4 Tips for a Wonderful Candidate Experience Strategy

Imagine you’ve invested a total of 10 hours screening, evaluating, assessing, and interviewing a candidate. Now imagine you whimsically find a negative review – from the same candidate – on your Glassdoor page. Shocking? Perhaps. But that’s just a small reminder that your candidate experience is lagging. Your efforts are there, but they’re not being placed in the right places. Even if you spend hours briefing candidates on your hiring process, if you leave them sitting alone in the meeting room for over an hour, you’ve instantly jeopardized the candidate experience. A negative candidate experience might elicit some bad reviews, but it’s not entirely hard to reverse.

So how can you build a wonderful candidate experience strategy?

Keep on reading to learn more.

Make it super easy for candidates to apply to jobs

In the same way, candidates don’t want to spend an hour in the waiting room, they don’t want to spend an hour filling in a job application. So if you want to build a wonderful candidate experience, you need to make sure candidates aren’t spending 2-3 hours submitting one single application. So if you’re wondering why you’re barely getting any job applicants for your vacancies, this could be the reason. So start by creating a well-designed application page. Make sure it’s super easy to use and can be easily navigated. Plus, to boost the candidate experience, you need to also give candidates clear application instructions. Nobody wants to spend a lot of time trying to figure out the next steps. So spare them the hassle and write some actionable steps, to enhance the candidate experience from the very start. At last, keep your application process mobile-friendly. Keep in mind that candidates are always on the go. So giving them the option to apply to jobs from their smartphones will take the candidate experience to the next level.

Be fully transparent about the hiring process

One of the main causes of candidate anxiety comes from the fact that they don’t know what to expect. This is one of the major pitfalls in the candidate experience. Instead, you need to ease their nerves by being transparent from the very start. For example, start with your job descriptions. Make sure that they are clear, relevant, and unbiased. If there’s anything important that they need to do, make sure you add it there. Whether it’s the need for a driver’s license or visa sponsorship – don’t skip them. These small additions could go a long way in boosting your candidate experience strategy. In the middle of the hustle and bustle, the smallest details can be missed. Recruiters might forget to tell candidates that the interview process consists of three rounds. Or maybe the hiring process has a video assessment stage. So be honest about the hiring process and stages. Let candidates know how long each round will take, and by when they should anticipate a response from you. By managing such expectations, you’ll immediately provide a wonderful candidate experience.

Keep in touch with candidates throughout

The hiring process can be pretty intense for recruiters and candidates alike. Once you’ve interviewed a mass number of candidates, it’s easy to lose track of communication. Did you send Sara a reminder about tomorrow’s interview? Did you let Alan know that he didn’t make it to the next round? Did you forget to send Ahmad the location of your office? If you’re looking to boost the candidate experience, you need to keep candidates in the loop. No candidate wants to be left with radio silence. So if you’re finding it hard to communicate with candidates in real-time, a hiring platform can help. A hiring platform like EVA-REC allows you to streamline communication with candidates at every step. For example, you can have created automated follow-up emails as soon as you move candidates from one stage to the other. So, let’s say that you moved Alan to the “Rejected” stage, he will instantly receive a personalized email informing him of the decision made. The best part about it is that you can personalize all the email templates. So instead of sending a super bland email, you can customize it to your liking. If fact, you can make the email reflect your company’s culture and branding. So even if Alan got rejected, he may respect the transparency and quick communication. But remember, for candidates that you invested a long time with, you might want to craft a more thorough response, especially when it comes to rejecting them. This way, you won’t risk compromising the candidate’s experience.

Collect feedback from candidates

Not all candidates will be hired. But even when you decide not to move on with a candidate, you must give and get their feedback. So the next time you decide to notify a candidate of your decision, make sure you provide them with detailed and constructive feedback to help you sustain a great candidate experience. This way, candidates can use that feedback to improve their performance for upcoming interviews. Keep in mind that providing candidates with personalized feedback can help them approach their job searching process more strategically. Perhaps they’ll fine-tune them and re-apply to your vacancies again in the future. Whichever the case, your feedback can help the candidates thrive and succeed. Now, another way to assess the success of your candidate experience is to ask candidates directly. You can opt to use surveys to get better insights into the candidate experience. This way, you can easily pinpoint common issues, areas that need improvement, and any points of frustration.

Wrapping it up

In today’s remote world, recruiters need to always take a good look at their hiring process from the perspective of the candidate to gauge their experience and satisfaction. There are so many factors that can influence your candidate experience strategy. From the time it takes to fill out their applications, keeping communication lines open, being transparent, to giving feedback. EVA-REC is an on-demand hiring platform that automates and improves the hiring process with AI technology. From small businesses to industry giants – we aim to offer fully customizable world-class features that help create a rich and immersive hiring experience for recruiters and candidates. With EVA-REC, companies can drive merit-based, objective, and fair hiring practices that minimize bias, without dehumanizing the hiring process. Request a free demo today!

Author