Even the most top-performing organizations still have areas of the hiring process they feel can be improved upon. Chief among them is speeding up the process altogether, but just as important is engaging with candidates passively through the written job descriptions and actively through directly communicating throughout the process.
What do you feel needs to improve in your hiring process to create a more positive impression?
The challenges organizations face in creating a better candidate experience are varied, but most stem from not having the resources needed to communicate and engage with everyone who goes through the hiring process. Technology seems the obvious fix and though recruiting at scale certainly requires excellent TA technology, the right efforts must be made before deploying technology.
Your recruitment strategy must provide a solid foundation upon which all other efforts are built. Brandon Hall Group research shows that the biggest challenges face in TA overall (not just in creating a better candidate experience) is a lack of a pipeline of talent, so having all the top software won’t help if you don’t have enough applicants and recruits.
Which of the following are challenges in creating a top-tier talent acquisition program?
Creating a better candidate experience has multiple positive effects but in the era of work-from-home, with increased access to communication channels and with the numerous available social media sites, it is the ability to create a strong and confident employer brand that is the most sought-after benefit in the modern era.
Organizations should create closed feedback loops that allow them to monitor their candidate experience and make changes to that process as needed. Listening to the potential employees as they move through the pipeline gives valuable insights into the mindset of those individuals and shows where possible bottlenecks may be occurring.
To create a more positive candidate experience, organizations must first assess what their current status is, then try to determine the next steps to improve it. Key questions organizations should address include:
- Who are the people who are responsible for improving the candidate experience and how are they held accountable for their success?
- What tools and technology are in place to support candidate experience efforts in terms of communicating with candidates and their user experience going through the process?
- How can you improve the candidate experience without sacrificing a more robust pipeline of talent?
- How will you measure the impact of candidate experience on business metrics?
Take an Evidence-based Approach to Understanding Your Current Candidate Experience
One of the steps employers should take is instilling a more objective approach in doing away with unneeded human error. A data-driven method to analyzing the candidate experience provides employers with a more accurate view of potential employees and gives candidates a feeling of fairness which will spread, especially in the era of social media, and create a better employer brand along the way.
Bring a Customer-experience Approach to Improving Your Candidate Experience
The strategies that create opportunities with customers are the same approaches you should employ to win the war for talent. Innovation, creativity, motivation — these are the core concepts required to attract the best candidates in a highly competitive job market. How the most successful companies woo and keep customers can be just as effective in attracting talent and those methods are precisely what many potential candidates expect.
Use Technology that Complements Your Existing Processes
There is certainly no shortage of solution providers that boast about how their technology can solve all of your organization’s hiring problems. But adding technology to a broken process just speeds up the broken process; you’ll be creating disengagement at twice the previous rate!
Instead, organizations should ensure they have a working strategy, build a process that executes that strategy then shop for technology that works within their framework. After all, the candidate experience for hiring local essential workers should be quite different from hiring high-level global executives. The technology piece of the candidate experience should reflect that.
Build a More Diverse Pipeline
Although at first glance, “Building a More Diverse Pipeline” might seem more like a strategy for improving TA efforts overall, not just the candidate experience, the fastest way to improve your candidate experience is to create a more inclusive environment. That means designing job descriptions with more engaging language that speaks to a broader population, creating candidate portals that are easily accessible and navigable, and messaging a wider variety of groups in previously underrepresented populations. These efforts will make a more positive hiring experience for everyone, regardless of background or demographics.
