Category: Candidate Experience

How to Improve Your Candidate Experience

Posted on by epadmin

Candidate experience is becoming a popular topic of discussion in the talent acquisition and recruiting community—with good reason. According to a CareerBuilder survey, 78 percent of candidates say the overall candidate experience they receive is an indicator of how a company values its staff. What’s more, the same survey found that 86 percent of job seekers believe employers should treat candidates with the same respect as current employees.

The results of CareerBuilder’s survey illustrate that the lines between the candidate and employee experience are blurring, making it critical for organizations to strengthen their candidate experience. In this post, we outline the importance of improving the experience of your candidates and how organizations can streamline the hiring process.

What is the Candidate Experience, and Why Does it Matter?

In order to build a strong candidate experience, it is important to understand what is and why it matters.

So, what is the candidate experience?

The candidate experience is the sequence of interactions a job candidate has with an organization throughout the recruiting and hiring process. These interactions can include correspondence that a candidate receives from an organization’s HR department, recruiters and its software systems.

Common candidate experience touch points include:

  • An organization’s career site
  • Job advertisements
  • The online job application process
  • Any communication from an applicant tracking system
  • An organization’s interview process
  • Any correspondence with HR professionals, team members or leadership
  • Notifications about a candidate’s application status
  • Candidate rejection letter or job offer

What is a positive candidate experience?

According to Talent Board’s CandE Research Report, candidates rated “communication” as the number one way to engage talent. So, organizations looking to craft a positive candidate experience should communicate clearly and honestly with job seekers to create the type of candidate experience they value.

A positive candidate experience meets the following standards:

  • Communicates realistic expectations for the job and work environment
  • Clearly communicates an organization’s employee value proposition
  • Outlines all of the employment details to candidates upfront
  • Provides an easy and mobile-friendly application process
  • Respects a candidate’s time at all stages of the application process
  • Provides a pleasant and smooth interview experience
  • Seamlessly transitions selected job applicants into new employees
  • Maintains a kind and respectful process for rejecting job applicants

What are the Benefits of Improving Candidate Experience?

Improving candidate experience not only benefits candidates and job seekers, but it can also have a positive impact on an organization’s workforce. Below, we outline three ways a strong candidate experience improves the overall talent acquisition process.

Improve applicant retention  

According to research conducted by Indeed, applications with 45 or more screener questions lose 88.7 percent of their potential applicants to application abandonment. Improving the candidate experience often begins with refining the application process. A short and streamlined job application process will increase the likelihood of job seekers finishing job applications, thereby increasing an organization’s applicant pool.

Create a better first impression

Research from labor economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger suggests a growing interest in joining the gig economy. The number of Americans working these “gigs” has risen from 10.1 percent a decade ago to 15.8 percent in 2015. Nearly 40 percent of workers in these jobs have a bachelor’s degree or higher. This means that organizations are not only in a battle with competitors for skilled talent but also with the candidates who may want to work for themselves.

To win the war for talent, organizations need to see the experience of candidates as more than just a part of the recruiting process; it is also a sales tool that can help win over top talent. A job application is often the first interaction a candidate has with an organization. So, making a great first impression on top talent with a superior candidate experience will help organizations differentiate themselves and stand out as great places to work.

Increase brand awareness

The candidate experience affects more than just job applicants; it also plays a significant role in how consumers view an organization as a whole. If an organization offers an exceptional experience, candidates are more likely to share the experience with colleagues and write about it online. What’s more, a survey conducted by Software Advice found that 71 percent of candidates are more likely to purchase from a company they feel treated them well throughout the recruiting process.

How Technology Can Help Improve the Candidate Experience

Technology continues to shape the way job seekers search for work and how organizations find and hire qualified talent. The rise of social and professional networking sites, mobile devices, job boards and online applicant systems means that creating a meaningful candidate experience often begins with crafting a technology-first approach. Below we list three ways in which organizations can use technology to improve their candidate experience.

