Best-in-class organizations are 32% more likely to use digital media tools to hire and engage with prospective candidates. They use data, social media and mobile to deliver the best employee experience. The use of technology has spurred a number of questions including "Are companies hiring the right people in a right way? Are they using the right tools to hire? Are candidates aligned with company’s culture? How can companies keep employees engaged for a longer period of time? And how can the effectiveness of processes be improved to save cost?"

Here are a few tips to ensure that you have a seamless experience in hiring:

1. Go Social: There is an untapped source of data on social media. And job seekers are actively finding their jobs through the social networking sites. The need is to reach beyond the job-boards and put less-manual sourcing strain on your recruiters.   Today, your candidates are on social media, that is the marketplace for sourcing. 

2. Referral programs:  Research suggests that 40% of the successful hires come from employee referrals; they are hired faster, and 47% referrals stay around for more than three years. Invest in referral program as costs will come down, and the quality of the hire would increase. It will also lead to better camaraderie and enhanced alignment of people with the organizational culture.   Leverage your employee network to bring in suitable candidates into the organization. 

3. Right branding on the career page: Candidates invariably visit the career site, and they see if their expectations and career objectives are aligned with what the company has to offer. So focus on the right branding on your career page so that it entices people to join your organization. Make your page attractive and add videos which talk about careers and success as this is the kind of information sought by candidates.   Candidates have their own personal objectives and goals and very often chose companies whose values are also aligned with their own. 

Going social as part of your overarching strategy can bring manifold benefits to your organization

4. Right Candidate experience

Make application process easy: Application processes that are complicated and repetitive can repulse candidates. There are plenty of tools available through which one can simplify the application process and make it easy and accessible. Using analytics, it is possible to check the metrics of conversion, ie, number of people who visited your career page vs. how many converted to applicants. 

Mobile-optimised process: Mobile phones are most commonly used for applications.  It is therefore imperative that the application process through mobile is extremely intuitive and user-friendly.  Focus on design and convenience and make the hiring process mobile optimised.

Seamless process: The entire process of candidate shortlisting and the various steps in recruitment leading to the offer should provide a good candidate experience.  Candidates are brand ambassadors of your organization, and they can make or mar your brand image.  A bad candidate experience can prove to be costly. Therefore, it makes sense to enhance and personalize the candidate experience so that they may disseminate the correct information about the organization. Few activities can be undertaken to enhance the experience like:

 •    Candidate experience mapping: Understanding how candidates feel when they enter organization and what are the things which they want in the organization and what people have to do to make them feel better.

•    Candidate-centered program: Chalk out programs by keeping candidate at the center of the entire exercise.

•    In-depth interview and feedback to hone candidate skills: It is a good practice to give reason/feedback to the candidates, even if they are not selected.

5. Nurture your relationships: It is advisable to create a community of prospective candidates and engage with them regularly by sending them relevant emailers and posts.

Once a candidate is hired, there are several metrics you can use to measure the efficiency of the process and also check the quality of the hires like manager’s account of employees’ performance, productivity and their compatibility with culture. Furthermore, there are tools and analytics available which can configure pre-decided parameters to differentiate between good, average and bad quality hire. Integrate intelligent technology tools to set you up for success.

6. Onboarding experience:  Once the candidate becomes an employee, it is critical to provide a fantastic onboarding experience so that the time to productivity is reduced considerably.   Providing a good orientation program, making it a team activity and assigning of mentors will accelerate the candidate’s onboarding process.  It has been observed that employees who haven’t been on-boarded well tend to attrite in the first six months.  An effective onboarding tool can be the first step to providing a welcome experience to employees.

(This article is curated by Dr. Arunima Srivastava based on a webinar on this same topic)