5 Surefire Ways to Improve Your Candidate Experience

The race to hire is ramping up, which means recruiters are focusing on creating an enjoyable hiring pipeline. When attracting and hiring the top talent, organizations need a stellar candidate experience that demonstrates why a candidate should want to work for you. A poor candidate experience impacts the kind of hire you can make. 54% of job seekers said a negative candidate experience would turn them away from accepting an offer. Clearly, the candidate experience is an essential element of the hiring process, but how can you get started improving it? We’ve got 5 tips to help you get the ball rolling.

1. Make Sure You’re Hiring For A Real Need

When hiring for an open role, a clear purpose and a well-defined goal are the pillars of a great candidate experience. Before the candidate ever interacts with your job posting or applies to a job, you need to make sure that the position you’re hiring for fulfills an actual need for your company. Identifying your specific hiring needs before you begin your recruitment process will help you to streamline your hiring pipeline and lead to a more refined candidate search.

Before posting a job description, you should:

• Evaluate and analyze your skills gap within your organization — what skills, talent, or characteristics is your company lacking in? What does the ideal applicant look like, who fulfills these needs?
• Work with your teams to create a detailed job title and description — what can the applicant expect day-in and day-out? Be honest in your details. Job seekers want to know the realities of a job before they apply or interview for a position.

By preparing yourself ahead of time and understanding why you are hiring for an open position, you can reduce the likelihood of second-guessing your new hires or changing your strategy and direction later. When organizations create a straightforward course of action for applicants, the candidate experience benefits.

Did you know: 75% of professionals currently working in their companies were influenced to accept the job offer because of the positive candidate experience they had.

2. Make the Application Process Simple

One of the worst things you can do is make the application process complex or long-winded. In fact, a complex application process is so detrimental to your recruitment strategy that 60% of job seekers will abandon an application if the process is too long. The old adage goes: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Your goal as the hiring manager or recruiter should be to create an easy process that attracts and drives candidates down the pipeline. People are busy, and no one wants to spend hours applying for a role. Some things to do:

• Make sure your job posting is easy to find on career sites.
• Identify clear instructions for each step in the application process. 
• If possible, offer easy application or one-step application processes. 
• Parse through the application process to see what parts you can or should remove.
• Embrace mobile-friendly applications.

Did you know: Before the pandemic, 77% of talent leaders claimed that their candidate experience was excellent, but 84% of candidates stated they had negative experiences while looking for a job. Hiring managers need to create a more simplified and enjoyable experience to attract and retain talent.

3. Provide Consistent Communication

Call me, text me, email me, whatever it may be. Job seekers want nothing more than consistent and clear communication about their application process and the next steps. When this communication lacks, the candidate experience takes a hit, risking you losing out on top talent. In fact, 30% of job seekers ranked communication after they apply as most important to them when it comes to candidate experience. 

When a candidate applies to a job, send a message to notify them you received their application. Let them know a timeline for when they can expect to hear back from you. Have any roadblocks or barriers caused delays in your hiring process? Reach out to the candidate and let them know, and give them an adjusted timeline that accounts for these changes. When it comes to the candidate experience, communication is everything. It is always better to overcommunicate the process to an applicant than to leave them waiting in the dust.

4. Record and Store Necessary Candidate Information

When recruiting for an open job, hiring managers will need to quickly organize and sort through a lot of information. With multiple applicants for an available role, it can be challenging to keep all this information straight. To have a strong candidate experience, recruiters need to record and store information about candidates so that it can be easily referenced. 

Everyone on your hiring team needs to be able to access and reflect on this information so that your hiring process is consistent across all levels. Additionally, recruiters want to ensure that they are not asking for the same information multiple times, as this leads to a poorer candidate experience. An ATS can help you to track, store, and access candidate information quickly. By leaning on tools to help with data collection and organization, you can take your candidate experience to the next level.

5. Be Honest In What the Candidate Can Expect

Similar to point 3 around communicating during the process, being honest is always the best policy. When it comes to the candidate experience, this is especially true. 83% of candidates say the candidate experience would be more enjoyable if employers provided a clear timeline of the hiring process. Your candidates want to know what to expect before getting an interview and what they can expect from working at your organization. It might seem like a small or simple step, but providing insight into what candidates can expect at each step in the hiring process will help eliminate miscommunications and keep your hiring process moving smoothly.

A poor candidate experience can cost you a great hire. By taking the necessary steps to create an enjoyable, efficient, and simple hiring process, you can attract more candidates and beat out the competition for the best applicants. 

With science-backed assessments that enable data-driven decision-making, Caliper Corp can help you to refine your hiring goals and identify qualified candidates early on in the process. Our Selection Report Suite allows you to gain insights into an individual’s traits, behaviors, and personality dynamics as they relate to a specific role, letting you hire more strategically. For more information about how our selection solutions can help you to hire better applicants faster, reach out to our team of experts to see Caliper in action.