Six Ways To Create a Great Candidate Experience

By Ali Hackett, TalentBond

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How would you rate your candidate experience?

There are so many ways to move your candidate experience up a gear. Many organisations have embraced some elements of the candidate experience – perhaps a really well executed social recruiting strategy or creating a great a careers site. Put yourself in your candidates’ shoes and see how many of the ideas below you’ve implemented…  

Candidate marketing – where’s your audience?

-How do you engage with your candidates at the start of their journey? Think about the channels you use to communicate with your target market and make sure you’re in the right place for your audience.

-If you’re not sure where this place is, do some research internally and look at what other recruiters in your sector do – you could be surprised what you might find.

What to say…

-Think about what content you share with your audience – it is relevant to their wants and needs? Don’t just push jobs; add value by sharing interesting content about their world. For graduates, this might be some universal hints and tips about assessment centres. Your audience is forming an opinion, so make sure it’s a good one.

-If anyone has a question or query, make sure you’re back in touch quickly to help out.

…and how to say it

-Be clear, consistent and jargon free in all of your communications, from the way you talk about your organisation and your offer as an employer, to the language on your website.

-This shouldn’t change as a candidate moves through the process so look at your communications to candidates at interview and offer stage.

Your careers website – getting it right

-As consumers and candidates we want the right information for our needs as quickly as possible and in a format that is relevant and engaging. Think about your candidate segments and what they want / need to know about your company, the process, your expectations of them etc. Graduates might not need the same information as your experienced hires. You might want to create a specific section for a particular area of recruitment – engineers, sales people, apprentices.

-Think about including a FAQs section about the process, timeframes, what to expect and hints and tips. It’s good customer and candidate service.

-Can your content be viewed on mobile? It’s critical for careers sites and we all use our mobiles and tablets for everything. If a candidate can’t find what they want in the right format when they want it, don’t assume they’ll wait until they get back to their desk to seek you out again.

-What about your user experience from a job search perspective – do your candidates want to search for a role on a map so they can see which bus route they could work on? Put yourself in their shoes.

Wrap your process around the candidate

-Think about the level and type of hire and what they want from their candidate experience and the recruitment process. If you’re not sure, ask them.

-As a rule of thumb people want to understand what the process is, how to prepare, who they’ll meet and what the timeframes are. A named contact would be great, too.

Ask for feedback

-There are lots of ways to gather feedback from candidates at different stages of the process, so break the process down into stages and work out how to engage with candidates.

-Candidate’s could ‘rate the page’ on your careers site to grade how useful it’s been to them, recruiters could generate questionnaires at key stages and there are some great automated tools too. And don’t forget to act on the feedback :)


Ali Hackett is a Director at TalentBond, a SaaS business that improves the candidate experience

www.talentbond.com

@talentbondltd

[email protected]

 

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