Key Takeaways
- Candidate Experience Matters: How candidates perceive your hiring process influences your employer brand, job applications, and retention.
- Negative Experiences Cost You: Poor candidate experiences can damage your brand reputation, leading to lost talent and even customer defections, like Virgin Media’s £4.4M loss.
- Core Principles for Great Experience: Communication, transparency, respect, and efficiency are essential for creating a positive candidate journey.
- Timely Updates and Personalisation: Keeping candidates informed, offering constructive feedback, and ensuring transparency about assessments helps reduce anxiety and improve outcomes.
- Efficiency and Relevance: Short, focused assessments designed to measure key skills keep candidates engaged and reflect well on your company.
Introduction
If I were to state that being able to attract and recruit talented employees can be somewhat challenging, I think most readers would agree. There are so many factors we must consider and balance, and not all of them are achievable without some degree of compromise.
However, one factor that has become front and centre of our thinking in the last few decades has been candidate experience.
What do we mean by candidate experience?
Candidate experience refers to the overall perception and feelings that a job applicant has about an employer's recruitment and selection process. It emanates from an exchange between job seekers and the organisation to which employment is being considered (Miles & McCamey). It covers every single touchpoint from the initial job advert through to notification of success (or not!) and beyond. Employers are increasingly aware that the focus is no longer simply on the candidates that progress the furthest in the process; the candidates you don’t hire matter too.
Positive candidate experience ensures that candidates feel valued and respected at every touchpoint, regardless of whether they secure the position.
Positive candidate experience ensures that candidates feel valued and respected at every touchpoint, regardless of whether they secure the position. However, research suggests employers are not always getting this right with almost 60% of candidates report having a poor experience.
Why does it matter?
Candidate experience is crucial because it directly influences an employer’s brand reputation and attractiveness. In a competitive job market, the way candidates perceive their interactions with a company can determine their willingness to apply, accept a job offer, or recommend the organisation to others.
The way candidates perceive their interactions with a company can determine their willingness to apply, accept a job offer, or recommend the organisation to others.
Poor candidate experience can lead to negative reviews on social media and job sites, deterring top talent from applying and potentially damaging the company’s reputation. Further, a negative candidate experience can even lead to candidates halting product purchases and/or their relationships with that organisation. There is an often-quoted powerful case study from Virgin Media who reported a £4.4 million loss to the business because candidates who were also customers, opted to leave the business after reporting a poor candidate experience.
How can you achieve great candidate experience?
There is no magic wand in relation to great candidate experience but there are some core principles that can form the basis of your approach.
Communication
Keep candidates informed at every stage of the process, providing timely updates and feedback. Ensure candidates know what to expect and when. Consider how you can personalise interactions with candidates and create ways to ensure that even those candidates who aren’t offered a position do still receive useful feedback.
Transparency
Provide information about what assessments candidates will be asked to complete and why they are used (e.g. job relatedness and the purpose of the test). This increases the perceived legitimacy of the process and can reduce anxiety, thus ensuring the candidate can perform at their best.
Respect
Candidates should always be treated with respect and should feel appreciated. Having a process that does this (via technology and human interaction) leads to increased perceived organisational attractiveness and job acceptance intentions.
Efficiency
Long gone are the days where candidates were invited to complete a battery of tests lasting three hours or more. Assessments should be pinpointed to measure the skills of relevance and do so in a manner that is both engaging and scientifically sound. Long and complicated applications can deter potential candidates.
By prioritising candidate experience, companies not only attract and retain top talent but also foster a positive image that resonates well beyond the recruitment process.
In a world where word-of-mouth and online reviews significantly influence reputation, providing a exceptional candidate experience is vital.
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