Candidate Experience Meaning
Although a popular buzzword, candidate experience is one of the most essential factors for acquiring top talent. The candidate experience, by definition, is how candidates feel about joining your company once they go through the entire hiring process. The feelings candidates may have will influence their decision to accept your job offer.
A positive candidate experience can help make qualified candidates feel valued and appreciated by your company. Additionally, a positive candidate experience can make candidates eager to share their feelings and opinions with others, helping to build your reputation. An excellent overall experience can make the recruitment process easier for everyone, as 58% of surveyed job applicants feel that a positive experience during the recruitment process will increase the likelihood of them accepting an offer.
On the other hand, a poor candidate experience lowers your chances of standing out as a company and builds upon a negative company culture. If job seekers undergo a poor candidate experience during the recruitment process, they are more likely to decline the job offer.
Creating a Personalised Candidate Experience
In today’s recruiting industry, hiring managers and recruiters have a hard job reaching out and building meaningful relationships with candidates while simultaneously balancing the fact that they are engaging with hundreds of other candidates and doing all of this in a concise timeframe. Often, this leads to candidates waiting for an answer, sitting in a funnel stage for a long time and feeling forgotten about.
Building a personalised candidate experience is taking a holistic look at your hiring process and funnel and developing new ways to make every candidate feel like they are important There are a few ways companies create personalised candidate experiences from start to finish of the hiring process.
Inspiring Job Descriptions
Your job description needs to inspire potential candidates, excite them to apply, and picture themselves within your organisation. You need to make clear job descriptions that are exciting to help candidates focus on what you are offering and keep them engaged during the job search process.
Highlight what the day-to-day role will look like and talk about the benefits that the company offers, showing job seekers that the company provides a positive candidate experience and hiring process. It is also a great idea to highlight the opportunities for growth and advancement.
Address Candidates Individual Talents
Candidates worldwide receive an enormous amount of messages with the same thing repeating – “We would like to learn more about you.”
Personalising your outreach messages is essential if you want to stand out from the crowd in the candidate’s inbox. Studies show that personalised messages perform up to 20% better than generic messages. It is essential to focus on explaining to every candidate why they are fit for the role, and although creating one-off messages for thousands of candidates is unrealistic in today’s society, there are plenty of automated solutions that can help speed up the recruiting process.
Involving more nuanced information and highlighting the candidate’s talents or something you are impressed with helps enhance the candidate’s perception and the company’s reputation.
Highlight the Benefits
Learning more about candidates and their backgrounds can help companies understand what matters most to them and focus on the benefits and compensation packages individually for every candidate.
For example, if a candidate is starting a family, you can highlight your parental leave policy, child care support and health insurance options. It is also a good idea to personalise the messages based on what the role entails and how big of an impact they can make within your organisation. Always be upfront about your compensation packages, the job application process and company culture.
Flexible Timeline and Interviews
Recruitment is all about playing the long game.
For some candidates, leaving a job and starting a new one can be uncomfortable and stressful, so asking candidates about their professional timeline and letting them know that you can follow their pace is important. Finding suitable times for the interview process can be difficult for other candidates, so it’s important to be flexible for a positive candidate experience and overall hiring process.
For candidates still waiting to make a move, there are other options, such as nurture campaigns where you can stay in touch with them by sending testimonials, company news and more resources to help your organisation stay on top of their minds.
Stay Responsive
Slow and generic responses contribute to being an impersonal organisation. Maintaining a fast response rate, transparency and keeping candidates informed at every step can help make a seamless hiring process that will likely contribute to a positive candidate experience.
Engaging with candidates and offering candidate feedback helps candidates feel seen, valued and motivated to join your team.
Always Inform Your Candidate
People have different communication preferences, especially in today’s remote working environments where most companies interview, hire and work with people from other countries, cultures and backgrounds.
Asking candidates what kind of communication they prefer will allow you to establish the best communication practice to make them feel comfortable during the hiring process. Taking the time to personalise the experience will keep candidates engaged and valued.
Personalisation in the Interviewing Stage
Setting up your candidates for a successful interview experience starts by making them sure they understand what they can expect. Send them updates about the interview’s date, time and location, along with the person they will be meeting with. Some companies even share their questions ahead of time so candidates can have the time to prepare and focus on their interviewing abilities.
In-person interviews should also include details about parking availability, which public transportation route candidates should take and how to get into your building. Providing all this information helps candidates know what to expect and makes them feel more relaxed when they arrive for the interview.
The goal of the interview and the application process is to learn about the professional capabilities of the job seekers, their skills and knowledge and learn whether they are the right fit for your company’s culture and your team.
Measuring the Success of Personalization Efforts
Measuring the candidate’s experience can be tricky because quantifying it is subjective and challenging. While there is not one metric to measure your candidate’s experience, a few KPIs can give insight into what is working and where to improve.
Some of the KPIs to measure candidate experience, as well as the recruiting process, include:
- Offer acceptance rates
- Measure recruiter response times
- Measure the time required to fill in the application
- Interview–to–offer ratio
Measuring the candidate’s experience is essential for a growing company. Nowadays, there are plenty of recruitment software and tools not limited to applicant tracking systems which provide unique features to obtain and analyse the data. Your candidate experience and recruitment data are your biggest treasure that can help you identify what candidates need and what you need to optimise your internal strategies and hiring process.
Olive Recruit Offers Tailored Candidate Experience
Olive Recruit has a team of highly experienced recruiters focusing on providing an exceptional, personalised candidate experience. We understand that interviews can be challenging for candidates, so focus on creating individual hiring strategies that concentrate on people’s strengths and unique skills.
If you want to reach your goals and boost your candidate experience and hiring process, contact us today and find out how we can help.
