How to design the right candidate experience

The focus on candidate experience has grown over the years. And there is explicit effort to build recruitment practices that are tuned to bring a positive candidate experience. This shift hasn’t come randomly. Studies across the globe have shown that keeping a tab of candidate experience is vital to attract and hire the right talent.

The advent of technology has necessitated that the processes and approaches need to blend intuition and objectively proven practices. But as the ways to reach prospective candidates multiply, so do strategies to reach out to candidates. HR professionals need to ensure a seamless process focusing on candidate experience. This means paying close attention at each and every stage of recruitment. 

1. Listen to your candidates

Often, the first stage of enhancing the candidate experience is to listen to candidates and take their feedback. Collating data on the hiring phase not only helps HR professionals improve their recruiting process but also helps them build a fruitful relationship with the candidates.

Keeping in touch with candidates who don’t get through the selection process helps in not just creating a necessary benchmark. But it also reflects on  the employer’s brand and plays an overall role in enhancing the candidate experience. 

2. Design effective communication strategies

Although listening to your candidates during the hiring process is an important part of candidate experience, it’s equally important to know what and how to communicate with prospective employees. According to one Candidate Behaviour study only 14 percent of job seekers consider employers to be responsive. With social media and other digital platforms, recruiters have more opportunities to ensure that they can effectively reach out to candidates. 

According to a Randstad report over 97 percent of senior candidates in a company want recruiters to employ a highly personalized approach when it comes to passive hiring. While one can easily reach larger groups of candidates, knowing what message to put forward is key building effective candidate experience. For this, an understanding of candidate preferences and the scope of various channels, both digital and offline need to be assessed. 

3. Focus on addressing negative experiences

A key component of improving candidate experience is to reduce the possibility of negative experiences during the hiring process. Candidates are also more likely to voice their complaints using social media owing to bad experience. Making the hiring process less cumbersome, communicating clearly and efficiently, engaging candidates throughout the hiring process, and innovating hiring strategies can all reduce the chances of candidates having a bad hiring experience.  

4. Make technology your ally

Embedding technologies like AI, predictive analytics, digitalization, automation into the hiring process can mitigate pain points. But like modern-day solutions, such technologies aren’t the end to creating a robust candidate experience. It still depends on how effectively recruiters are able to leverage them.

To do so, it is important to use technology to bridge the gap. A recent study found that although 99 percent of the respondents had invested in an applicant tracking system and another recruitment tech like assessment systems and reference-checking systems, many note that the human touch remains the most important in ensuring successful hiring. This is pivotal for building a good candidate experience. For example, SumTotal Systems Recruiting enables recruiters to redesign their recruitment to focus on candidate experience by the use of the latest technology tools. It provides features like smartphone-optimized career sites which apply capability, candidate matching, automated and intelligent interview tools with an end-to-end, easy-to-use user experience forapplicants and  recruiters.