Finding the Key to Good Candidate Experiences
As an executive representative of your company, you must be looking to up your game and enhance employee engagement. Here are 5 effective ways in which you can elevate your long-term employee engagement strategies:
Hiring is not always about hiring the best talent. Nowadays, hiring processes are also about including excellent candidate experience.
Have you ever wondered why companies treat all their candidates so well?
When candidates apply to a company, they notice how respectfully the HR or the talent acquisition team treats them. It does not matter if they are selected or not. The HR and talent acquisition team ensure candidates don’t face any difficulty during the screening stages.
In today’s world, a good candidate experience is necessary for the company’s reputation. If they have a terrible experience with a company, they would probably never apply again. There are chances they might also bad-mouth the company to their friends and family.
Did you know, nearly 94% candidates value a feedback loop and a follow-up on the application, helping close positions quickly.
Moreover, how candidates feel during the hiring process is a decisive factor. It influences candidates’ decision to apply to the company or accept your offer letter. As a recruiter, you must have empathy while approaching candidates. You have to test them and select the best talents but do not treat them as mere numbers.
A person’s skill level is not a parameter to judge how he should be treated.
What Makes Candidate Experience so Essential?
In this advanced and technology-driven world, candidate experience has become a marketing essential. Before the boom of social media and community platforms, candidate experience wasn’t prioritized to the fullest. It was because the expectations weren’t so high from a candidate’s standpoint. Even if the candidate had an awful experience with your team, the most he would do is never feel like applying again. Recruiters had vast pools of candidates and would rarely pay much attention to their experiences.
But the modern-day approach goes hand in hand with the digital age of social media. Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have expanded our social networking space.
Now, candidates have a platform where they can share everything. If the candidate had to go through long hiring forms, procedures, and unreasonable tests, they would share their discomfort on social media.
It takes one negative post to adversely affect the company’s reputation. Unsatisfied candidates may write bad reviews about the company on several websites. People generally sympathize with the feelings of ill-treated candidates. These people may be your future applicants or prospective target customers.
Moreover, if you treat your candidates respectfully, they become your unofficial goodwill ambassadors. It will attract talented and skilled applicants. Ultimately, you will get highly skilled candidates for your open positions. On humanitarian grounds, everyone deserves respect and kind words. An individual’s qualifications do not give you the right to disrespect him.
It would be best to refrain from treating your candidates as mere numbers. They are the ones who will be standing with your company at all times to ensure its success.
What is Responsible for Bad Candidate Experiences?
Think of all the things you would want from a company when applying to it. It can be a smooth communication channel, organized process, and short tests.
A negative candidate experience comes from all points opposite to the candidates’ expectations, such as:
- Unresponsive hiring team
- Lack of communication
- Lengthy application form
- Complex hiring tests and stages
- Unpleasant interviews
- Inability to fill the forms from the candidate’s choice of device
- Unclear job responsibility and salary
- No place for candidate feedback
A simplified, sorted, and decent hiring process reflects the excellent work culture of the company.
Empathy as a Part of the Modern-Day Recruitment Approach
With empathy and kind values, everything’s possible.
Empathy is the ability to comprehend others’ feelings from their perspective. It has become an essential part of the recruitment process.
The COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything and forced people to face their worst fears. Many lost their dear ones. Millions of people lost their jobs and livelihood. A majority of people are financially broke and suffering from depression. As human beings, we need to grow together and support one another.
As a recruiter, you have to handle hundreds of candidates before settling on one. You may come across unqualified candidates every day. You should prioritize skilled candidates but not at the cost of ghosting other candidates.
Instead of being straight, sassy, or unresponsive, one could politely convey to the candidates to keep getting better. You, as a recruiter, can also suggest where they went wrong along with relevant courses for upskilling.
Empathy creates connections and is all about understanding each candidate’s work experience, interest, and productivity. Here’s how you can incorporate empathy to provide good candidate experiences through your recruitment process:
- Handle every candidate with kindness and patience.
- Be humble throughout the hiring process.
- Be open to rescheduling interviews for genuine reasons.
- Try connecting with candidates, their past work experiences, the value they could add.
- Be an active listener.
- Respect a candidate’s honesty.
- Make the hiring process and job description clear to the candidates the first time you approach them.
- Only post a job vacancy if you are hiring.
- Make it easier for the candidates to apply.
- In case of delays in submissions, reach out to the candidate politely.
- Throughout the hiring, offer letter acceptance, and onboarding process, keep in touch.
Great candidate experiences go a long way
It takes nothing to be a humble and kind-hearted person. Empathy is a key concept in ensuring a happy and good candidate experience. A seamless and empathetic hiring process is beneficial for your company in the long run. Besides ensuring good candidate experiences and attracting better applicants, it also builds your brand reputation among your target audience. From hiring to feedback loops, there is a scope of offering excellent candidate experiences at every step of the process. Don’t fall under the 50% category where you have an offer rejection based on poor candidate experience.