Offer a mobile-friendly candidate experience

Research conducted by Indeed found that 78 percent of Millennials, 73 percent of Generation Xers and 57 percent of baby boomers conduct job searches from their mobile devices. This means that organizations looking to improve their candidate experience should look to create a mobile-friendly recruiting environment for job seekers. Organizations should make sure that their career website and other resources candidates may need while applying for job openings are mobile-friendly.

Affinix®, PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology, is designed as a mobile-first platform for both candidates and recruiters, ensuring seamless engagement from any mobile device at any time throughout the application, scheduling and screening process.

Quick questions to ask yourself to improve the mobile the experience for candidates:

  • Is career-related text and content easily readable on mobile devices?
  • Are job pages optimized for better visibility in mobile search?
  • Is navigation of the career site and job application simple on mobile devices?
  • Will candidates have to go through trial and error to complete applications on mobile devices?

Clear Communication

Establishing timely and clear communication between candidates and recruiters is essential for developing a positive candidate experience. However, many candidates are left without feedback or status updates on their application. In fact, a Talent Board report found that 47 percent of candidates were still waiting to hear back from employers more than two months after they applied.

The right technology platform can help by sending automated messages to candidates via email or chatbot technology letting them know their application status. You can even craft messages letting a candidate know if they did not get the job. While missing out on a job is never pleasant, receiving prompt feedback communicates to a candidate that their application and time were respected.

Social Recruitment Marketing

Enhancing the candidate experience also means reaching candidates where they are. According to Social Talent’s 2016 Global Recruiting Survey, 37 percent of survey respondents said that social media is the primary source of finding candidates. This shift towards a digital hiring model has seen the traditional résumé be displaced by the online footprint of candidates which showcases their skills and experiences.

PeopleScout’s Affinix platform can help organizations reach digitally native candidates with customized ads, optimized job descriptions, personalized landing pages, career portals and recruitment marketing that elevates job postings with robust content and campaign management.

Conclusion

Learning from past mistakes and successes is essential to improving the experiences of your candidates. While there is no such thing as a perfect hiring process, learning and evolving processes and procedures will improve an organization’s ability to attract great talent and retain the strongest workers.

Does your Candidate Experience Meet Candidate Expectations?

Posted on by epadmin

Candidate expectations are transforming, and in today’s tight talent landscape, organizations need to keep up or risk being left behind. To succeed, employers need to understand what these new candidate expectations are, where they come from and how to meet them.

A Transforming Workforce

Millennials have been the largest generation in the workforce since 2015, according to the Pew Research Center. They are disrupting traditional work environments. To attract the best millennial workers, companies have relaxed dress codes, redesigned offices and offered flexible work hours. However, for many employers, the application and hiring process has been left behind.

It’s not just millennials changing the way we work. As a society, we’re more connected than ever before. According to Pew, 77 percent of U.S. adults own smartphones they can use to communicate, shop and apply for jobs. Unfortunately, many organizations still have applications that haven’t adapted and require as much as an hour of sitting at a computer.

High Stakes

An outdated or poorly designed application process can have real business consequences. In late 2017, the U.S. unemployment rate fell to lows the country hadn’t seen in 17 years. Candidates have a lot more choice when it comes to applying for and taking new jobs. As employers compete for the best candidates, those organizations with poor candidate experiences will miss out on the best talent.

However, the impact goes far beyond that. In the 2016 Talent Board North American Research Report, research shows that candidate experience is a part of an organization’s employment brand, which affects the perception of their overall brand. Talent Board reports that 41 percent of candidates who have a negative candidate experience will take their alliances, product purchases and relationships somewhere else. Additionally, 64 percent of candidates who have a positive experience say they’ll increase their relationship with that brand.

In this connected world, candidates are also likely to share their negative experiences with their networks on social media. This is perhaps the worst outcome for many organizations because not only do they miss out on that candidate, other potential candidates will be discouraged from applying. Because everything can live forever on the internet, posts sharing negative experiences can remain visible even after an organization has worked to improve their candidate experience.

