4 Benefits of a Winning Candidate Experience
The companies that get there are the ones that make candidate experience a priority in their sourcing and recruiting practices. There are various avenues to take in this approach, ranging from simple enhancements to more complex endeavors. In essence, by treating your candidates like you would normally treat your consumers, you can impact your bottom line and take your business to the next level. What candidates experience when they apply to and interview with your company makes an impression — and they will eventually share that impression, good or bad, across their social networks.
If you don’t recruit with candidate experience in mind, top talent may be turned off by your complex and inefficient application process. They will be lured away by competitors that are making the effort to communicate with them, making it easy and fun to apply, and offering opportunities to interact with people in their companies.
A great candidate experience can provide organizations with many benefits — unfortunately, very few companies have attempted to optimize their candidates experiences. According to recent research, 80 percent of senior HR and procurement professionals do not regard the candidate experience as a priority in recruitment. However, prioritizing the candidate experience can bring a few key benefits to employers:
1. More Engaged Employees
A new employee who experiences an enjoyable hiring process is much more likely to be positive and engaged when they start working for your company than an applicant who was mistreated and neglected by your hiring team. Such mistreatment creates disengaged employees who can have a detrimental impact on your business once hired.
2. A Better Employer Brand
Applicants who have positive candidate experiences can help you build your company’s reputation on social networks, which will then make it easier for you to attract top talent. When crafting a candidate experience, keep a few things in mind
- You are not just hiring employees, but ambassadors of your business.
- The people you hire today will determine the kind of culture and brand you build tomorrow.
- Your employees are your greatest point of differentiation and your biggest asset in creating a competitive advantage.
3. An Improved Talent Pipeline
4. Higher Proftes
A memorable candidate experience is a business necessity: it can help you boost sales and profitability. Findings from the Candidate Experience Awards show that close to 90 percent of candidates are more likely to buy from a company that gave them a positive candidate experience, irrespective of whether or not they were hired.
What’s Next?
If you want to build a better candidates experience, the first step is to review and audit your application process through the eyes of the candidate. You can also seek feedback from current employees to find out what they would change about the application process.
Next, you should create a list of things that need to be improved in order to ensure a more pleasant talent experience. Finally, you must start implementing the necessary changes. These can be small tweaks or more complex initiatives that require in-depth cost-benefit analyses and organizational support, depending on what your investigation uncovers.
Make the biggest impact on your candidate experience by searching for low-hanging fruits — i.e., the easy fixes you can do now — and build momentum from there. Tailor your improvements to your target talent audience and invest in the changes that will affect the perception of your organization the most.
It is equally important to continuously seek feedback from your applicants. You should always be striving for a word-class candidate experience. Building one may require an investment in people, technology, and social media, but rest assured: the benefits certainly outweigh these costs.