Your Candidate Experience Management Says a Lot About Your Brand

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It would be superb for your recruitment agency to have former hires be the ones to speak praises about how their application experience was handled. Think about what this would do to your firm’s brand online reputation. As other companies would bask in the glory of their customers doing the marketing for them, so do you when candidates share stories of how well you took care of them. The key for them to be ambassadors of your staffing firm? Proper candidate experience management. 

It’s an entirely different battlefield for you, though, compared to experiencing a company’s product or service. While many negative customer reviews are written after the experience, your recruitment agency is providing an entire process; the applicant may drop out in the middle and rant about it online. That’s why your staffing agency must perform proper candidate experience management in all aspects of the process, from potential hires reading the job post to receiving the job offer. Here are a few suggestions on how to create a better experience management strategy across the entire hiring process. 

Candidate experience management starts with the job post. 

You haven’t met your potential hires yet, but through the job post, they’ve had their first impression of the staffing firm. How the post appears to them, like how readable it is and how much info they can make use of, may actually decide if they’ll apply or not. A bombardment of information would turn an applicant away and make them turn the page to the next job post. To streamline your job posts, consider these steps: 

1. Keep the job posts jargon-free. 

While more advanced applicants may understand terminologies, not including such words would cast a wider net on the hiring pool. Also, a job post that appears too technical might indicate that the position is laden with difficult tasks. 

2. Aim for a succinct writeup. 

Do your best to include all the needed information in the least number of words possible. You may want to tone down on elaborating on the company profile because introducing the company further may be done during the interview. Details that have to be listed, like job responsibilities and needed qualifications, may be limited to up to five bullet points. Also, have your staff read the writeups and ask if all the needed info can be understood in a matter of minutes. 

3. Improve the job posts’ accessibility. 

It will improve brand reputation if job hunters can apply using different platforms, from your agency’s website and mobile app to various social media handles. Also, make sure your job posts are accessible and read well using different gadgets. It gives a great impression to potential hires if they can send their resumes to you through their phones, right then and there, while browsing for job openings. A frictionless digital application process will surely score you points for your recruitment brand. 

Engage your applicants as they go through the hiring process. 

It’s highly possible that an applicant will drop out of the hiring process because they felt they are not attended to. Remember that these are professionals who are in a race to get employed. If they feel that their time is not valued, they’ll opt out in a snap. Therefore, maintaining your connection with them through the hiring process is a good effort toward better candidate experience management.

Acknowledge their application.

Once your recruitment firm has received a potential hire’s resume, send them a message as acknowledgment. While it’s impossible to write a different thank you email per applicant, make sure to send them using a personal email account. 

Go beyond informing them of the next step.

While it’s imperative to inform candidates of what will happen next, some tips on what and what not to do in the upcoming stage of the process would be appreciated. It gives potential hires an impression that you want them to get the job. 

Also, a clear time frame in between recruitment steps helps set expectations. As mentioned, a job hunter’s time is too valuable to be wasted on waiting for results. Telling them how long they should wait for a response will help the applicant move on and not be stuck in hiring limbo. 

Prep them well for interviews.

This is probably the tensest part of the hiring process but see to it that helping in calming your applicant’s nerves is part of candidate experience management. Give details such as who will interview them, how long will it be, and what could be the nature of the questions. Be sure to be clear with logistics, too (for face-to-face interviews). Details on the address/floor number, directions, and even parking will rid the interviewee of trouble going to the venue. 

Also, do your best to give the applicant results right after the interview. Ridding them of the wait time will give the recruitment agency a great impression at the last stage of the process, which the applicants will remember more as it’s the most recent. 

Keep communication lines open.

Listening is also a valuable means to keep your potential hires engaged. While social media chat functions and email addresses are viable means for applicants to ask questions, an actual phone number is opted for by more job hunters because they have an actual person to talk to. 

Feedback is the best way to gauge the effectiveness of your candidate experience management.

May it be at the end of a successful hiring process or telling the applicant you’re going in a different direction, ask for a review. The experience may either be triumphant or harrowing, but the truth of the matter is, most applicants are willing to share their experience. So, rather than letting them echo their experience on the internet, why not devise means for you to ask for reviews at the soonest? 

This is where Great Recruiters comes in. Our highly sophisticated experience management platform can help in requesting and gathering concurrent feedback about the hiring process. Our software also has data visualization that is easy to understand and utilize. With our 48-hour onboarding process, your staffing firm will be identifying and rectifying recruitment issues in no time, allowing future applicants to experience a better process right away and remember your fuss-free recruitment brand.

If you value candidate experience management and would love to hear from your potential hires fast, book a demo with us now.