In the competitive landscape of talent acquisition, an exceptional candidate experience holds the power to captivate and secure the best candidates. While multiple factors influence a skilled applicant’s job selection, the impact of a warm and reassuring candidate experience cannot be underestimated.
Treating candidates well through a thoughtful and positive candidate experience leaves them with a great impression of your company. Whether or not they accept the job this time, they may share their experience with friends and family, contributing to your brand’s reputation. On the other hand, a poor candidate experience can generate negative word-of-mouth and diminish your employer branding.
Why Improve the Candidate Experience?
Improving your candidate experience helps you stand out in the marketplace. Leaving applicants with a good impression keeps the door open for them to apply to other open positions at your company down the line. Over time, it helps build your pool of strong candidates who know, like, and trust your brand.
Creating a positive candidate experience boils down to communicating with your applicants and treating people with respect. Still, without strategies and procedures in place, companies risk falling short of delivering the exception experience they aspire to provide.
How to Create an Exceptional Candidate Experience
A positive candidate experience starts with the job description and continues through each touch point along the hiring process. At each step, your company has an opportunity to build relationships that can generate referrals and bolster your reputation among job seekers now and in the future.
Read on for 12 ways you can create a top-tier candidate experience.
1. Make Essential Information Available to Job Seekers
When candidates read your job description online, they may want to research your company’s products and services, size, culture, history, and achievements. Add a dedicated page on your website for interested candidates, or make your career site easy to find.
Remember to include what makes your brand unique and showcase your team. Positive feedback from current employees and details about employee benefits can make a significant impact.
2. Include Company News and Information on Your Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms are a reliable way to share company news and recent or upcoming events. Prospects often browse a company’s professional social networks to understand the culture.
Pro Tip: Creating a “careers” hashtag for your company can help potential candidate find you, boost engagement, and drive awareness.
3. Understand the Job’s Requirements Before Posting
Before writing the job description, meet with current team members and possibly the outgoing candidate to get information to fine-tune your posting. An accurate job description attracts qualified candidates with the skills and experience to match.
4. Write Thorough Job Descriptions
An enticing job description captures candidates’ attention and gives them all the information they need to confirm the position matches their goals and skills. Your job description may be the first contact with a candidate. A well-written posting makes a positive first impression.
Include the information candidates care about the most, including salary range, benefits, required qualifications, and whether the role is onsite, remote, or hybrid. Clarify what success in the role looks like with measurable performance goals and how the position impacts the company’s objectives.
5. Use Inclusive Language
Your job descriptions provide potential candidates a glimpse into the company’s culture. An inclusive job description attracts a diverse talent pool.
6. Take Friction Out of the Application Process
To improve your candidate experience, make your application mobile-friendly and ask for only the necessary information to avoid making the process tedious. Minimize required skills assessments in the early phases of the application and allow candidates to attach a resume rather than re-typing their experience and skills into a form.
7. Think of Interviews as a Two-Way Evaluation
Make interviews easy to schedule and ensure that expectations are clear. An engaging and fair interview process will boost candidate engagement, giving your hiring team more suitable options.
8. Conduct Structured Interviews
Structured interviews provide a fair and systematic approach to interviewing, whether you conduct them in person or virtually. You ask candidates the same predetermined questions in the same order. The advantage is you can reference the answers for each candidate for an objective comparison.
Including behavioral interview questions in the list challenges the candidates to think of their feet and can give you more insight into their personality and how they might fit in with the team. While you want to conduct a thorough interview, be efficient in getting the information you need without taking up too much of the candidate’s time.
If you’ve got managers outside the hiring team interviewing candidates, train them beforehand. You want to ensure that everyone involved in the hiring process is engaged in creating a positive candidate experience.
RELATED: 10 Best Phone Interview Questions to Ask Candidates
9. Communicate
Clear, consistent communication is essential to building any relationship and critical to creating a positive candidate experience. It’s vital to communicate with candidates your team is considering and those who won’t advance. Don’t leave prospects hanging. Considerate, personalized communication makes an impact.
10. Invite Candidate Feedback
A great way to improve your candidate experience is to get feedback directly from people going through your hiring process. Integrate opportunities for applicants to give you feedback at different touch points. These can be in the form of open-ended questions, invitations to respond, or structured surveys.
11. Implement a Smooth Onboarding Process
Even exciting changes come with some anxiety, and that increases the more is unknown. Once a candidate has decided to join your team, your onboarding process is an opportunity to reassure them, reinforce their excitement, and ensure they have the essential information they need.
Start with a welcoming email immediately after they sign the offer. Make pre-boarding activities clear and accessible and give them access to support if needed.
If you’re a remote company, onboarding is critical. It can make the difference between seamlessly folding a new recruit into the team or leaving them confused and disoriented.
12. Integrate New Hires Into the Team
Don’t leave introductions up to the new hire. Announce their presence to the team, creating a celebratory and inclusive feeling. Create systems that quickly add them to group chats and consider assigning an orientation buddy to ease the transition. If appropriate for the position, you can have new employees meet one-on-one with key team members to begin building relationships in the first few days.
Improve the Candidate Experience to Attract Top Talent
Crafting a positive candidate experience is a time-consuming but worthwhile process. Happy candidates will consider other positions at your company even if you don’t hire them today. They will share their good impressions with others, building your word-of-mouth candidate referrals and boosting your brand as an employer.
If your team doesn’t have time to build an outstanding candidate experience, we go above and beyond at each step of the hiring process to exceed expectations and create a lasting positive impression. Connect with our experienced recruiters to find out more.
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