5 Tips To Better Your Candidate Experience.

If you haven’t revisited your hiring processes for some time, the chances are you are losing out on the best candidates – and your competitors are benefiting from this.

If you are not effectively engaging the right candidates and ensuring that they complete your recruitment process – you don’t have a chance of recruiting them.

To make sure you are competitive in the market for the top talent you need to consider…

Tip # 1 – Career Site

 

This is your chance to show potential candidates why they should come and work with you. You’ve attracted talent with your job ad – your careers site now gives you the opportunity to win them over.  Here you need to demonstrate the values that drive your organisation and what opportunities are available that will allow individuals to fully develop their careers with you. You need to show why you are an employer of choice and why the top talent – with multiple opportunities elsewhere – should come and work with you.

Highlight what it’s like to work in your organisation – show what benefits are available to employees – and showcase the opportunities on offer to develop fulfilling careers.

Also, remember that your career site and your job ads need to work together.  Make sure that your individual job ads and your career site remain consistent in terms of portraying the organisation’s values and branding – as well as career paths available.

Tip # 2 – Professional standards and branding for ads

 

Your job ad is often the first point of contact for prospective candidates and your organisation.  As such, they are one of the most important public statements you will make. Make sure you give them the attention they deserve. Ensure that you invest enough time and resources into presenting your job ads in the most professional light as possible. Job ads are a key component of your branding initiatives and need to be developed in consideration of other career-related information presented on your career site.

Remember, all content that is externally presented – from mission statements to each individual job ad – reflects on the quality and professionalism of your organisation.  Don’t leave the development of job ads to individual hiring managers. The content and presentation of each job ad needs to be consistent and professional – and considered as part of your whole talent acquisition and branding strategy. This is a key first step for a great candidate experience.

Tip # 3 – The application funnel

 

OK, it’s great having an awesome career site and great ad copy… but what happens when the candidates click on the “Apply” button!  Sadly, for a lot of great companies out there, this is where the application journey becomes a nightmare. It’s here that so many great candidates drop off during the lengthy and overly-complex application and form-filling process. Often the process seems like a challenge to overcome for the applicant, rather than an invitation to connect. So, what are the issues?

All processes need to be mobile-first – many companies are sadly still yet to recognise that a new generation of employee favours mobile devices. Make sure your application processes are produced for digital devices and easy to complete from all mobile devices. If your application cannot be completed on a mobile device you will lose valuable candidates!

Too long – how long do you need the application process to be! All too often applications are far too long and ask too many questions. Quality candidates are considering numerous opportunities at any given time – don’t make the process too arduous for them. Make it quick and easy for both of you to progress to the next stage.

Remember – you’ll have the opportunity to gather additional information later.  So, at this stage focus on getting them to answer the minimum number of questions that allows you to determine who fits the bill – and leave it at that.  Leave everything else for later. Your recruitment software should enable you to gather all other relevant information at future stages of the recruitment process.

Tip # 4 – World-class communications with all applications – good, bad and the ugly!

 

 All candidates deserve to know what’s happened to their applications. The biggest complaint that candidates have about recruiters is that they all too often don’t get back to them. Let’s stop hearing things like “as if my application fell into a deep well!!!!”. All candidates deserve an acknowledgement! Your Application Tracking System (Recruitment Software Platform) MUST enable you to get in touch with all your candidates even if you are busy. Too busy is not an excuse!  This is where technology comes to the rescue. Branded and personalised automated templates and other smarts should make it possible to respond to candidates – no matter how busy you are.

While simple courtesy should be enough, also consider this. For any given vacancy there are far more candidates for each position than offers made. Wouldn’t it be good if even candidates that aren’t successful could be advocates for your company? Professional and courteous communications can go a long way to generating positive advocates for your brand.

Tip # 5 – Smooth and paperless onboarding. Forget the paperwork

 

The ultimate goal here should be to enable your top pick to read and sign your letter of offer or contract in 2 minutes while on the bus! That’s the standards of candidate experience you should be aiming for. Decision made – you’ve been through a long recruitment process, you’ve made the verbal offer, and the candidate accepted it, so why delay the hiring process here. You’ve identified your preferred candidate, a smooth and simple onboarding process gets them into your organisation and closes the recruitment loop. You can now start to benefit from the costs incurred throughout the recruitment process.

Digital and paperless – throughout the entire onboarding process you shouldn’t need to print a single paper sheet. That means no PDF documents, no documents attached to emails and no time wasted printing, scanning and returning documents. Documents can be signed digitally from wherever the candidate is – whether at home or on the bus.

In addition to speeding the onboarding process, your recruitment software platform should be able to allow you to start the induction process for new employees immediately – providing additional information in any format – ensuring that new hires are ready to start as soon as possible. Better candidate experience!