Candidates Expect: Mobile First

We live in a mobile world. According to Pew, 77 percent of Americans own smartphones. That’s even higher than the percentage of people who use social media, which is 69 percent. Consumers use their smartphones to get directions, shop, pay for goods and services and more. Increasingly, candidates are using smartphones as a part of their job search. In fact, a growing number of candidates expect to be able to apply from their mobile phones.

According to Pew, 28 percent of Americans have used their phone as a part of their job search. That number jumps to 53 percent for adults ages 18- to 29-years-old. Half of those have used their smartphones to fill out a job application. However, many organizations still have application processes that are difficult to navigate on a mobile device. A survey by Indeed showed that 78 percent of people would apply on their mobile devices if the process was better.

It’s up to organizations to make the process better and meet those expectations for a mobile-first application process. While it is still difficult to create and design a traditional resume on a mobile device, other job search tools, like LinkedIn, work seamlessly on smartphones. To make an application process mobile friendly, organizations need to think outside the outdated application process.

Candidates Expect: A Fast Process

Speaking of that long application form, it fails to meet another major candidate expectation. Candidates want a fast and easy application process. According to the Talent Board report, the application process is still one of the most challenging areas in the candidate’s journey, and candidates want to “understand the questions they are being asked and have the opportunity to share their skills and experience.” In fact, a quick Google search for “the worst part about applying for jobs,” turns up article after article lamenting the process of uploading a resume and then entering work history and education information into an application.

If an application process is too long or too complicated, candidates will abandon the process. According to Indeed, applications with 45 or more questions have an abandonment rate of nearly 90 percent. In this tight talent market, that leaves a huge chance that an organization will miss out on the best candidate for the job just because of the long application process.

Candidates Expect: Personalization

As a consumer, when you go online, it can feel like everything is personalized for you. The ads on social media and websites are based on your online shopping and web browsing habits. Your email is filled with promotions and deals from companies offering exactly what you’re looking for. However, the candidate experience lags behind.

Personalization is important, – in one survey, researchers found that 87 percent of people said personally relevant content improves how they feel about a brand. In a job search, that can mean a lot of different things. If a candidate opts-in to a talent community, it can mean sending them open positions that are actually a fit with their skills and goals. If a candidate has already applied for a position with an organization, it can mean prepopulating a new application with the information they’ve already provided. As the Talent Board survey points out, it can also mean providing a personalized portal where a candidate can track the status of their application.

Personalization is really just another form of communication. It’s communicating to the candidate that an organization recognizes and remembers them and that the organization sees them as an individual – not just a resume.

Tech to the Rescue

Implementing an application process that meets all of these candidate requirements doesn’t have to be difficult. There are many technology solutions available that can help build a fast, simple, personalized, mobile-first application process.

Organizations should look for tools that take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning to build a good candidate experience. AI and machine learning technology can streamline the process for candidates and provide personalization to reflect a strong employer brand. AI can also source active and passive candidates within seconds.

Video interviews and digital assessments are other important tools. Many positions require skills assessments, but they don’t need to be a part of the initial application process. By using a tool with video interviews and digital assessments, organizations can speed up the hiring process because candidates can accomplish these on their own time.

It’s also important to have secure tools that tie in with your organization’s applicant tracking systems and vendor management systems. That way the tool will work seamlessly for candidates and recruiters and hiring managers.

To meet these candidate expectations and help our clients stay ahead of the shifts in the talent landscape, PeopleScout developed Affinix. Affinix is a mobile-first, cloud-based platform that creates a consumer-like candidate experience and streamlines the sourcing process. Embedded within PeopleScout’s talent solutions, Affinix delivers speed and scalability while leveraging artificial intelligence, recruitment marketing, machine learning, predictive analytics and other emerging technology with one point ATS and VMS integration and single sign-on.

How well does your candidate experience measure up? Schedule a candidate experience evaluation today!