Are Job Candidates Also Fans of Your Company? Part 2

 In part 1 of this article, we looked at some common areas where employers often miss the mark for creating a positive candidate experience. Taken from HireVue’s white paper, “Turn Candidates into Fans, Whether or Not They Get the Job: Taking Advantage of Four Key Hiring Moments,” these key areas include:

• Job descriptions

• Sourcing strategies

• Candidate friendly career websites

• Interviews

Authors Chip Luman and Ben Martinez state that so many employers are missing the mark when it comes to ensuring that candidates come away as fans of a company—regardless of whether or not they’re hired.  And as the writers offer tips and advice on how employers can improve in each area to ensure candidates always leave with a positive experience, I want to continue explaining why these areas are so detrimental to the candidate experience by offering the job seeker’s perspective.

In part one, we discussed how boring job descriptions with lack of detail can repel top talent from applying. We also looked at how employers not only need to source candidates via the means job seekers are most comfortable with, but how companies themselves need to also be accessible to job seekers through those platforms.

Now, let’s tackle the final two:

Candidate-Friendly Career Websites

Your careers website is your calling card to job candidates. What impression are you leaving?

For many companies, their career web pages are an afterthought. They’re typically simple, lacking a brand story and flat out boring; hardly an inviting calling card to prospective candidates.

The white paper says that recent data from Employer Brand International found that just 59 percent of companies leverage their career website for communicating the employer brand. And a huge part of being able to effectively communicate this brand is mobile optimization.

A SparkHire survey discovered that 77 percent of job seekers use mobile job search apps, and Glassdoor reported that 68 percent of job seekers use their mobile device to search for jobs once or more a week. For job seekers, a candidate friendly career website is a mobile optimized site. It’s more convenient and allows candidates to quickly apply for jobs on-the-go. Just like the convenience of applying with LinkedIn, candidates in the job market will be more likely to become fans of a company that has a mobile career site than one that doesn’t.

Interviews

The Mystery Applicant survey also estimates more than one third–38 percent–of candidates are less likely to use a company’s product or service after a poor interview experience. From Failures to communicate along the way to technical issues during the process, there is a fantastic opportunity for improvement on the part of brands.

How can brands expect candidates not to get frustrated when they’ve invested significant amounts of precious time applying for a position only to have their application fall into a black hole without any communication from the company on the status of their application?

Waiting for a call back can be the worst for a candidate, especially if he or she has gone on an interview and was promised he or she would receive a call back in a certain amount of time. Or suffering through an interview where the interviewer is uninterested or clueless about the position.

If you want to turn job candidates into fans, treat them with respect in regards to the interviewing process. Remember that they are humans too, and even if unemployed, their time and efforts of showing up prepared for an interview are valuable. Offer candidates the same courtesy for a satisfactory interview. Because if I were interviewing with a company and its hiring manager was timely, respectful and kept me informed every step of the way, I would be more likely to apply with the company again if rejected than I would with a company that offered me a negative candidate experienc e.