During the recruiting process, you need to build relationships with candidates and make them happy. Happy candidates will work with you, refer others, and hopefully become placements.
Keeping candidates happy is all about providing the best candidate experience. You want candidates to have a positive experience throughout the entire recruiting process.
What is candidate experience?
Candidate experience is all about how a candidate perceives they are treated. Candidates must feel like they had a positive recruitment experience.
Everything you and your client do impacts the candidate experience. How a candidate feels determines whether or not they want to work with you or work for your client. Things that can affect candidate experience include:
- How you treat candidates
- How you reach out to candidates
- The quality of your communication
- The clarity of the job posting
- The interview process
- Your social media accounts
- Your recruiter website
Overall, you must treat candidates with respect and not as if they’re just another resume.
While you and your client are both responsible for the candidate experience, you have a bigger responsibility. You are the main point of contact with candidates, so it’s up to you to deliver a large portion of the candidate experience.
Why is the candidate experience important?
You need happy candidates. You need candidates to work with you. Unhappy candidates will bail out of the recruitment process.
Candidates who have a good experience are also more likely to refer others to you. Recruiting referrals expand your recruiting database while reducing your time investment.
Even if a candidate is rejected by your client, it’s beneficial to maintain a positive relationship. If candidates enjoyed working with you, you might be able to use them in the future for other positions.
Creating a positive candidate experience
You must ensure a positive candidate experience throughout the entire recruitment process. Find out how you can create a positive candidate experience during sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding.
Sourcing
You should include ways to boost candidate experience in your recruitment sourcing strategy. By creating a positive experience from the beginning, you have a better chance of attracting and keeping candidates.
Develop a clear job description. Don’t leave items up for interpretation. Make sure the must-have skills and qualities are highlighted. If you make candidates fill out an application, make sure the form and instructions are clear as well.
Interact with candidates and potential candidates. Use technology to help you. Use your website to show off your brand and to help candidates learn about you. An attractive recruitment website design can be a great tool to expand your reach and keep candidates engaged.
Create social media accounts, too. Social media lets candidates look into your business. You can easily show your personality and add character to your business. Candidates can also easily interact with your business.
Communicate often from the beginning. Let the candidate know where they are in your process. Let them know when you receive their resume and what other information you need from them.
Interviewing
Candidates will likely have multiple interviews. You will probably interview the candidate to learn more about them and put together a candidate profile for your client. If your client likes a candidate, the client will interview them at least once.
You and your client can work on improving the candidate experience during the interviews.
Don’t make candidates wait a long time for interviews. If you or a client agree to an interview at a specific time, do everything possible to have the interview start on time.
Talk to your client about the interview at their business. Instruct them to have a friendly person greet the candidate. If possible, find out what the interview will be like, because preparing candidates for interviews can increase the candidate experience.
Get candidate feedback after the interview. Ask them what they thought about the interview and the client. Find out what went well and what the client could have done better. Tell the candidate what the next steps are.
If there are things the client could have done better during the interview, tell them. Encourage the client to improve so they can increase the experience when interviewing other candidates.
Onboarding
You’re not done with candidate experience once a candidate accepts an offer. You want the candidate to stay with your client, which means you need them to remain happy even after the hiring process is complete.
You should make the candidate feel like they made the right choice by accepting the offer. You, your client, or both of you should create a welcome package for the employee.
Suggest things that will increase candidate experience to your client. For example, you can suggest that your client takes the new employee out for lunch on their first day.
Once the candidate is settled, check in with them. See how they are doing and how they like their job. You can set standard check in times, such as 30 and 90 days into employment.
Tracking candidate experience
Candidate experience can seem ambiguous and difficult to measure at times. Each candidate will perceive things differently. However, you can use the applicant tracking features in your recruiting software to monitor your candidates’ experiences.
Your recruitment management system can show your successes and failures. Look at your recruiting process. Where do people drop off? What tasks take a long time to complete? Is there an organized process that you put all candidates through? Look for recruiting trends and any notes you took that might indicate where your candidate experience management is falling short.
You can also survey candidates about their candidate experience. Create a short candidate satisfaction survey that they can complete after they go through your process, whether or not they were hired. Tell candidates about the survey so they know to expect it and don’t delete it.
Ask candidate experience survey questions about what went well and what can be improved. Ask the candidate how they thought they were treated throughout the process. Have a question about the quality of communication. You can ask about anything that will help you learn about the candidate experience.
Once you have results from the surveys and your ATS, you can improve your recruiting strategy and increase your success.
