Why Ignoring the Candidate Experience is Hurting your Candidate Pipeline

A 2016 study entitled Candidate Experience Research Report, conducted by Talent Board, highlights two realities. Firstly, forty-one percent (41%) of applicants who had a negative experience with a business felt encouraged to apply with their competitors. Secondly, sixty-four percent (64%) of candidates with a positive candidate experience confirmed that their opinion of the business’s brand image had improved. In short, offering candidates the same attentive and satisfying experience that you offer your customers is crucial! Now, the trick is to know how to create this unique experience. Here are three steps you can take.

The Balance between Aesthetics and Ergonomics

Take a moment to reflect on whether you took as much care in designing your Careers or Join Us page as you did on your Product page. This page is one of the key aspects of your brand image. As such, it deserves your full attention so that it reflects your values, mindset, and commitment to an ambitious HR policy that’s beneficial to your teams. Once you start to keep this mind, it becomes a question of making things easier for applicants. Make your questionnaires shorter, limit the number of supporting documents, and be precise when specifying what’s needed for an application to be taken seriously. Finally, keep things concise to avoid discouraging applicants.

Make Sure to Follow-up

Whatever the interest or relevance, an application should be followed up. For candidates, nothing is worse than a lack of feedback. Use thank-you e-mails to acknowledge the applications and mention the deadline for a reply. Stay true to your word. Also, remember to stay connected with unsuccessful applicants since they’re potential customers. In short, never forget that despite the impersonal aspect of digital recruitment, empathy and respect are two essential values! This is especially important since they’re often forgotten in virtual interactions. Make use of them and see the difference they’ll make.

Ensure A Successful First Interview

Selected profiles are interviewed face-to-face or virtually to evaluate them. But don’t forget that they’ll also be assessing you. Smile, be friendly,and keep things informal through dialogue instead of turning things into a panic-inducing interrogation. Be consistent with your values so that the candidate experience is a positive one.

Rethinking your recruitment strategies from a Candidate Experience perspective means reviewing your methods. Make sure to perform an accurate and rigorous follow-up of the offers you post. Check the relevance of the applications you receive and always review the basis for your key indicators. RITA Sourcing, one of the components of Cegid’s Talent Management Suite, provides you with all your necessary tracking information. And to welcome new employees, you can turn to Cegid’s Onboarding, a veritable catalyst for talent integration!