What’s a candidate? Is it a number, a cv, a pile of skills and education? Certainly beyond a candidate, there is a person with life projects and dreams who is willing to invest their time and energy to explore the possibility to be a part of your team.
“Happy candidates are not just the ones you hired. Those rejected can have a good experience too” Says experienced Recruiter Carolina Amievain in her article “Candidate experience: what, why, how?”
Candidates with a positive experience will be 95 % more likely to apply again and 97% will refer your company to others. 88% of candidates with a positive experience will increase company liability and 55% will also boost employers’ branding in social networks. Source: Kelly Services Co
How does a positive candidate experience look like?
We recently did a poll on our company LI page and 67 % voted that Rejection Feedback is a big area of improvement (See poll). We will reflect on why would that be and which other potential areas of improvement we encounter so far.
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Clear communication.
How does the process start and end? One major complaint from applicants is that they are never notified that their application was received or that the position was already filled. Nowadays most applicant tracking systems do this for you and if you don’t use this make sure to include it in your process.
Also keeping candidates updated during the recruitment process will increase their candidate experience. A short, and in most cases, also automated email will do the difference.
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Transparent Job Description.
Write job descriptions that clearly define the job duties and requirements, provide salary and benefits information, and portray the company culture.
Also, display the recruitment process, it can be shorty in the job ad but also in the company career page. Candidates look for information online and it’s always better to get them first hand directly from the company
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Process length
Processes should be short and concise. 3 or 4 steps maximum. If we have longer processes candidates will lose interest and will most likely get another offer. Slow hiring will often be revealed on social media very quickly and even on sites such as Glassdoor. Nowadays, people are getting more specific, and they even state the number of days a company takes to complete the recruitment process. With help of a good ATS, you can track your process length and get better at it. Therefore there is no excuse to never get too slow!
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Give rejection feedback.
As our followers have stated in our poll, candidates don’t want to be ignored and need final feedback after a rejection. Imagine, after all those interviews, tests, and overall energy invested in a job application. Why wouldn’t we come back to them with a proper explanation about why we choose someone else.
If we think it’s a time-consuming task, now with ATS we can also automate that and still provide good feedback and experience for our candidates. A perfectly useful feedback for future job applications, personalized will help not just the candidate but your employer brand as well.
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Survey candidate’s opinions: What are their thoughts about your process?
It is very important to know what your candidates are saying during and after the recruitment process. Some topics you can cover are:
- Opinion about the application process
- Process length
- Validity and Feedback of each step
- Communication and Feedback management in general
- The general personal feeling during the process: respect/transparency/fairness
As we said before, a present rejected candidate could be a perfect future-fit that is why we have to provide an excellent candidate experience to ALL candidates, no matter their status in the recruitment process. Of all the connections your company has with the external world, the ones you have with potential employees are going to be the most shared and heard stories about who you are as a company.
Nurture everyone and treat them with respect for the time they have invested and give them the best experience they can have.