One of the main reasons companies are automating their recruitment process using recruitment software is to give candidates a better experience, after all, they are the “customers” of your recruitment strategy so giving them a flawless journey is pivotal.
What is the candidate experience?
Candidate experience is defined as how job seekers perceive and react to employers’ sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding processes. To start off, an effective recruitment process is beneficial for both the employee and employer and fulfills the needs of both sides.
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Example: Virgin Media turns down almost 150.000 applicants in a typical year. In 2015 this equated to upsetting over 7.500 customer applicants enough to cancel their contracts and switch to the competition. By providing an excellent candidate experience, Richard Branson was able to save $7 million in lost revenue.
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The frustrating lack of communication is often referred to by candidates. Unsurprisingly, job seekers’ top requests for improving the candidate experience include:
- More communication
- Notification if passed over
- Timeline of the hiring process
- Human contact after application
- Timeliness of replies
Source: Software Advice
Simply put a great candidate experience is brilliant marketing for your company, a bad one is an ongoing black hole for candidates interested in your employers brand.
How can you measure it?
To get a direct insight into what candidates think about your experience ask them! A great way of doing this is to create your own survey on a website like Survey Monkey and ask new hires and interview candidates questions for example:
- Did the job description fully help you understand the advertised role?
- What did you like/dislike about your interview process?
- How would you specify your communication with recruiters/hiring managers through email or phone?
- Would you apply for future roles at our company?
- Would you encourage a friend/family member to apply to work at our company?
Keep in mind new hires may be eager to impress. Try to keep the feedback anonymous to get an honest amount of feedback. The same goes for unsuccessful candidates, they may be reluctant to fill out the forms so it may be an idea to track mentions or reviews on social media and analyze them also.
Tracking and using the data you find from your results will be a key to help you in providing candidates with a flawless experience and change your recruitment process for the better.
