Best Practices for Better Candidate Experience

The hiring process is no longer a one-sided journey for the candidate only, organisations are making a considerable investment in hopes of finding the shining talent that fits perfectly into their culture. Within your recruiting process, the candidate experience acts as a factor, a direct reflection on the company’s brand and culture. It reveals a great deal about how a company nurtures their talent pool and differentiates itself from competitors as candidates’ expectations change.

Read more: What Organisations Need to Know about the Candidate Experience

Improving candidate experience adds significant business value. Your hiring process is your future team members’ first exposure to your brand. Just as applicants try to impress you during an interview, your application and hiring assessments should impress applicants. Ultimately, a proper candidate experience is a brilliant talent management tactic for any organisation; a bad one is an ongoing black eye for people interested in your business as well as your company brand. 

Candidate experience best practices

1. Put yourself in their shoes

The recruitment process should be candidate-centric: Make sure that your candidate fully understands your process, be direct and honest, and more importantly, let the candidates know they are listened to at all times.

Employers should have their virtual profile well-taken care of with detailed information about their requirements and business structure. From the candidate’s point of view, without a complete picture, it’s impossible to fully understand what the job will be like, the company structure or how would they fit into your company culture. With both sides fully understand each other, the candidate journey will be a successful, pleasant experience that attracts high performing and engaging employees in your business.

Read more: Must-Have Qualities of Leading Employers

2. Communicate with the applicants             

71% of candidates said they would share their experiences publicly, regardless of how good or bad. In present’s day, most of the recruiting and job applying procedure is made digitally, there is no excuse for not letting your candidate know they didn’t get the job or at least thanking them for applying.

Having a responsive manner when hiring shows that your company appreciate the candidate’s effort for applying and having the interest in working for you. Even if the candidate didn’t make the cut, companies should follow up with recommendations about what can be improved, while providing positive comments - eventually improve the candidate experience.

Read more: How to avoid the "job applicants ghosting employers" trend

3. Use pre-hire assessments to give candidate feedback

While the main purpose of pre-hire assessments is to predict the candidate’s performance in the workplace, organisations can add value to the candidate experience by providing career management feedback. This helps your candidates to understand their strengths and weaknesses and how to utilise their competence to become successful in career planning.

A detailed, thorough feedback report shows your professionalism and your awareness of the candidate experience. Treating your candidate right is important because even if they didn’t get the job, they just might become your customers in the future. Providing feedback not only improves the candidate experience, it also enhances their engagement and generates valuable referrals for your business.

Read more: Pre-hire assessments: Definition and Factors to consider

4. Ask for feedback from the candidate     

Building an effective hiring process is a challenging task and should be ever-evolving. After the recruitment, ask for feedback from your candidate – including both those you hire and those you don’t. The feedback from your candidate provide long-term help to improving the candidate experience and directly reflect on the company’s brand and culture.

Read more: Companies’ Views on Talent Management (Part 1)

Along with the development flow of Talent Management, candidate experience is a high priority for top HR leaders. A positive candidate experience results in better brand advocacy, more satisfied candidates, reduce hiring drop off rates, quicker time to attract and hire and, ultimately, more engaged employees. By defining clearly what a better candidate experience is worth and exactly how it will generate value for the business, investing in a proper hiring process is crucial in making your entrepreneur brand stand out from others.

To learn more about Candidate Experience and how it can help boost the growth of your business, visit TRG Talent page or request a free demo for Pre-hire assessments today!