the interview was just something they had to do.” His exact words about the company that started on time: “I felt like they cared about me and that tells me they probably care about their employees.” I don’t have to tell you which offer he accepted.

7. Follow up the interview well.

Here I’m going to focus on your interview follow-up communication when the answer is a “no.” Your “yes” answers demand intentionality and care too, but they are not as tricky as the “no” answers.

Many companies believe that it’s better to provide a candidate with no feedback rather than negative feedback. This is a mistake, and actually hurts rather than helps the candidate experience. Candidates want to understand why you decided not to proceed with them. Leaving them in the dark is much more frustrating and disappointing than giving them this information.

However, it’s important to give them this information the right way. You can expose your company to risk with certain types of negative feedback, plus as a human being, you don’t want to be insulting. Here is some guidance:

• A blanket statement about “fit” and the lack thereof is not enough. It may seem polite, but candidates know it’s a worn euphemism for whatever the real issues are. They remain lost with this kind of generic feedback.
•  Approach this situation as an opportunity to educate rather than flatly reject a candidate. Respect your candidates as people who are professional and motivated enough to want to grow in their fields, and who will take specific feedback as a chance to improve.
•  Use positive rather than negative language. Instead of saying “You fell short on the coding challenge,” say “We are looking for someone with [x] skills. We encourage you to focus on those skills and would love to speak with you again in the future.” Or instead of saying “You talked a great deal about [x],” say “We enjoyed hearing about all your work with [x] and would like to contact you when a position in that area opens up for us. Right now we are focused on [y].”

If you would like guidance on crafting a unique candidate experience at your company, or on improving the one you have, reach out any time. And in the meantime, remember: communication is the key.