How can Staffing agencies Design a Great Candidate Experience?
Originally Published in the TimeSaved Blog
Successful staffing agencies know that with the current talent shortages, they can’t afford to lose candidates to their competition. The conversation is no longer about increasing the number of people in the database but instead is all about the most efficient way to manage and leverage the database.
Creating a strategy around building an engaged talent pool of workers is more time and cost efficient than constantly trying to acquire new talent. Your candidate engagement strategy will impact your fill rates, time to fill positions and client satisfaction, and it all starts with designing a positive candidate experience.
What is Candidate experience?
Candidate experience is the candidate’s overall evaluation of the entire recruiting and hiring process. It includes every touch point, including the accuracy of the job description, transparency during the hiring process and ability to contact a recruiter. Historically, it is an area of recruitment that has been given less attention and has become the most important area of opportunity that the new firms entering the industry are focusing on.
Why is it Important?
In a seeker-driven market, agencies are in a fierce competition with each other to fill the same type of roles. Ensuring a positive experience for all of your candidates will not only increase many key metrics like referrals, time to fill, fill rate and client satisfaction, but it can also be a key differentiator that sets your agency and brand apart from the competition.
A negative experience often results in declined job offers, no-shows, and a poor response rate. While, a positive candidate experience would most certainly make a candidate more loyal to your agency, and in turn increases the likelihood of accepting an offer, referring a friend and even performing better on the job. So how can we do this?
User-Centered Design Thinking
User-centered design thinking is a process of solving problems by considering the needs, wants and limitations of the user during every stage. In the recruiting world, your users are your candidates. Using this framework we can drive a positive experience for our candidates. Where do we start?
1. Candidate Research
You start by talking to your candidates and making an effort to understand who are they are. What are their lifestyles? What is important to them and why? It is important to understand their personal identity before we creating a solution.
2. Detect potential barriers
Using your research, try to find problems they face during the recruiting process. Are they having trouble contacting a recruiter? Is the timeline hindering their experience? what are the potential friction points?
3. Brainstorm solutions with your team
Consider how you can account for these barriers. Can you adapt your workflows? Is it time to seek out a tech solution that will give candidates what they are looking for?
4. Create the solution
Beyond determining and enacting the solution, make sure you’ve accounted for implementation. How would you communicate it to the team to ensure seamless adoption?
5. Measure and test the effectiveness of the solution
Pay attention to how candidates are engaging with your solution (and think about developing benchmarks for its use). And seek feedback from candidates when possible so you can iterate on successful elements and revisit less effective ones.
If you are a Staffing agency, you definitely want to read further . . .
How is TimeSaved helping agencies design an enhanced candidate experience?
Providing worker-driven availability
Enabling workers to set their own availability through a mobile app brings a sense of independence and flexibility for candidates while allowing recruiters to focus on placing the candidates who are available instantaneously.
Promoting transparency
Workers are able to rate and give feedback about the client. Agencies can use this information to confirm and promote highly rated clients to attract candidates while sharing actionable areas of improvements.
Increasing ease of communication
Gone are the days of telephone tag and constantly refreshing your inbox. Candidates and recruiters can easily reach out and share information with each other through the in-app chat function.
