Guide to A Better Candidate Experience

There are a lot of steps that go into a hiring process – whether it’s creating and posting your job on job boards, screening resumes, conducting Telephonic screening, performing in-person interviews, roll out a job offer, closing the deal and all of the communications and logistics that happen in between all of those steps. But while you and your team are probably very familiar with the details of the hiring process from this one perspective, the job candidates you’re evaluating are seeing your hiring process from a totally different perspective on the other side.

The questions you should be asking yourself are…

• Are you providing as great an overall candidate experience as you should be?
• Are you providing a positive, that will leave the best candidates wanting to work for you, or are you only doing the bare minimum as you evaluate job applicants – without any thought of their candidate experience?

Since top job candidates today have likely “know it all”, therefore, it takes some thoughtfulness and effort in your candidate experience to get your company to stand out against other companies who are eyeing the same candidates’ attention.

To get a feel for what aspects of the candidate experience make a real difference for job applicants and how to improve yours, Surprisingly, the insights of industry experts had a lot to do with the same themes, which revolve around respect, communication and transparency (among a few other important things).

• Help them feel welcome from the start and value their time throughout. 

Candidates often take time off work to come in for interviews, so it’s inconvenient if they’re left waiting for an unreasonable amount of time or are asked to reschedule at the last minute. It sends the message that they are not valued — even if that’s not your intention. 

• Make life easy for them

Make our interview process easy, simple and speedy. When you meet with them in person, be sure they spend time with all the decision-makers on the same day, which allows us to move forward almost immediately. Try to give feedback quickly, and your time-to-hire ratio is fast too, which is appreciated by the interviewees.

A streamlined interview process will only help YOUR chances, as an EMPLOYER, of gaining top talent. The more steps you add to your interview process (or even worse – the longer the waiting period), the more time you give the candidate to find another position. Don’t leave the guesswork up to the candidate. Let them know who they will be meeting with, especially if they should expect a larger panel or multiple interviews.

• Be honest and transparent

A lot of employers interview someone, and in an effort to make the situation less awkward, they give the potential future employee false hope. They will say they what may like the interviewee, that "next week the interviewee will receive a call for a second interview". Except the interviewee never gets called back. Be upfront on feedback even the person is not a right fit, in a subtle way, but the person will be happy that you didn’t give them false hope and you didn’t waste their time.

• Embrace candidate feedback

Making a great candidate experience without candidates’ feedback is practically difficult. Some of this feedback might be negative, and that’s okay. Taken as a whole, candidate feedback will help you identify bottlenecks in your hiring process, potential areas for improvement. Embracing candidate feedback, positive or negative, will help you identify the areas where the human touch will have the greatest impact. Monitoring feedback is a small detail that has a huge impact on the overall experience. Some of this feedback in a fragmented manner may come from hiring consultants and recruitment partners. 

• Set and manage expectations early on

When you’re interviewing candidates, let them know what your timeline looks like. The factors that give candidates negative impressions of companies vary, of course, but poor communication consistently tops the list. Job applicants expect a level of communication that they often do not get. A lot of the candidate frustration with the recruiting process comes from them investing a significant amount of time only to receive little to no feedback. When hiring managers or recruiters don’t clarify expectations and timelines, candidates are left waiting and wondering for further communication from the company, or through hiring consultants, which eventually comes in the form of the phone call if followed up, which is a like of "will revert to you in future", "you are not selected". 

• Train your employees to be good interviewers

Invest in making sure your employees are effective interviewers for external candidates. Before conducting interviews, your employees may go through a training process so they are accurately representing the organizational culture and providing a great candidate experience. Make sure that all the interviewers are prepared (have specific questions to ask) for the interview. They should first SELL the opportunity, organization, team etc. and ONLY then jump into questions. It is selling at both ends, Right?  

Please share and comments on how to improve the candidate experience leading to Happy Hiring.

Mintskill