3 Ways to improve your Candidate Experience

Employers are beginning to understand the importance of candidate experience. Better candidate experience can lead to some or all the following:

More candidates applying for your job positions with a focus toward qualified candidates
More offer acceptances among candidates due to increase in your employer brand
Encourages positive word of mouth between candidates about open job positions

There are some great companies doing very cool things with candidate experience including doing 24 hour IM chat on their career site, providing interactive video content on working at their company as well as offering real-time status updates for candidates. But candidate experience doesn’t have to be game changing. It can start with some simple realistic changes in your recruitment marketing process that can have some big impact on the way candidates view your recruiting organization.

So what things can you do in your process today to improve the experience of your candidates. Here’s a few ideas:

Shorten your application: A job application needs to be accessible to candidates and should take less than 5 minutes to complete. You should make sure to go through your own job application process to determine the length of your process from a candidate perspective. Also, set expectations for the candidates in the beginning of the application to let them know how long the process will take.

Give candidate’s an answer even if it’s NO: In most cases, candidates just want to know where they stand in the interview process. To provide this to every candidate you can do a few things. First, turn on the auto reply feature in your ATS to ensure that you tell a candidate you received their application. Also enable it to send a custom decline message to candidates that don’t get an interview. Continue to do this during every stage in the interview process. This should help eliminate the black hole.

Enable candidates to apply in their own time with opt-in: Candidates may not be ready to apply today when they come into contact with your company and careers. In order to help candidates stay in touch with your company provide them the option of opting-in to your recruiting CRM Talent Network where they can receive new information via email or on social recruiting profiles that your recruiting team updates.

Candidate Experience is all about making the recruiting process as simple and clear as possible for the candidate. It’s about engaging candidates to understand what parts of the process are preventing them from learning about your company and ultimately apply. Try a few small things to improve your candidate experience and see how they affect your recruiting results. You may be surprised with what you see.

Comment by Rebecca Griffin on October 19, 2011 at 11:05am: I agree, setting up an auto reply when a resume comes in is a good idea. BUT, I disagree about the automated decline message. The least a good recruiter can do is pick up the phone and call a candidate to let them know that they were not selected for a position. An automated rejection email is cold. Just one opinion.

Comment by Chris Brablc on October 19, 2011 at 12:28pm: Rebecca - Thanks for the comment! I agree that calling candidates is by far the best method in telling a candidate they didn't receive the position. Especially if you had them in for an interview.

However, with the sheer quantity of candidates that come in for a position, I understand that a recruiter can't get back to every candidate that applied but didn't get an interview at most companies. I for one believe getting back even in an automated fashion is better than never getting back at all.

If you can get back to each individual contact, I think that's great!

Comment by Dorothy Wong on October 19, 2011 at 3:40pm: I cannot agree more with Chris. I am a Gen Y fresh college graduate seeking for an entry level position. I have been sending out resumes every day. For me, I am more likely to apply to positions with a shorter job applications.

I had some not so good experiences with recruiters. I passed the phone interview and the first interview. It took almost 3 weeks for me to be able to schedule the second interview. I guess the frustrating part was that the interview was supposed to take place 2 weeks after the first interview but because of unprecedented events that were out of the control of recruiter I was working with, the interview was postponed 3 times. I took the initiative to email couple times the recruiter about second interview. She just ignored my emails. I felt like I was left hanging. I almost gave up on my second interview because I felt I was pushing my recruiter for a second round interview. However, I was told that there would be a second interview by my first interviewer.I just need an answer from the recruiter even if it is a No.

To learn more about Gen Y job seekers go to: http://employers.identified.com/blog/bid/69143/Facebook-The-Future-...

Comment by Sandra McCartt on October 19, 2011 at 4:48pm: @Dorothy I know it's frustrating as a new grad but i would suggest that you not take the path of least resistance when it comes to job applications. They are a pain but sometimes the longest ones could be the best jobs. Since you aren't working yet in your field your job is looking for a job which sometimes like all jobs has parts of it that require more detail and boring stuff than any of us would prefer.

Your recruiter should have responded to your emails even if it was to say, "I don't know anything yet" but normally when you get no response it's because the recruiter doesn't know anything either. Unless you have another offer that you need to respond to just hang on and wait rather than push until you get a No. If you really need an answer for some reason, other than you are frustrated with waiting, email or call the recruiter and explain that you have another offer but would rather have the opportunity for second interview before you accept another position. Try not to blame the messanger for not having a message, she really may not have one for you yet. Companies are moving very slowly in most cases.