How to Build an Impactful Experience Management Strategy

Candidate experience used to be the talk-of-the-town for staffing agencies in recent years. It gained attention with its newfound relevance in building a recruitment process that’s a win-win for candidates, the agency, and their clients. 

Today, candidate experience management is regarded as the bare minimum for recruitment operations. But many in the staffing industry still struggle to make ends meet in coming up with a viable candidate experience management strategy. You might be one of the companies whose recruiting team always asks, “How can I improve my candidate’s experience?” 

We’ve got you covered. Here are some tips that can be your initial steps in building an effective experience management strategy, which considers what makes a great candidate experience and helps in your firm’s online reputation management.

Start with empathy.

You might have your share of complaints already from past candidates who did not enjoy specific aspects of your recruitment process. They may have voiced out their opinions through online reviews, probably laden with deep emotions. This is where empathy steps in.

Empathy is the ability to go beyond acknowledging another person’s feelings. Instead, there is an actual effort to understand and even try to feel these emotions. Many companies are using empathy as a technique to understand their customers’ needs, and perhaps, your staffing agency might benefit from it too. After all, your potential hires are your customers.

It’s a promising idea to inculcate the concept of empathy within your recruitment team right before creating or introducing an experience management strategy. Start by making the team understand the need to put themselves in the shoes of their potential hires. Job hunting can be a stressful endeavor, and the team should do their best so that the candidates are guided towards a positive and impactful experience in each step. Imagine going into the experience management strategy without empathy in the picture. Potential hires may just be treated as numbers to meet, and this lack of sensitivity to their experience may lead to negative feedback.

Consider design thinking in every step of the process.

Now that a guiding principle like empathy has united the team into one vision, you can move on to the specifics of experience management strategy. While identifying each step of the recruitment process is a given, there is nothing wrong with aiming for efficiency and timeliness in planning each step. However, you might want to put design thinking into the mix, which has worked for many companies.

Simply put, design thinking is a mindset for solving problems that take the user into perspective above anything else.¹ In consumerism, design thinking finds its way into solutions that help customers make their purchase a convenient, enjoyable, and impactful experience. These experiences then turn into good reviews, boosting the brand’s reputation.

Design thinking can work wonders for your recruitment firm by making the recruitment process centered on potential hires. Thinking of their welfare will result in making the job application process smooth and even memorable. Here are some small steps you can take to incorporate design thinking into your experience management strategy:

• Open communication lines. Make your recruitment firm reachable for questions and inquiries through any device or medium. Ensure that candidates can ask questions in varied ways, from online chat support to landline phones. Your team should also be mindful of timeliness in replying to questions, as your potential hires will want answers right away.

• Provide options on how to apply. Is your firm’s website reachable both for computers or handheld devices? Is there a way for job hunters to send their CVs while on the go? Perhaps, they’re simply browsing on their phone, saw you have an opening, and they would want to try it out. Can they send their LinkedIn account instead and send a detailed resume later on? Think of ways for applicants to secure a spot on the application queue right then and there.

• Go full-on digital but with contingencies. Interviews through conferencing apps and online quiz tools for employment testing are here to stay way after the pandemic. By this time, your staffing agency should have adapted to the reality of remote working, and your recruitment process must have followed suit. But just as technology can still fail, lay down contingent plans for every aspect of the recruitment process.

A physical office is still imperative to process applicants who would rather meet your team in person. Assign personnel who can work in this office and use it as a hub for technological contingencies. These may include interviewing applicants in person or contacting potential hires through phone calls. In a nutshell, get into a design thinking state of mind to give potential hires numerous options for going through the recruitment process.

Involve everyone in the experience management strategy.

Building your clients’ workforce may be the sole responsibility of your recruitment team, but in reality, a staffing agency won’t run on the recruiters’ efforts alone. There are various teams involved, such as marketing, IT, among others. It doesn’t hurt to ask these individuals who might have many ideas to incorporate into your experience management strategy. After all, working together in one staffing agency would make better sense if everyone joined in the staffing organization’s most important goal.

Gather different leaders from your firm’s departments and present to them your experience management strategy. Chances are they have resources or ideas they can share to make the applicant’s journey a smooth and memorable one. For example, IT professionals can suggest applications or automated systems that can make data collection almost instantaneous. Your colleagues at the marketing department may have tips on how to write job descriptions and where to post them to reach more job hunters. Of course, you don’t have to use all of these ideas. What’s important is that you consider different points of view in enriching the candidate experience.

Listen to your candidates.

The best way to gather ideas on how to improve your potential hires’ journey? Allow them to speak. There is no better judge of your firm’s experience management strategy than the people who are at its receiving end. And before they talk about it elsewhere, go ahead and be the first to ask, “How was it?” Chances are, they’ll be willing enough to give a word or two, be it a harsh complaint or words of praise.

With many job seekers coming in and out of your firm, it would be tedious to ask them one by one. Great Recruiter’s reputation management software is your go-to tool for automating feedback requests and collating reviews. This sophisticated platform solely created for recruitment firms can schedule review requests and follow-ups. Additionally, the platform’s data visualizations will allow your staffing firm’s leaders to identify each recruitment step and what needs to be done for improvement. And when you come across positive reviews, you can post them right away on your agency’s website or social media accounts to attract clients and boost your recruiter brand.

Remember: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. So let Great Recruiters give you the tools for measurement to make your experience management strategy a cut above the rest. Book a demo now.