5 Major Things Your Candidate Experience is Missing and How to Improve It

You’re doing everything by the book. You’ve read endless recruiting blogs online, scheduled multiple meetings with your team, updated your career page, and added your vacancies on LinkedIn. But barely any candidates are applying to your vacancies. Even those who applied, are dropping out halfway through the hiring process. Where did you go wrong? Well, for starters, your candidate experience may not be your company’s strongest suit. Or, maybe it’s just missing a few important things. Whichever the case, don’t underestimate the power of a strong candidate experience and the fundamental role it can play in your hiring process.

With that being said, here are 5 probable things your candidate is missing – and how to overcome them.

Your career page is difficult to navigate and not compelling enough

Your career page is often the first look candidates t4ake into your company’s culture. It’s what sets the foundation for the candidate experience. It helps them envision what it would be like to work at your company. So if your career page is hard to access, navigate, or isn’t too compelling – it’ll repel top talent right away. If your career page doesn’t answer the frequently asked questions that arise throughout the hiring process, candidates might lose enthusiasm for the position altogether. To avoid that, you need to revamp your career page. And the best way to do that is with an advanced applicant tracking system! Where you can make it refreshingly easy for candidates to apply to jobs, create job alerts, and find all the information they need at a single glance. If you feel like your career page is lacking the modern look and feel, opt to modernize it with an applicant tracking system. Where you can embed it with aesthetically pleasing designs, images, videos, and grids that attract the candidate’s attention fast. Your career page is like an open book that gives the prospective candidate a good peek into your company and entices them to seek employment there. As soon as candidates get a sneak peek of your company culture, team spirit, and work environment, they’ll definitely be more excited to apply to your vacancies.

The hiring process isn’t flexible or accommodating enough

If you’re hoping to keep candidates engaged at all times, you need to foster a more flexible hiring process. Simply because a rigid hiring process will deter away would-be candidates from your open vacancies. Bear in mind that the majority of candidates that are qualified for your positions have full-time jobs. This means that they need to take time off work to conduct their interviews or make it on time for their assessments. Oftentimes, they have to cut corners at work and do all that behind their employer’s back. Which is not always easy. So to alleviate this kind of stress and anxiety, opt to incorporate video assessment interviews into your hiring process. Leverage video interviewing software that enables you to hire and assess candidates at any time or place. Take the hassle out of hiring and boost the candidate experience by allowing top candidates to take their interviews at their own convenience and from the comfort of their own homes. Not only that, but video assessment interviews also allow recruiting teams to enjoy a certain level of flexibility too. Where they no longer need to waste time interviewing candidates who aren’t a good fit. Instead, they’ll have more time to focus on the candidates that have what it takes to thrive and succeed.

Communication with candidates is infrequent and impersonal

Did you ever apply for a job, only to hear nothing back? Not even a rejection email? Not even a zip? That’s exactly how employers negatively impair the candidate experience; when they leave their candidates in the dark, hearing crickets. Every single missing piece of communication will add friction to the candidate’s experience. And the more friction you have, the more prospective candidate will drop out of the hiring process. In today’s challenging job market, communication is no longer one-size-fits-all. Sending a mass email to every single candidate in your database will not drive engagement nor improve the candidate experience. Instead, learn more about the way candidates prefer to be communicated with. Perhaps it’s via phone, emails, SMS messages, or social media. You can even leverage an applicant tracking system to automate and personalize communication with candidates across their favorite channels. So as soon as you move a candidate from one stage to another, they’ll instantly receive a message informing them of the next steps. This will keep the candidate in the loop at all times, and enhances the candidate experience, even if the candidate got rejected. Honesty is the best policy. Candidates want to know when they’re rejected. So be quick to let candidates know if they didn’t make the cut, and make sure to give them the feedback they need to grow and improve. By doing that, you’ll be simultaneously boosting the candidate experience by the simple gesture of being honest and transparent.

Candidates can’t apply to jobs from their phones

The majority of us are glued to our phones. And candidates are no different. So when candidates are commuting to work and see a great vacancy, they want to be able to apply to it from their phones. When candidates are out and about and hear about a recent vacancy at a conglomerate, they want to be able to apply on the go. They don’t want to wait till they get back home to boot up their PCs and apply to these jobs. They want to be able to do that through their phones. The reason why is because candidates despise spending a little under an hour just filling in required fields and a long list of questions in every application. Luckily, an applicant tracking system populates these designated fields automatically and saves the candidates a massive amount of time. Meaning, candidates are no longer forced to regurgitate the information every time they apply for a job. Instead, you can whip up a short list of pre-screening questions that are absolutely necessary. Take a good look at your application process. Do you pinpoint any complicated steps or unnecessary questions? Are you asking candidates questions that can be saved later on in the hiring process? Or even questions that you can extract from their resumes? Put yourself in your candidate’s shoes and tweak your application process to be mobile-friendly, easy, and seamless. You’ll help candidates feel like you value their time and won’t drain their energy by spending hours applying to a job that they might not even get in the end.

You don’t solicit feedback from candidates

You can’t improve the candidate experience if you don’t know what needs to be improved or enhanced. So the best way to tackle that is by surveying candidates and soliciting their feedback on the hiring process. Perhaps you can send them a one-question survey to learn more about their experience, or a longer survey following their interview. Once you collect feedback from candidates, you’ll get to see directly what areas in the hiring process need to be fine-tuned and what aspects you should be focusing more on. This allows you to continuously evolve and meet your candidates’ needs. Here are a couple of great questions that you can ask candidates in these surveys:

• Did the job description provide enough details about the job?
• What did you like or dislike about the hiring process?
• How often did you hear back from recruiters?
• What would you improve about the interviewing process?
• Would you apply to another role in the future?

By asking candidates for feedback, you’ll instantly improve the candidate experience because you’ll be showing them that you care about their opinion, and most importantly, their needs.

All in all

The candidate experience that you create is the foundation for the connection you build with potential candidates. And just like any relationship, you need to nurture it, cultivate it, and take care of it. The candidate experience is a hot topic in the world of HR and it’s not going away any time soon. It can play a huge role on your hiring process and impede your recruiting efforts if it’s neglected. Looking to ramp up your candidate experience? We have the perfect ATS for you. EVA-REC is the #1 leading ATS that automates and improves the hiring process with AI technology. It arms leading companies from all across the globe with world-class features that help them create a rich and immersive hiring experience for recruiters and candidates alike. With EVA-REC, companies can drive merit-based, objective, and fair hiring practices that minimize bias, without dehumanizing the hiring process. Ready to see EVA-REC in action? Request a 1-on-1 demo today!

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