Employers need to attract the best talent through their recruitment efforts in order to fill roles and achieve goals. But have you ever actually took a step back and looked at your candidate’s journey to really understand what type of experience your company gives?

The candidate’s journey is similar to that of the customer’s journey. It gives you an in-depth experience of what it is like to apply for a role with your organization. What each touch point is and how you interact with the candidate during each stage.

Stages of the journey?

Each candidate goes through these 6 stages in any recruitment journey:

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Interest
  4. Application
  5. Selection
  6. Hire

Really understanding the journey

The way we reach candidates today has evolved. It has gone from a ‘help wanted’ advertisement to a state of the art online process. Even though the way we hire has changed, some of us still haven’t changed our recruitment strategies. Some of us still use the traditional methods and have transferred that over to our online efforts. Resulting in? Well, you can imagine… very poor recruiting.

In order to understand what the candidate wants from the recruitment process, you need to focus on the candidate and take a walk in their shoes. By doing so you will be able to uncover:

  •  The needs of the job seeker
  • Identify opportunities at various touch points
  • Generate ideas around how to best engage with them
  • Apply all of your findings to create an engaging recruitment process

Keep the user experience always in mind. Candidates want a straight forward but secure way to apply for your roles. You may think the best way to do this is to provide them with an email address to send a CV to but this doesn’t provide them with the security they need to do so. They are after all sending on very personal information. So, you should also address how you can make that possible.

What to look out for ?

A study carried out by Software advice found that the frustrating lack of communication is often reffered to by candidates. Unsurprisingly, jobseekers 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

Are you missing these touch points in your recruitment process?

Communication is just one of the elements that could be missing in your hiring process and we all know communication is the heart to any relationship even in recruitment. Nearly 60% of candidates have a negative candidate experience and this is mainly down to the lack of thought and structure that goes into the journey.

To really get an understanding of a candidate’s experience you should look out for the following:

  • What do your social media/ company pages look like – if candidates research your company
  • How easy is it to complete your job application
  • If you need to reach out to anybody is that option available?
  • Do you provide your candidates with a secure platform to submit their application to ? or does it just go to an email inbox? (not GDPR compliant)
  • When their CV is received do they receive a thank you message?
  • Do you touch base if they are unsuccessful?

Ideally, you should measure and monitor your candidates experience through feedback forms. Constantly changing and fixing any flaws in their journey will allow you to create a credible recruitment strategy. Resulting in? …. excellent recruiting.