It’s that time of year: Halloween! Time to dress up and pretend to be someone else for the day. A perfect time to have your recruiters to try on a costume they haven’t done in a while: Being a candidate to your company!

When was the last time that you actually went through your recruiting process from soup to nuts from a candidate’s point of view? I hope the answer is every month or quarter. But if you haven’t in a while, now is a great time to do it.

Put on your candidate costume, walk through the entire recruitment marketing process and take notes on what you think can be improved. Here are a few areas that might want to focus on:

Job Ads: For most employers, you send to a good deal of recruiting channels through a job ad distribution tool. But when was the last time you actually went to look at your job ads on Monster, CareerBuilder, Craigslist, LinkedIn, etc? I encourage you to look at your job ads and check out two main things. First, make sure that it looks good. Is the formatting look great and do you incorporate your employer brand in the job ad? Second, is your job ad messaging compelling? By this I mean, are you providing all the information that candidates need in order to make a decision to apply and are you selling the candidate on why your company is one they should want to work for? (I’ve gone in more detail on this aspect in the past.)

Application Process - This is a crucial part of the process. Look at your application process in three main areas:

1. Length: How long does it take to complete an application? Do we set an expectation for how long it will take? Make your application as short as possible while keeping in important filtering fields and information.
2. Redundancy: How much redundancy is in the application? Do I have to fill out the same information multiple times? Do I need to just re-write everything that is on my resume? Look for ways to cut down redundant steps in your recruiting process.
3. Broken: By all means, make sure that none of the buttons or links on your site is broken. There’s nothing worse than losing qualified candidates because your application can not physically be finished.

Response Time - Submit an application to your organization and see how long it takes to receive a response from your recruiting organization. Also experiment with exceptional, good and bad resumes / applications to see how the response differs for these groups of candidates. Are there ways to make these experiences more similar than different?

More information please! - Is there an easy way for qualified candidates to get more information on your company as an employer before and after they apply? What steps do you put in place during the application and in your job ads to direct candidates to learn more about your employer brand and company culture? This could be anything from including a link to your career site in an auto-reply resume submission email to including web commercials in your application process to educate candidates.

Most importantly, do you provide qualified candidates ways to opt-in to your Talent Network during not only your application process but on your career site as well. Not every candidate is ready to apply today and what are you doing to interact with them now to make them a future job lead.

Walk in your candidate’s shoes and I promise you’ll find some ways to better interact and engage with qualified candidates. While recruiting metrics can also help you identify what’s wrong in your recruiting process, also make going through your recruiting process a monthly if not quarterly process for all your recruiters as there is a lot to learn from being on the other side of the table.

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.