Candidate experience is more than just a buzzword we are used to seeing today. It is one of the most important factors for attracting top talent. A positive candidate experience defines how potential employees feel about your company once they go through the hiring process.
Their perception of your company during the hiring process will influence their decision to apply, accept or decline your job offer.
What is a Candidate Experience?
A candidate experience is how job seekers learn about employer branding during the hiring process. It starts from reading the job description to the interview process. Each step provides an opportunity to build stronger relationships and shows job seekers why your company should be their preferred choice.
A positive candidate experience helps companies convert their top-choice candidates into employees. On the other hand, a poor candidate experience will only lead to candidates dropping out of the hiring process altogether and spending time and other resources on finding a new team member.
Nowadays, we are in the middle of a candidate-driven market, with job seekers having plenty of choices when finding their dream job. Therefore, offering a positive candidate experience can help your company with candidate engagement and lead prospective candidates to accept your offer over another.
Why is the Candidate Experience Important?
The candidate’s experience is significant because it allows a company’s reputation to stand out. Standing out helps because it makes a company desirable. This is especially true for candidates who initially didn’t get a job offer. Their experience will determine whether they should re-apply when there’s an open position or look at another opportunity in your company.
Also, a good experience will save your company time and resources and can speak volumes for your company culture and why job seekers should join your team. Furthermore, candidate experience is essential as it increases employee engagement and trust between employers and candidates.
In today’s fast-changing job market and the world of online reviews, negative reviews about a company’s hiring process can be damaging to the company’s reputation. Data shows sharing about poor candidate experience is often more common and can cause significant damage to the company’s image. If the company’s image is damaged, it can discourage top-tier talent from applying.
What is Considered a Bad Candidate Experience?
Every one of us, when applying for a job, expects clear communication, friendly conversation and honest feedback. However, there are times that this is not the case, and some of us might have already experienced a bad candidate experience. A negative candidate experience often involves:
- Lack of responsiveness or communication from employers
- A time-consuming job application process
- Inability to complete a job application on your phone, or another device of choice
- Unpleasant in-person interviews where you feel no one is listening to you
- Lack of opportunity to provide feedback
In the past, companies solely relied on their brand and image to attract top talent. However, this is not the case today, and candidates have just as much power to decide whether they want to join a particular company.
The cost of a bad experience, therefore, can range from missing out on the best talent for your company, spending a lot of resources to find top talent and ultimately finding someone that will not be the right fit.
Key Benefits of Memorable Candidate Experience
A great candidate experience helps bolster the candidate’s opinion about your company. The good news is that when someone decides to apply, they already have a positive perception of your company and what you do.
Some of the other key benefits a good candidate experience entails include:
- Higher retention rates of employees
- Happier employees
- Lowering the costs
- Hiring top talent sooner
- Competitive advantage
- Shared goals and core values
Happier candidates make for happier employees and are more likely to refer you to their inner circle and social network. As a company, you can expect to see your quality of hire go up and your time to hire and cost per hire decrease. A good candidate experience will likely increase your referral rates and grow your talent pool.
The Process of Building a Memorable Candidate Experience
Before getting started, it is essential to map the entire recruiting experience from a candidate’s perspective and find out what you, as a company, can do in every step to optimise the process.
A good candidate experience makes the recruitment process easier for both the applicant and the company. Often candidates want to apply for a job but are unsure of what it takes to be selected, which can cause stress.
The best thing employers can do is provide space for candidates to focus, relax and show their best abilities and skills by utilising candidate experience best practices to improve the overall experience. There is no fixed recipe for offering a great candidate experience, but a few ingredients can ensure your company can offer one.
Hire to Fill a Real Need
Your company has to be sure of what it needs from a talent perspective and your ideal candidate for the vacancy. Planning and organisation are the core fundamentals of a good candidate experience. Planning your hiring strategy and seeing what gaps need filling will allow you to locate top talent that will fit well within your team.
Make it Easy for Candidates to Apply
Candidates often research a company before they apply. To allow the candidate to learn about your company, you need to make it easy for candidates to find information quickly.
You can do this by making your careers page easy to find and your job application page mobile-friendly. Also, clear and short instructions are the key to keeping candidates interested and more likely to continue with the application process.
Provide Clear Job Descriptions
Writing a clear job description is one of the most important things to do to attract suitable candidates and convert them into employees.
A job title should contain information that allows candidates to learn whether they are the right fit from the start. Also, using clear language and having a well-structured description keep job seekers interested for longer and will more likely get to the end of the description rather than skipping and finding something else.
Last, creating an attractive website with an intelligent job search engine can help attract talent faster and easier.
Provide Clear Answers to Candidates’ Questions and Expectations
Providing clear answers to candidates’ questions and expectations allows them to feel seen and not wonder whether they should follow up or prepare for something in advance. Ultimately, being open and clear about your expectations can contribute to job applicants having a positive experience with your company.
Record Important Information on Your Candidate Profiles
The hiring process sometimes includes communicating with candidates through email, phone, texts and more. Sometimes, important information can be missed or lost. Miscommunications happen, and it can be a real issue.
As a solution, keeping a record of important information about your candidate in one place will ensure nothing is missed or lost.
Keep in Touch with the Candidate In-Between Offer Acceptance and Onboarding
The entire hiring process can be stressful, and when candidates accept your offer, it doesn’t mean the process has finished. Being radio silent can make candidates second-guess their choice and might feel like they are not the right fit for your team.
Engaging with candidates during the last stage of interviews and onboarding is a great way to build a positive candidate experience and develop strong relationships.
Keeping in touch and having consistent communication helps ease that tension and anxiety. Our recruiting team at Olive Recruit is always happy to show how excited we are when we help candidates experience an exceptional candidate experience and find the best fit.
Give And Receive Feedback Openly
Providing constructive feedback on the hiring experience helps candidates approach their interview more strategically and discover what they want to know about your company.
It’s worth asking candidates for feedback because it can help you ask the right questions and improve the overall candidate experience. Receiving feedback is the best way to learn what you are doing right and what you can do better.
How to Measure Candidate Experience
To know how good of an experience your company offers during the hiring process or recruiting process, you must learn how to measure it. Luckily, there are many tools that can help in measuring candidate experience.
First, asking a job seeker to fill out a short survey at the end of the application process can provide answers on what can be improved at all stages. Next, you can read review boards online to check for feedback on the interview process, which can later be used in a qualitative analysis of your hiring process.
Finally, use different analytics tools and ask candidates or your employees to learn more about their first impressions and how improvements can be made and integrated into other hiring processes. Once you learn what kind of experience you offer, you can focus on improving the candidate experience and confidently attract qualified candidates.
Olive Recruit is Dedicated to Offer Memorable Candidate Experience
At Olive Recruit, we believe in the potential of people. We deliver exceptional talent capabilities at the right place and time. Our “always on” approach can match the best candidates across a wide range of roles. As your career partner, we are committed to helping both employers and candidates have a memorable candidate experience.
We assist candidates with reference and compliance, provide support in the recruiting process partnerships and help find unique candidates for both clinical and corporate roles.
Olive Recruit delivers expertise in the healthcare industry and finds top talent that can enable the transformation of the sector and accelerate innovation. We are passionate about empowering people to find a job that they love and helping them on their career path to success.
