How to Win Candidates Back After a Negative Candidate Experience – 4 Easy Tricks

We all know that an organization is only as strong as its people. But hiring top performers for your company shouldn’t be your only goal. If you want your business to attract top talent, your recruiters need to own up to every part of the hiring process as well. Meaning, they need to make sure the candidate experience is exceptionally great – even for those who didn’t get offered the position. So if you thought the candidate experience ends once the candidate is hired – Think again! Nowadays, we live in a candidate-driven market. This means that candidates are in full control. They have many options to choose from, and they’re no longer desperate about accepting any offer that slips into their inbox.

If your candidate experience is the reason you’re losing top talent – here are 4 valid ways to redeem it.

Regain trust and set clear expectations from the very start

Expectations and experience come hand in hand. When you fail to meet your candidates’ expectations, you also jeopardize the candidate experience. While filling a role is no easy feat for recruiters, they shouldn’t neglect setting clear expectations with candidates from the very start. Think of it this way – if you’ve been invited to attend a conference with your colleague, wouldn’t you like to learn more about it in advance? Wouldn’t you want to know who will be attending and what topics will be discussed? Exactly. The candidate experience is no different. Top candidates want clarity – from day one. They want to read clear job descriptions that are straight to the point. They don’t want to get misled by a job description that is not an ideal representation of the job. Plus, candidate expect recruiters to brief them on the hiring process. How many interviews will there be? How many interviewers will they meet? How many days until they get to receive a response? If you keep candidates in the dark, their candidate experience could take a deep plunge. But luckily, you can easily reverse that by keeping them in the loop, letting them know what’s coming next, and being transparent from day one. But, what should you do if you already lost a great candidate due to a weak candidate experience? Three words: regain their trust. You need to rebuild whatever is damaged from your employer brand if you’re looking to boost the candidate experience. You need to show this candidate that things have monumentally changed since their first hiring experience. Only then, will you be able to lure them back in and prove to them that radical changes have taken place to improve their experience.

Leverage a modern ATS

Recruiting circles nowadays can’t seem to stop talking about one thing: applicant tracking systems. In fact, today, this technology is a crucial necessity in every recruiter’s tool belt. Can it automate the hiring process? Check. Can it improve team collaboration? Check. Can it ramp up the candidate experience? Check! While many people think that having an ATS only benefits recruiting teams, they fail to acknowledge how it can ultimately help candidates as well. Since an advanced ATS can streamline mundane tasks and core recruiting workflows, it tends to make the hiring process much faster and more efficient. This means that recruiters can now recruit candidates in a matter of days, not weeks. Or even worse – months! And what does a faster hiring process mean? Happier candidates and a better candidate experience! When the hiring process is shortened from a litter over a month to a couple of days, recruiters will get to focus more on what’s important. Gone are the days of texting a candidate only once throughout the hiring process. Now, recruiters can communicate with candidates in real-time, answer their questions faster, and sustain a wonderful candidate experience.

Create a more seamless hiring process

If there’s one thing candidates hate more than a rejection email: it’s a long and never-ending hiring process. Why? Because modern-day candidates don’t have time to wait around. If a great candidate is being interviewed by 3 different companies and gets an offer – they won’t wait around to see what the other will have to offer. In fact, they’ll take it without even blinking twice. So if you want to secure top talent before the competition, you need to move fast. To move fast, you need to streamline your hiring process. To streamline the hiring process, you need an ATS. Do you see where we’re coming at here? An advanced ATS like EVA-REC can help you automate, streamline, and manage all your recruiting processes under one single tab. Where you can create unlimited hiring pipelines with automated triggers, automatically filter resumes, instantly post jobs, and create a seamless application process. With advanced automation at hand, you get easily get back all the time you’ve wasted on tedious recruiting tasks. If candidates need to spend 6 hours filling in a job application, can you really blame them if they drop out? If the hiring process is taking over a month, can you really be surprised that they went with the competition instead? When processes take too long for candidates, it immediately takes a heavy toll on the candidate experience. A lengthy hiring process put top talent off – especially those that are in high demand. So you need to scrutinize the hiring process. If you’re asking a plethora of unnecessary questions in the application process, you’re at risk of losing top talent. Especially since no candidate wants to regurgitate their entire resume from scratch. Nor do they want to answer questions that you can attain from their resume itself. So, opt to add only the most specific and important questions to the application, and see how securing great candidates will turn into a breeze.

Be more responsive and communicate frequently

Do you remember the last time you sent an inquiry to a customer service agent, yet didn’t solicit a response for days? Maybe even weeks? How does that make you feel? When candidates are expecting a response from you, but they end up getting radio silence instead – you’re putting the candidate experience at risk. Lack of communication is the crux of the candidate experience. Think of it this way: you might have the best ATS, the brightest team, and the most luscious offices – but what good is all of that if candidate have to chase you down for a response? Candidates crave for transparency. Even if they didn’t make the cut, they still want to know why. So be sure to get back to candidates in a timely fashion. Answer all their burning questions and keep their worries at bay. Whether it’s through SMS recruiting, automated communication, or a quick call – communicating with candidates in real-time will do wonders for the candidate experience. And if you’re not sure how to do that, here’s how an automated ATS can help. An ATS like EVA-REC allows you to streamline communication with candidates all throughout. Where candidates will get an automated follow-up email as soon as the recruiter moves this candidate from one stay to the other. This will help keep candidates in the know and happier to know where they stand.

Bottom line

While the candidate experience might just be one element in the hiring process, it’s still the glue that binds everything else together. A great candidate experience is vital to an exquisite employer brand and hiring process. So when you neglect it, you’ll be simultaneously hurting other processes that depend on it to succeed. So if you’re looking for an easy and simple way to boost your candidate experience, you came to the right place. We might have the perfect ATS for you! EVA-REC is an end-to-end ATS that automates and improves the hiring process with AI technology. From small businesses to industry giants – EVA-REC helps companies drive merit-based, objective, and fair hiring practices that minimize bias, without dehumanizing the hiring process. Request a free walk-through demo today!

Author