How To Enhance Your Candidate Experience

Once you’ve mastered the art of attracting top talent, you face the next set of challenges in the recruitment journey. Finding the best candidates is only the beginning: next, you need to make sure you deliver a winning?candidate experience.

What do we mean by candidate experience??

Firstly, it’s important to remember that for even the most self-confident candidates, applying for?a new job can be nerve-wracking. If recruitment?is a major issue for the employer, it’s no less?significant for the applicant. The experience from?job advert and application to interview and final?decision should always be positive. Even if a candidate is ultimately unsuccessful, it’s essential for their self-respect and your company’s reputation that they should have no?complaints.

A survey conducted by Talentegy found that 69% of candidates with a negative experience would share it.Social media could spread the bad news to thousands of people in your industry. It’s a long, anxious process for the candidate for whom the successful completion of each step feels like a mountain climbed. They have to check their CV and references, complete the application form, submit everything, and then just wait. If they’re lucky, they’ll reach the?interview stage, but here too, there will be a lot of waiting between rounds, hoping to hear good news.

After enduring all of this, if they get the job offer, they must be taken through the onboarding process before they can feel like a fully integrated team member. If you don’t manage this process properly, a?candidate could become discouraged at any?stage resulting in the loss of someone who?might have been the perfect hire. In the same Talentegy survey, the same percentage of candidates – 69% – said that a bad experience had changed their mind about the company to which they had applied. A poor experience can result from many different?factors, some of which you can’t control. Still, of those you can, the most significant ones are communication, the application itself and the interview process.

A Reed UK survey quoted in a LinkedIn article illustrated the different attitudes of applicants and employers, with 69% of candidates expecting feedback, even if unsuccessful, but only 8% receiving it. It also showed that 73% of those with a bad experience might never use that company’s products or services again.

Clear, consistent, and swift communication is vital because it makes a candidate feel involved and valued. Application forms should be stripped back to the essentials and not try to anticipate the work of the interview stage. Needlessly lengthy and complicated shapes can be extremely off-putting. Then there is the interview stage, which is a potential minefieldof mismanagement.?

Each interview needs to be clearly focused and necessary – four rounds of interviews are not uncommon, but they are rarely warranted. Apart from anything else, you and your recruitment team could fall victim to interview fatigue if you have to spend hundreds of hours in the interview room repeatedly talking to a parade of applicants. An interview should also never feel like an interrogation. LinkedIn found that 83% of applicants found a negative interview experience was enough to put them off the job.

The methods of providing a good candidate experience should be fairly self-evident from the above. Treat applicants respectfully, keep them informed, even when there are delays, and make them feel valued. Don’t construct the application process as an obstacle course but as an opportunity to shine. Ensure that every interview has a purpose, a logical structure, and the feeling of a conversation in which you’re not trying to catch the interviewee but learn about?

them as a professional and a person. Make decisions quickly and let your interviewees know those decisions as soon as possible. So far, we’ve talked a lot about how to attract great new talent and convince them to join you. The other vitally important issue in maximising your human resources is, of course, staff retention, which we’ll look at next.