✋🏽 5 things you can do to build a fantastic candidate experience

With the advent of technology, the job market has become widely accessible today. It has transformed the employer-employee relationship and has caused organizations to rethink the way that they seek top talent. One way that an employer can favorably distinguish itself from competitors and other organizations when hiring is through a modernized candidate experience process.

Candidate or applicant experience is the experience a candidate undergoes as he or she progresses through the various recruitment stages in an organization. It is important because it can directly affect whether candidates ultimately accept job offers and because it impacts the employer brand as well. By carefully honing the touchpoints that encompass a candidate’s experience, organizations can make the application process more seamless and transparent.

Here are five things we recommend doing to improve your existing candidate experience process and ensure the enthusiasm of job-seekers throughout the hiring life cycle:

1. Build your employer brand: Candidate experience is biased by how applicants perceive your brand. That’s the main reason why employer branding is non-negotiable. HR developments such as paid menstrual leaves, an increased focus on mental health initiatives, and diversity hiring measures have demonstrated marked improvements in employer branding. Such initiatives improve employee well-being and potentially attract new talent, as a result, affecting candidate experience positively.
2. Strategize the hiring process: During recruitment, the skills required to succeed at specific job roles can be overlooked or misunderstood sometimes. This creates a void in the knowledge of those hiring for the company. An organization-wide needs assessment such as talent gap analysis or skills gap analysis can avoid this error of ambiguity. Such a structured hiring plan allows recruiters to clearly define job roles and to create job descriptions based on skills. This enhances not only the hiring experience but also the candidate’s on-the-job experience.
3. Facilitate the job application process: UX-based ease of use techniques such as a ‘career’ page on organization websites or AI-based chatbots can effectively minimize the vagueness of information about requirements for a job or vacancies thereof. It also reduces the time and effort required for sending an inquiry email to the HR team and waiting for their response. In addition, when recruiters upload forms to be filled by the candidates, they must ensure that the subfields in the form are structured in such a way that the job aspirant doesn’t have to repeatedly type, for instance, their recent work experience or job responsibilities, into the form, as the option to upload CV makes filling similar details seem redundant and creates a nerve-wrecking candidate experience.
4. Utilize skill-based selection tools: This method of assessing a candidate’s fit for a job can be leveraged to hire quality talent while determining culture fit. These assessments are also viewed as more impartial and meritocratic than traditional hiring methods which can be opaque. Skill-based assessments, in particular, are viewed to be more valid than personality-based ones as the former helps delineate the range of skills required for the job.
5. Maintain transparency: By being communicative and open towards the applicant, recruiters can considerably improve candidate experience. Instead of being unresponsive, relay information about interview results or assessment reports so that the candidate is aware of his or her likelihood of being hired. By exercising such a proactive approach, an HR team can alleviate the job seeker’s anxiety and reinforce a candidate’s experience. This openness simultaneously enables the HR team to seek real-time feedback about the applicant’s experience of the recruitment stages. As an effect, they can actively take steps to ameliorate their hiring processes and assure better candidate experiences in the future.

According to a 2019 study by Talentegy, only about 25% of the 4000* surveyed reported their candidate experience as good and about 69% affirmed that they would not reapply to a company after a negative candidate experience. Organizations must therefore realize that candidates today expect more and that potential employers can leverage this to gain an edge over others. It is thus imperative to consider various touchpoints of interaction across the stages of recruitment, till the time of onboarding, because each can be an opportunity to leave a lasting impression on applicants and build a fantastic candidate experience.

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*https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/353/5-eye-opening-candidate-experience-statistics-infographic