3 Easy Ways To Provide Context in your Candidate Experience

We’ve all made the mistake. You see a headline that begins with, “you won’t believe what happens next…”

You click the headline.

…SIKE! It’s a video of a totally believable situation, and you already knew what would happen next because physics exists. Jumping from a roof onto a trampoline and into a swimming pool rarely ends well (if you’ve ever watched a “fail compilation” you know what I mean).

Clickbait is the worst, and we all hate it. Literally every situation where some form of bait is involved always leaves the baited-party in a less-than-desired position.

This exact scenario happens every single day in the candidate experience. When candidates aren’t provided with important and necessary context for the position they are applying to, they’re being baited. A company that is looking to fill in the gaps as quickly as possible with a bait strategy ultimately ends up costing themselves time, money and resources.

Context is unbelievably important in the talent acquisition process. It’s the secret sauce that converts a passive job seeker into an engaged candidate and, it helps unqualified job seekers opt-out of the process so you’ve got a funnel filled with right-fit candidates. Context provides the meaningful information needed to help candidates choose your company over your competitors.

The good news is, providing context is one of the easiest things for a company to do. Here are 3 ways to provide your candidates with the context they need.

Contextualize Your Job Postings

If your job descriptions provide bare minimums, your candidates will provide bare minimums. Your job descriptions should be an accurate, honest description of the position, and should speak directly to the awesome person you are trying to hire. Adding arbitrary skills and requirements like “self starter”, “excellent communication skills” or “data ninja” are meaningless without any context.

What specific skills/skillsets do you need from the candidate and how will they be using them? What does a day-to-day look like? What tools will they be using? What results do you expect them to achieve? What other teams will they be working with? What will they hate, and what will they love about the position? What experience can they expect to gain? The idea is to write to the person you want to hire. Don’t use superfluous language and instead write with context in a way that appeals to your target candidate that convinces, and inspires them to apply.

Add Culture/People Videos

One of, if not the best way, to provide context to candidates is to leverage the best asset a company has. It’s people. Providing candidates with the opportunity to actually see the culture, and learn more about the position from people that work at the company is incredibly impactful. You can show show the office/working environment, and let your candidates hear from the people they’ll be be sharing space with for eight-plus hours a day about what they love about their work, and why the work for your company. Working on a cool project? Show me. Is the office cool? Showcase it. Beer Fridays? Dope. Ping pong tables? Sign me up.

ZenDesk does an awesome job of doing all of these things.

Optimize for Opt-outs

There is no candidate experience handbook that says: your company, and your jobs must appeal to everyone. It’s completely O.K., and actually a smart talent strategy, to declutter your candidate funnel. We often use volume (such as number of applicants) as the benchmark to determine success, however, volume can be a skewed statistic if majority of the applicants are not actually hireable candidates.

Optimizing for opt-outs means showing job seekers that they might be unfit for a position from step one of the experience. A smaller, more targeted pool of better, more qualified candidates is the result. Don’t be afraid to get honest, and specific about what parts of the role job seekers might not like. For example, “if you’re the type of person that needs structure - this position isn’t for you”, is a perfect way to turn away candidates seeking a structured environment and also entice candidates who flourish in unstructured environments.

I’m not going to clickbait you. It will take time and effort to add context to your candidate experience. However, it’s worth every part of the investment. You’ll provide your candidates with a better, more transparent experience by adding the important context they need to make the right career decisions. You won’t believe what happens next. SIKE! You totally will. You’ll have a funnel filled with better, more right-fit candidates — no clickbait necessary.