Are You Recruiting Online? Follow These 5 Essentials Tips To Build a Better Candidate Experience

If you’re a recruiter or hiring manager, it’s in your best interest to start off on the right foot with candidates when recruiting online.

Consider what it is like to apply for a job at your company. Put yourself in their shoes. What’s the application process like? What impression are you making from the very first phone screening down to the rejection or offer letter? All of this is known collectively as “the candidate experience”.

Companies are doing more and more to ensure a pleasant experience for candidates in the hiring process. This is to attract the best people and keep good people in your talent pool.

Also, candidates are more likely to become engaged employees if they have a smooth and engaging application procedure. This makes it important for recruiters and HR departments to rethink their application process to ensure a positive experience for your candidates when recruiting online.

Why Is Candidate Experience Important When Recruiting Online

How you treat your candidates will ultimately reflect on how you treat employees: both of which have direct impacts on your overall business performance. Let’s dig into why a positive candidate experience is good for business:

• A positive candidate experience will make top talent more likely to join your team.
• Alternatively, a poor candidate experience will drive top talent away.
• Candidates (and employees) talk. If people are having a bad experience with your company, they have many platforms to share their thoughts, including Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, and good old-fashioned word of mouth.
• All that talk of poor experience will ultimately hurt your employer’s brand and make it harder to attract top talent when recruiting online.
• A positive experience sets your candidates off on the right foot and makes them feel like a valued part of the team.
• That last point is key to understanding the immediate benefits of a positive candidate experience. Employees want to feel that they are welcome, supported, and part of a team that cares about their well-being and growth.

Providing that positive candidate experience has direct benefits for companies and employees, including:

• Boosting long-term retention rates
• Increasing employee loyalty
• Improving engagement and commitment to results
• Helping to create a strong culture
• Reducing costs associated with attrition and employee churn

How To Improve Your Candidate Experience

Improving the overall experience in your hiring process requires you to start out by thoroughly evaluating every step in your hiring process. By doing this, you will be able to identify areas for improvement. Remember: your communication with the candidate in between hiring steps when recruiting online plays a role in the overall experience and should also be assessed.

The hiring process from a candidate’s perspective can be a stressful experience. Often candidates want the job but are unsure of what it takes to be selected as your next team member. This can cause anxiety.

A great candidate experience can be a great way of relieving stress among candidates, enabling them to focus on showing your team their best qualities and skills.

Here we’ll cover 5 crucial components to improve your candidate experience:

Make Sure You Are Hiring To Fill A Real Need

A good candidate experience is one that has a clear purpose and goal when recruiting online. This starts with ensuring that you and your organisation are crystal clear on what you need from skills and talent perspective, and what type of candidate will fill those gaps.

Before asking candidates to apply for a job, you should:

• Perform a skills gap analysis to determine your exact needs.
• Coordinate closely with the hiring manager to establish a job title.
• Write clear job requirements that align with your needs and chosen job title.

Failing to go through these steps increases the likelihood that you will need to change directions or second guess the hiring need at some point in the process. This, ultimately, leads to delays, poor communication, and wasted time for the candidates.

Make It Easy For Candidates To Apply For Jobs

Your goal as a recruiter when recruiting online should be to make it as easy as possible for qualified candidates to find and apply for your positions. Everyone is busy, and most people won’t be willing to spend excess time trying to figure out how to apply for a position that’s hidden behind a cumbersome application process.

To do so, you should:

• Make sure your careers site is easy to find
• Give clear instructions at each stage of the application process
• Offer LinkedIn easy applications, where possible
• Remove unnecessary steps in the application and screening process
• Make the application process, and all touch points thereafter, mobile friendly
• Send a confirmation email once the application has been received
• Provide timely follow-up and next steps once they are known

While the application process is extremely important, the next point is where the majority of candidate experiences will either shine or fizzle out.

Reach Out With An Delays

One of the biggest complaints recruiters face is with candidate communication.

While great candidate communication forms one of the pillars of a good experience, it can be difficult to keep in touch with candidates when you are working on multiple requirements. Additionally, a lack of updates can be both frustrating for the hiring party and the candidate.

Sometimes tracking down an update for a candidate can be out of your control; perhaps the hiring manager went on holiday, you’re waiting on paperwork to be processed, or any other reason, However, in the absence of a substantial update, it’s important to inform your candidates when recruiting online.

An email or call explaining the circumstances or delay in the decision can go a long way in promoting a great candidate experience. Sometimes no news at all is good news.

Record Important Information On Your Candidate Profiles

When you have so many balls rolling in your hiring process, important information can be missed, especially if the communication happens over the phone or during a meeting.

Miscommunications can be problematic when it comes to the offer stage. If information regarding salary expectations or start dates were not recorded appropriately, this can lead to a negative candidate experience. Additionally, if you have to ask your candidate multiple times for the same information when recruiting online, this can be perceived as a lack of attentiveness.

Outline Your Hiring Process In The Job Description

The biggest cause of candidate anxiety stems from the fact that they don’t know what to expect from your organisation.

There’s a quick and easy fix that can help ease at least some nerves: outline the basics of your hiring process in the job description when recruiting online. This small addition to your job descriptions can help your potential candidates understand what might be required of them.

It’s normal to be hesitant to share the details with your candidates in case they arrive over-rehearsed. But if you provide only the most basic information, this can be avoided. Share only the basic steps so they know what to expect if they are successful in each round.

Concluding Thoughts

Candidate experience is important in developing a great employer brand and attracting the best talent while recruiting online. While it may require more devoted attention and assessment, make sure you don’t forget these seven elements. These quick fixes can help ease candidates’ nerves and generate a better candidate experience. You can also use a hiring platform to improve the hiring experience and we have the perfect suggestion

EVA-REC is a futuristic hiring platform that automates and improves the hiring process with AI technology. It arms leading enterprises 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 minimise bias, without dehumanising the hiring process.

Request a free demo and see how our hiring platform can help you save time and make recruiting painless and hassle-free. 

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