Senior Manager Talent Acquisition Karthik Venkatasamy on how creating a positive candidate experience is an important factor in attracting the right kind of talent at Meesho
Guest Blog by Karthik Venkatasamy, Senior Manager Talent Acquisition
Candidate Experience is one of the most talked about topics in today’s recruiting world. How does one as a recruiter create a great experience? At Meesho we like to describe it as “Candidate Delight” for those who choose your company as a career enhancement opportunity.
And this piece is so fragile that you could either make or break this experience if you are not prepared enough. While a positive candidate experience helps you win the war for talent, a negative experience might result in the worst possible nightmare for a company.
“Candidate experience” hence is the candidate’s overall perception of the company’s recruiting process.
In fact, as recruiters, we are always trying to create an experience at every stage of a candidate’s journey — a journey that starts from your very first connection with a candidate to his or her final destination to getting an offer. We at Meesho, try to put in a lot of effort to make sure that we provide an enriching experience to the candidates we engage with.
While you have multiple touchpoints in an overall candidate journey during their recruiting process with a company, to ease the flow at Meesho we break it into three major stages.
Stage 1: Talent Attraction — First Connect — Introduction to the Opportunity — First Pitch!
We at Meesho, focus a lot on the content here. What message do we deliver during that first call or the first mail you send to a candidate? Knowing your candidate and fine-tuning the message you want to deliver — Tech, Product and Non-Tech (‘’Do not overdo’’ is the key here) is very important. Focus on your content about the company, team and the job role — make it as attractive and genuine as possible.
Stage — 2: During the Interview Process
Explain the interview process to the candidate including the number of rounds, what do we cover in each of those rounds, who will they meet, and more. Give your candidate that extra tip from your experience, like what is that he/she can expect during the interview rounds, what are the areas to brush up on, how to prep for the interview and so on. Be in constant touch during this stage and make sure to connect before and after each round. Keep the candidate warm, try understanding the pulse of your candidate and watch out for signs. In case of a positive sign, keep going forward, but in case of red flags, raise an alarm with your stakeholders (hiring team) and work on those areas. Make sure you make it up during your next rounds and neutralize those points.
Once the interview process is over, we do a quick intervention by sending out an experience survey to all the candidates irrespective of the outcome of the interviews (be it a select or a reject). Why? Because It is absolutely necessary for us to track how we fare when it comes to giving out an experience. We constantly take feedback from all the candidates and review it very closely. Rating is closely monitored and impacts the monthly performance scorecard of recruiters. Actionable steps are taken to improve/better our candidate experience every time.
Stage — 3: Offer and Post Offer
The candidate becomes a lot familiar with the company during this stage. Once the offer is made and accepted by the candidate, the next level of engagement starts. Here at Meesho, we create multiple levels of connects during this stage and call it a Post Offer Engagement Process. We create touchpoints based on the notice period of the offered candidate (NP depends and varies from 30 to 60 days in most cases). Here is a picture that depicts our engagement process that helps topping up our candidate experience during this most crucial stage, where a candidate is likely to get multiple offers from your competing companies.
What makes a difference in candidate decision making is truly the experience he/she goes through during his journey with any company — and at Meesho we with the above process take absolute care of the candidate experience. And this has resulted in us improving our offer to joining ratio considerably.
At each stage of the candidate journey, give and take feedback, ask your candidate about the experience. This also sends out a message that you are striving for the best possible experience to your candidate, while you formally send out a questionnaire after the interview process.
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