Elevating Candidate Experience
Driving a better hiring process
2023 has certainly shown the importance of candidate experience is now a top priority, should have been or will now be a core focus going into 2024.
Yet despite this being a large topic within the LinkedIn community there are a number of posts highlighting this issue and calling for the reduction in candidate ghosting. These posts are certainly calling out something that does need to change within the industry but limited is offered in ways that we can look at improving the candidate experience going forward.
In today’s newsletter lets explore some key concepts that you can apply to your recruiting process to ensure your candidates have a great experience whilst also improving your ability to hire well.
Candidate Experience Overview
A lot of people think that candidate experience starts the moment that you connect with the candidate. This is the wrong way to think about candidate experience and this should be as you are building the job description and thinking about the candidate to be hired. Everyone within that is involved within the hiring process really needs to be fully aligned with one thing. Focussing on the candidate journey and experience through the process.
In a recent survey they found that 58% of candidates would reject a role if they experienced a poor interview process.
We are now in a space where candidate experience can impact the ability of being able to hire. Knowing this TA Leaders need to ensure that candidate experience isn’t jump something that is lip service and actually part of the overall process.
Candidate experience starts the moment you think about hiring someone for a role and doesn’t stop until they leave your organisation.
Candidate Experience Tips
Knowing the above and the impact that poor candidate experience has on the process, not to mention your ability to hire candidates, this should ensure that as TA Leaders you begin thinking of how to solve this problem.
Candidate experience should be something that is continuously reviewed and assessed. With every change or update to your process, how does this impact the candidate experience and journey through your process. A lot of time what is often forgotten about is TA teams will role out changes but forget the downstream impact to the candidate or hiring manager. For me this is a key reason TA teams should have candidate personas built and at the top of their mind consistently, through feedback loops ensuring these are updated regularly.
So how can we in TA improve the candidate experience?
Here are some top areas to look at that can all play a part:
Clear interview process: Outlining the process in the job advert and being clear on time frame. Setting this out and what candidates can expect during the process helps with the candidates understanding the process, increasing their understanding. You will need to ensure that any changes to this or the timeline you will need to ensure you communicate quickly with an explanation as to why.
Respond Quickly: One of the biggest issues currently is that candidates don’t feel there is a good communication flow from when they apply until they leave the process through being hired / rejected. You will need to ensure that within your TA teams you have SLA agreements for responding and following up. A large part of this will also improve time to hire, but should be focussing on ensuring the candidates are updated. It would be great to see whether you can include a candidate waiting time (CWT), a metric of time from when the candidate was last spoken too. Your ability to update and follow up with candidates will play a key part in driving the hiring, this is the relationship part, and in all good relationships communication is key.
Personalisation: Personalise the feedback and outreaches, this will alter the overall experience. This will increase the work up front from the TA team but this will drive a better overall experience. When writing to connect following an application instead of saying your CV was of interest add a sprinkle of personalisation in the message, add something from the candidates CV into the message. Hopefully with the advances of AI and Gen AI this should enable TA partners to be able to this more.
Job Adverts: Ensure that your job adverts are really clear with expectations for the role and what life is actually like within the company. Include a section that includes the interview process and what this looks like going forward. Ensure wording is clear and uses neutral language that will enable diversity hiring too. Even better if you have build candidate personas and leverage the key words from those areas which will allow you to have a better experience for attracting the candidates you are looking at hiring.
Provide Feedback: If candidates have any touch point or interview with anyone you should be making sure that you are providing the candidate with feedback, both positive and constructive. Ensure you spend the time wording this well and to increase your ability to drive better experience for the candidate add in some tips for how to improve or develop where they fell short. This gives the candidates the ability to develop and learn and apply this to other roles going forward.
Train your interview team: This part is often overlooked but interview teams play a large part in the candidate experience. I have personally witnessed that despite TA team giving a good experience if the interview team don’t then the candidate may still reject the offer. A very well trained interview team can have a dramatic increase in improving the employer brand too, all through delivering good interview experience. If you want to know more about interviewer training then sign up to our interview training course.
Engage with candidates through the process: A lot of TA teams I see purely drive communication relating to the overall process and interviews and very little else. This is a missed opportunity for engaging, increasing brand awareness and potentially increasing referrals. Sending candidates information packs on life at the company, links to YouTube videos or even a candidate purpose built site that gives them information on the company, the role they applied for. All of these drive better engagement but you can also look at sharing access to the product, product updates etc, which again drive engagement and allow the candidate to build more interest in the overall company.
Once hired carry on connecting: Another part people often forget is once the candidate is hired continuing the dialogue and connection. This can be also be a part of the process where they could accept another role or be counter offered. Continuing the engagement with the candidate will enable them to continue being engaged with company and the opportunity. Get the hiring manager to have regular catch ups during the probation review, also allows for communication flow including any key team updates etc, removes the surprise factor when they join.
Candidate experience tools
Here are some tools that can help with improving the candidate experience:
Candidate.fyi - a new tool on the block but is certainly making headways within the TA tech space. This tool is purely focussed on driving better candidate experience with providing clarity on next steps and key information on the interview process for the candidate. Worth checking out.
Willo - a video interviewing tool that enables candidates to share their skills and experiences. Their aim is to remove the CV and allow candidates to have a voice within the interview process.
Chatbots - Given the rise of AI you can now look at leveraging chatbots within your careers site or elsewhere to help answer questions from the candidates. It would be great to see these providing candidates with guidance and feedback on their skills and role recommendations, enhancing the overall experience and driving better hiring approaches for the TA teams.
ScreenLoop - A great product that enables you to video interviews and provide interviewers with feedback. Allows candidates to have a great experience and more clarity with the feedback. Also has an interview training module for interviewers.
Candidate experience will never be perfect, we can all hope and aim for utopia, but we also need to be realistic in that humanity will make mistakes, things will fall through the cracks, people will get sick, urgent items will come up. But the key concept and takeaway should be communication throughout the entire process should enable you to ensure a better experience. From my own personal experience ensuring that lines of communication remain open is important, people like to be kept updated on things, even when there is no to limited update, this is still an update.
Hopefully you found the above information useful and something that you can all think about into your processes going forward.
Looking Ahead
With the end of the year rapidly approaching and Christmas holiday season about to kick in here is a quick summary of what to expect for the remainder of the year from this newsletter.
I will be doing one more newsletter next week before signing off for the holiday season and some downtime with the family. In next weeks newsletter will be back into thinking TA as a product looking at the interview process and will also include a sneak peak of Interview Training Course that I will be launching in January 2024.
If you have any feedback or would like to share anything in relation to what else you would like to see in this newsletter please do comment.
Until next week, happy hiring.