“Candidate experience”… it’s a recognisable buzzword that’s incredibly useful for attracting talent because it implies that the employer is aware of how important their employees feel. That limited initial contact heavily influences a person’s decision to accept an offer and the benefits stretch far greater than that. Building a strong employee bond builds trust from the outset making recruiting so much easier.
Existing employees will eagerly share team building days on social media, experiences over dinner with their friends and family, elevating your company’s band all without spending a penny. On the other hand, treat your employees with little respect and you can kiss goodbye your reputation and welcome high staff turnover, high recruitment costs and bad mouthing your business out of earshot or even worse, they could voice it on social which is extremely easy to find and extremely damaging
Common candidate complaints include:
75% of applicants never hear back from the company they’ve applied to
60% of applicants have had an interview and never heard back
42% of applicants will lose faith and never want to apply again
22% of applicants will also tell others not to apply!
These figures show how important it is to have measures in place to at least respond to people who’ve taken the time to send a CV to you. Ok, so a large percentage won’t read the job description or even job title but that’s on them! A good candidate experience involves a shift in mindset that focuses on what you’d want to experience yourself, how would you want to be treated? Design your candidate experience that’s a simple as you’d like it to be, even a response of yes, no, maybe in the future would go some way into helping or managing expectations from the outset, “if you don’t hear from us within 14 days, thank you for your application but we won’t be progressing your application at this stage”
Steps you can take to improve your candidate experience:
- You must have a current, vacancy to fill
- The job description must be clearly thought out and all managers in agreement about what the business is looking for
- Should be easy for applicants to apply
- Follow up as soon as you can and maintain contact if there’s someone of interest
- Thank applicants every step of the process
- Set expectations of how your company hiring process works, what the stages are and what to expect in person. Not only that, give the interviewees information on the people/person interviewing them
- Give the applicants your full attention at interview stage!
- Streamline the interview process
- If someone’s no longer in the running please let them know. You may be interested in that applicant in the future and if you don’t give a courteous message it will sway them to other opportunities first
- Be open to giving feedback of any kind, people appreciate honesty
If you’d like to know what your employees think about your company please get in touch with me on [email protected]
