A bad candidate experience could virtually ruin your chances of hiring diverse talent. Candidate experiences are often overlooked by hiring managers because they don’t think it’s important. But, if you’re reading this blog post, you understand the value of a good candidate experience, and today we’re going to teach you how to fix yours.
What is candidate experience?
A candidate’s experience is everything they go through before being hired by your company. In most cases, a candidate’s experience will have the following 4 stages:
- Application
- Screening
- Interview and negotiation
- Offer and acceptance
Each stage of the hiring process provides candidates with a separate experience that leaves an impression on them about your company. So, you want to provide the best candidate experiences to every applicant to get the best talent.
What makes a good candidate experience?
Generally, a good candidate experience has the following 6 aspects:
- Clarity: The applicant is fully aware of the entire process and understands each part.
- Fairness: The applicant feels they’ve been treated fairly in the entire process.
- Attractiveness: The applicant has positive interactions with members of your organization.
- Timeline: The entire process was orderly and completed on time with proper notifications and updates.
- Personalization: The candidate felt individually attended to and valued instead of as part of a bureaucracy.
- Technology: The hiring process was smooth and every activity from applying to interviewing was seamless.
Why is candidate experience important?
You need to give the best candidate experience if you want to hire a diverse workforce and reap the best talent. In one survey, employers reported that 76% of applicants to a job ghosted them in the past year. You can avoid experiencing similarly high drop-out rates by giving applicants the best candidate experience since it increases their chances of working with you.
For example, CareerBuilder research found that 65% of applicants are less likely to even buy from a business they never heard back from after a job interview. That’s a massive loss for your company over the years if you provide bad candidate experiences. But, you can take advantage of the importance of candidate experiences by using them to differentiate your brand.
Biggest Gaps in your Candidate Experience and Fixing Them
These are the 5 biggest candidate experience gaps in most companies.
- Accessibility on platforms
A bad applicant process can turn away or annoy many applicants. Applicants shouldn’t have to use old and clunky interfaces that aren’t even smartphone compatible. Another cornerstone of accessibility is a platform that forces applicants to fill large numbers of fields and still upload resumes. Such a bad applicant experience implies that your company is also inefficient and technologically lacking.
Instead, you should have a clean and updated application platform that’s easy to use and only asks for relevant information. You can achieve this by having your IT team design an application for you.
- Preparing hiring managers
Most hiring managers aren’t prepared by talent acquisition specialists to identify and understand talent. Even those who are prepped, probably don’t have specific teaching in candidate experience because of how overlooked this topic is. This lack of knowledge results in candidates often complaining about unfair treatment or organizations not having the skills to properly process applicants.
The best way to resolve this issue is to train your managers or choose relevant interviewers for every role. For instance, if your job involves a specific skill like sales skills, you could have an interview with sales experience themselves to interview them.
- Having Ineffective career pages
Career pages are often a vital source of job information for applicants, so it’s very harmful to you if you don’t have a good one. For instance, 24% of employers claimed that their organization’s career page doesn’t accurately portray the job or role. As a result, candidates experience dissonance from the career page to the actual job.
The best way to resolve this problem is by making your career page more accessible and updated. Make sure the career page is user-friendly and contains only relevant and accurate details. A clean UI will dramatically increase a new applicant’s positive impression of your company.
- Not building relationships with candidates for future
Not developing a positive relationship with a candidate you’re rejecting is a mistake. You need to effectively communicate with the entire talent pool you have access to. Even if a candidate isn’t good for you today, you want to leave an opportunity for potential future work. Every applicant you reject should leave feeling there’s still potential for future work.
The best way to achieve this is to be fully transparent with applicants and keep them updated. Let them know exactly how far they are in the hiring process and why you ultimately can’t hire them. Specifically, your hiring managers should reach out to applicants on phone calls because only 8% of applicants receive a call from hiring managers informing them they’re not selected.
- Not integrating candidates after recruitment
According to one research, 2 in 5 candidates( or 40%) experienced little communication between when they received an offer and when they started working. This absence of communication results in frustration and confusion for candidates. Ultimately, this results in a bad end to the candidate’s experience and a bad start to their employment period.
The only way to correct this is by having communicative hiring managers. Your company should take feedback from candidates, regularly communicate with them, and invest the effort to welcome them into the company.
Wrapping things up, a bad candidate experience is an unclear and awkward mess in which the candidate doesn’t know what’s happening and whether they’ve even been rejected. You can fix this by having a clean, modern, and communicative hiring process. You should even be fully communicative with applicants you reject to save your company’s reputation.