by Charlotte Gurney
There are alot of benefits to taking steps to enhance your candidate experience. If the way your brand interacts with candidates is engaging and seamless then it is much more likely to appeal to a broader spectrum of people, as word of mouth will ensure that news of this spreads. Better candidate experiences also tend to result in more employee loyalty and create a firm foundation for a relationship going forward. So, given that there are clearly many reasons to take the time to enhance your candidate experience, what steps do you need to take to get started?
How to enhance your candidate experience
For most people who go through a recruitment process with a business, it’s often the small things that can cause annoyance and frustration. The idea behind enhancing the candidate experience is to remove these small things so that they don’t become obstacles.
Make sure that the experience is optimized for mobile. Smartphone use has rocketed all over the world in recent years and most of us now use our devices to carry out a whole range of different tasks. That includes applying for jobs - 86% of people looking for a job with a smartphone will use the devices to look for positions, for example. Many candidates prefer to track application status this way and even submit their documents so it’s vital that mobile access is simple.
Create a well-defined hiring process and a specific structure for interviews. It’s vital to ensure that whoever is connecting with candidates is able to use the opportunity well. That means creating a process that is consistent for every candidate who has contact with the business and ensuring that interviewers etc. know exactly what they are looking for with every person they interact with. Every applicant should have the same transparent experience and come away with the same essential information.
Ensure everyone in the business understands why it’s essential to provide an enhanced candidate experience. This isn’t just something that should fall to HR but any team within your organization that might have contact with candidates. That could be internal managers or external support. Make sure everyone is aware that the ultimate goal here is to remove anything that could cause the candidates in the hiring process to leave it before the time is right.
Create a way to measure how your candidate experience is performing. Metrics can be vital so that you can see how your candidate experience performs against other companies - and also against your results from the year before. There are lots of different measurements that you can focus on to get a clearer picture of how you’re doing in terms of candidate experience. For example, the length of the hiring process or the way that candidates describe it afterwards.
From ensuring mobile optimization to creating consistent structures and using clear metrics there are many opportunities to enhance the experience that candidates have of your business. The more effort you put into this, the more likely you are to find that your hiring process is a success.
This is only a snippet on what to think about when you are going through the recruitment process. At Volt we have a 70+ year record as a recruitment advisor of helping organizations of all sizes recruit and manage qualified people, improve responsiveness of their supplier network, mitigate risk, and increase the return on their workforce investment.