What if we told you that a candidate’s experience is directly related to their first visit starting from the pre-application stage?
The 2020 Talent Board North America Candidate Experience Research report suggests:
- Nearly 52% of candidates shared their negative experiences online.
- About 25% of candidates reported a long recruiting process as one of the reasons for withdrawing.
The report states that applicants who’ve had a negative experience report taking their business alliance somewhere else.
What is a Candidate Experience?
Candidate experience impacts a company’s brand leaves on prospective applicants throughout the application, interview, and hiring process.
Various components can influence a candidate’s mindset while applying for a job, including:
- Company’s website
- Online presence
- The online job application process
- Communication through ATS
- Interview process
3 Reasons Candidate Experience Matters
How does a positive candidate experience in recruitment matter? What is its benefit?
A candidate’s journey with the company starts way before the interview and form filling. Most candidates apply for a vacancy while keeping a positive perception of the company in mind. The benefits of providing a positive candidate experience to recruiters are:
1. More Applicants
One of the significant benefits of a short and simple application process is more candidates finishing and applying to your job postings. But how can you make application filling simple and easy? An easy solution to this would be removing repetitive or similar questions.
2. Competing for the Best Talent
By streamlining your candidate experience, you can win over the best candidates and stay ahead of your competitors. Providing candidates with a superior experience like less or negligible manual data entry leaves a great impression of your brand, increasing their desire to work for you.
3. Improved Brand Awareness
Exceptional candidate experience often leads to great reviews online. Job seekers talk about their experiences with others and share their stories with friends and other job seekers. This creates positive awareness for both the employer and customer brand, which can lead to more buyers.
How to Measure Candidate Experience?
Candidate experience is not only tough to measure but can drive you up the wall. But here are some easy indicators to measure candidate experience:
1. Applicant Drop-off
Are candidates abruptly leaving your site without giving any reason? What could be the probable explanation? Lengthy job applications, multiple interview rounds, and tests may lead to high candidate drop-off rates. Therefore, assess where and why the applicant dropped off. Try fixing the issues in the application process, which may lead to a high candidate engagement rate and improved candidate experience.
2. Time-to-fill
Time-to-fill is the time that passes between the job posting and an offer accepted by the candidate. Certain communication problems can crop up at this stage and can be resolved by asking the candidate about their preferred mode of communication. Some may like emails, while others go for phone calls.
3. Visitor Stats from Career Page
A company’s career page is highly relevant, and it is where applicants apply for job openings. You can look for unique visitors the page received and how many left without performing any action. The reason could be anything from non-integration with ATS to a non-friendly mobile site. Create a mobile-friendly site and ensure your ATS integration configuration is well in place.
4. Overall Candidate Satisfaction
Getting feedback from the candidate is crucial. Recruiters can use feedback to increase their hiring and enhance the employer brand.
Asking candidates about their experience will send them a message that you care about their opinion and will help you improve the candidate experience for others.
What’s the ROI on a good Candidate Experience?
A good candidate experience leads to better retention rates, can save your business money, and increase your profits.
In the long run, with each hire, a good candidate experience can lead to a better return on investment (ROI).
But how is the quality of hire related to improvement in ROI? Organizations with happy employees are more productive than unhappy ones, eventually leading to greater profit.
Tips to Improve Candidate Experience
To keep up with the competition, one requires a well-crafted candidate-centric approach and attention to the candidate experience. But do you offer an excellent experience to the candidates? Here are some tips to improve candidate experience, which can result in high ROI:
- Invest in HR technology tools such as resume parser & multilingual resume parser, which significantly reduce manual data entry time.
- Keep the application process as brief as possible and capture the relevant information that you need.
- Try to reduce the application time from 10 minutes to under 3 minutes.
- Stay ahead of your competition by not keeping candidates in the process for more than 15 days.
Candidates are more likely to suggest your company to their peers if they had a great experience with you. Thus, a good candidate experience means high revenues and substantial growth avenues.
By offering a weak candidate experience, you drive them away and negatively impact your brand. However, if you provide a great candidate experience, you can reap various rewards like high ROI and increased market presence.
