Three Free Ways to Create a Great Candidate Experience
Posted on in Recruiting Strategy
Treating people the way you wish to be treated.
It’s such a simple concept, yet it seems to fall by the wayside when companies are working with prospective employees. When candidates rate their experience as poor, it generally points to challenges in the interview process as opposed to clunky technology or the resume black hole (although those are offenders too!). Here are three simple changes you can make immediately that will improve your candidate experience…and that will cost you absolutely nothing!
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Create an interview process. It’s all about the process. Candidates want to understand your interview process and what they can expect at each stage throughout it. Create an interview process that outlines the goals of each step, the expectations of each individual, and realistic timelines. Train your interviewers on the process and reinforce the importance of follow through. This buy-in will create efficiencies which will improve your time-to-fill, and provide a high level of confidence when explaining your process to a candidate and making commitments at each stage. This is a win for everyone.
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Go deep in interviews. Candidates want an opportunity to get specific about what they’ve done, what they’re looking to do next, and how your company is a good fit. The interview process should build with each conversation, clarify information previously received, and provide new insights. Segment your interviews so your team can hone in on a topic or skill and go deep. This ensures you obtain a well-rounded view of the candidate and eliminates people following their “gut” in lieu of gathering real data.
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Be responsive. Candidates are still clamoring that companies don’t communicate enough. If you make a commitment to respond to a candidate in three days, you should beat that deadline. Under promise and over deliver. Even if your email or phone call is to tell a candidate you don’t have the information, schedule, feedback, or offer decision yet, that is far better than hiding until you do. Take this one step further, when someone has not been selected for the position, pick up the phone and tell them in real time. While this isn’t a phone call anyone wants to make, it’s actually a relationship builder. You may get questions that are hard to answer or ones you simply can’t give a response to, but candidates will respect the fact that you had the guts to pick up the phone. And, on the off chance that the candidate is angry, by speaking directly with you they are given an outlet. Better to you over the phone than publicly on Facebook or Twitter.
Putting the candidate experience in the center of your recruiting process shouldn’t end here. By making these three changes, you are guaranteed to receive positive feedback from your candidates regardless of outcome (you are surveying them for their feedback, right?).
To find out how your candidate experience compares to leading companies in this space, take our Candidate Experience Survey and Score by completing the form below.
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