9 Best Practices to Ensure a Good Candidate Experience
Candidate experience is an important differentiator and can make a huge difference in the talent hunt. The competition is fierce for acquiring and retaining talents. Candidate experience includes all kinds of feelings, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts that a candidate goes through during the hiring process. The active and non-intentional interactions and encounters through email, chat, voice or video calls, career sites, company websites, candidate management systems, recruitment solutions, review sites, etc.; all channels contribute to creating a positive or negative candidate experience.
Many employees resigned during the Covid- 19 pandemic, and organizations are always in search of new ways to hire and retain good talents. Candidate experience can be an excellent weapon in your recruiting arsenal to attract, recruit and retain candidates. So, here are some best practices to ensure a good candidate experience during the hiring process:
Use right technology
Screen right candidates faster and parse large volume of resumes with recruiting solutions, candidate management system, or ATS. Making the career sites more attractive, and user-friendly with intuitive UI to make applying easier, utilizing technology to accommodate candidates with disabilities, and better managing responses and time of the candidates will help create a positive candidate experience. Automated recruitment marketing with AI will help to reach the right talent by accessing a wider range of channels.
RPA can automate tedious, time, and resource-consuming tasks like sending emails, producing reports, updating statutes, and more, performing them more accurately yet faster. AI and RPA combinations in recruiting software or candidate management systems can offer a more intelligent and interactive candidate experience. Recruiting chatbots are already a popular technology. Remote recruiting is here to stay so do the video interview platforms and so, better to find a candidate management system or recruitment CRM that contains video chat facilities.
Personalized Communication
Applicants do not connect with generic email or text messages. So personalizing messages for email. Chat or any other medium using names, positions, titles, or referral names can work wonders. Also, build a relationship with the candidate through email messages. Templates for every stage of recruitment will help to keep the recruiters organized and ensure they are not missing any important details. But customization opportunities should be also there, and follow-up emails are a good idea to make the organization’s presence felt to get a higher response rate from candidates.
Simple and easy application process
The application process must be simple and easy. Allow candidates to upload resumes. Make them able to apply from the website and other popular career sites at their convenience. Guide them through the application process digitally or personally. If they need to fill out application forms, enable the auto-suggestion feature and allow them to save their progress if they cannot complete it in one attempt.
Always send an initial response after the candidate applied for a job. Also, the application process must be accessible to all, including people with disabilities. So, the recruitment solution, candidate management system, applicant tracking system, other CRMs, or any software should be selected keeping these functionalities in mind.
Get and provide feedback
Improve candidate experience by getting feedback. Reach out to the applicants and ask for their feedback during the hiring process. Send a candidate satisfaction survey to all the candidates. Reach the candidates who failed the interview or screening process or candidates who dropped out in any stages of hiring for feedback to optimize the recruitment process.
Also, it is essential to provide feedback to the candidates after screening or interview or in other stages of hiring. A report revealed that 94 % of candidates want feedback from their interviewers, but only 41% have received it. Exchanging feedback and opinion leads to a positive image of the organization and both candidates and the company can benefit from it.
Close the loop with candidates
Regular communication can keep candidates engaged and create a positive candidate experience. So, inform candidates who made the cut, but don’t forget the ones who couldn’t. Inform each of them with personalized messages and empathy. Dissatisfied candidates can post reviews on third-party portals or websites like Glassdoor, and Indeed, and, maybe they are not a good fit for the current position but can be a suitable choice for another profile.
So, build a robust talent pipeline and keep an excellent brand image with continuous threads of communication and timely follow-ups. Also, maintaining a single point of contact for candidates is a good idea to build connection, confidence, and trust and allow a prompt response from the recruiting team. A candidate management system or recruitment application with chat, instant messaging features, or automated email facilities can greatly aid candidate communication.
Make good impression
In every stage of recruiting maintain good relationships and offer and receive feedback from candidates. If there are any complaints or negative reviews address them immediately, Be transparent and honest with candidates. In remote hiring make candidates aware of the tools used in the interviews or communication beforehand to avoid any technical issues. Make them feel more comfortable with simple questions at the beginning of the interview or offer remote applicants a tour of the office.
Bridge the gap between acceptance and onboarding
The time between the final interview and onboarding is when most sort-after talents drop out of the hiring process. During this time candidates may receive new job offers or have second thoughts about joining the company. So, during this time keep in contact constantly, keep them excited, and make them feel they belong and are part of the organization.
Interaction through digital mediums like video conferencing, chat, and emails; introducing team members, sharing exciting news and events about the company; sending a checklist for the first day, or sending videos, photos, cards, or merchandise of the company will keep them interested. Managers or colleagues can reach out before the onboarding and bond with the new hire. A candidate management system, and recruitment CRM with messaging features can help to bridge the gap between acceptance and onboarding effectively.
Focus on the onboarding experience
Onboarding is a part of the candidate experience. Employers must be prepared for the first day and introduce the best version of the company environment and culture to the new hire. The organization should welcome new employees, help them to get accustomed to the new environment, and make them understand what is expected of them. Onboarding begins before the first day as online software can handle paperwork, benefits, and training of employees.
According to a report, a negative onboarding experience can make employees twice as likely to leave the job. So, a well-planned preboarding and onboarding experience can significantly impact employee attrition. An onboarding solution or a candidate management system, HRMS, HRIS, workforce management system, or employee lifecycle management solution with onboarding facilities can be a great tool for implementing good onboarding practices.
Involving employees
Organizations can involve employees to enhance the candidate experience. Candidates can ask employees questions and connect through team communication applications or instant messaging software to get a glimpse of the company culture and employee experience. Employees can share their stories and experience through social media. The referral program is also an excellent way to involve employees in recruitment. Ambassador or mentoring programs can also be introduced by the organizations.
Endnote
Implementing these practices needs a solution that contains almost every feature to support each stage of the recruitment cycle. Mind Workplace is a comprehensive workforce management solution that can offer recruitment, onboarding, training, instant messaging facilities with community forums, knowledgebase multiple other applications with customization, and quick scaling, making the recruiting team’s work a lot easier and can help to offer an excellent candidate experience.
