Is Your Candidate Experience up to Par? Ask Yourself These 5 Questions:

February 12, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

According to CareerBuilder, a good number of candidates see the candidate experience as an indicator of how much a company values its people. Every contact with candidates throughout the recruitment process is a chance for them to learn more about your company. Considering how important these interactions are, it is important that your company positions and portrays itself accurately.

Applicants generally hope to validate their preconceived perception about your company using the candidate experience. Since the recruiting process provides a glimpse into the daily life of the organization they may soon be joining it is important that you ensure that your candidate experience is up to par with the needs of the job seekers. Here are 5 important questions you can use to evaluate this.

How Good Are Your Job Descriptions?

Your job description is most times the first contact a candidate has with you. As yourself this, what do candidates see when they open the job listings on your website. Are they seeing generic posts which can be filled by just anyone on the street or they get a clear picture of the specific requirements of every position including a comprehensive list of the goals and responsibilities they will be required to fulfill?

If you want to make a good first impression then your job description is one of the important places to look at. Try to make sure it answers every question the candidate might have about a position and your organization including the vision and mission of your company, the structure, and culture of your organization as well as the benefits packages of the position.

Does Your Candidate Experience Reflect Your Culture As a Company?

The recruitment process should be aimed at giving candidates a taste of the culture within your organization. Your candidate experience should be based on the values of your internal culture. For example, if your company is team focused, ask candidates to demonstrate how well they can perform in a team or invite them to meet multiple team members within your company to demonstrate how you emphasize on teamwork.

Do You Have A Mobile-Friendly Recruiting Process?

These days everyone is on their phone and as a modern company, it is important that you keep up with the trends. The bulk of traffic to your recruitment pages is from mobile devices which means for convenience your career site should be mobile-friendly.

How Great Is Your Follow-Up?

While it is true that breaking a bad new isn’t easy on anyone, you owe it to the candidates to inform them about their status in the recruitment process. It also helps your company’s reputation as well. Let the promising candidates know that they did well even if you will not be able to employ them. Also, try to let the declined candidates why they didn’t get the position and what they could have done better to improve their chances the next time. This way you maintain a good reputation with the candidates and increase the chances of them applying for future positions in your company

What Do The Candidates Have To Say About You?

Asking the people that have gone through it to evaluate it is one way to get a picture of how great your candidate experience was. Ask your new hires to give feedback about the recruitment process. This will give you an idea on which part of the candidate experience you need to change or improve upon.

Not everything that works great for the company is great for the candidates. These questions will help you if you are thinking of adjusting and improving your candidate experience in 2019

Employer

Why Candidate Engagement Matters in Recruiting

January 22, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

Employee engagement is one of those often talked about but rarely understood concepts. We all know that a fulfilled employee is more productive, but in order to attract and retain top talents, companies need to engage employees in the long run.

To realize how important the candidates’ engagement is you’ll have look at your recruitment and selection processes from the candidate’s perspective and change things accordingly. Some of the most common problems we find embedded in each process are:

The application form, candidates find on your website is too long and too complicated.
There is no confirmation email that a human being has seen that a new candidate filled the application form
The recruitment and selection process has too many steps and/or is too long or worse no expectation is set on this.
The candidate is unable to contact a recruiter for no contact info are available.
No notice is given when the position is filled/closed or just a standard automatic mail is received weeks after the job was given to someone else.

Communication is key and by simply addressing some of the basics above and further scrutinizing your process most will understand if another more qualified candidate has been placed in the role or recognize if the organization is no longer hiring. Be clear and notify candidates if passed over or not, answer promptly to all candidates’ questions/emails, explain the timeline of the selection process. Also, ensure you offer feedback to all candidates after each step including after interviews or tests and questionnaires applied.

The improvements shouldn’t stop here make sure to survey the candidates and the newly hired employees by asking them for feedback on what they like or didn’t like about your application process and change things accordingly.

Candidates will always prefer the human touch but this doesn’t mean automation is obsolete, on the contrary. Use recruiting technology or even the trendier Artificial Intelligence (AI) for speed, to automate repetitive tasks, such as screening, use chatbots to answer questions that potential applicants have about posted job offers, use AI to generate insights that you as an HR professional wouldn’t think of by yourself, for example. Thus, recruiters will have more time for tasks that really add value such as network-building and communication. AI is clearly the future as discussed by LinkedIn and other but is now only coming to the fore and gaining acceptance because the experience is more human-like. However, AI is only as good as the logic you invest in it and technology will only execute what you’ve told it to automate so don’t skimp on the investment of time in engineering your process for a successful candidate experience all around.

Take time to understand how these new trends match with your current hiring process and you will be able to add extra more valuable tasks to your “to do list” for improving the candidates’ experience and engagement but also for attracting and hiring top candidates from the marketplace.

With all this info at hand is time to act, so be critical when scrutinizing your hiring process and improve it using candidates feedback, common sense and of course the 80-20 rule (Pareto distribution). Results will show but you need patience for this is not an overnight transformation. Analyse, change, measure again and change again and don’t forget that recruiting is changing fast and so should your ways of doing it.

Employer

Candidate Engagement Latest Trends

January 10, 2019 Comments Off Roxana read

Recruitment landscape has changed forever, Baby Boomers are retiring and Gen X is no longer forming the majority of the workforce. Almost every qualified person is already having a job and not actively looking for a new one. The new generations, Millennials and Generation Z require a lot more from an employer, even from the recruitment stage. If we go even further with the labor market analysis and the changes triggered to the recruiting and selection process here are some of the major trends:

The talent shortage is getting worth;
Candidates are having now the power, they pick the company they like not the other way around;
The Millennials and Gen Z have different expectations on what they look for in a company, and they are the majority of the workforce. They also change jobs more often than the other generations. Note that employees ages 20-34 change jobs as an average at every 2.8 years while employees ages 35-44 change jobs every 4.9 years and employees ages 45-54 change jobs only every 7.9 years. This means that retention is the other side of recruitment and companies should put more effort in increasing retention.
Job shopping is now commonplace, so things like your employer brand and career page from your website are more important now than a year ago.
Social media is the new trendy recruitment channel that can increase your pool of candidates but your competition can also tap into this resource.
Flexible hiring strategies are available both for the candidates and for the employer.
Recruitment speed is more important than ever, not just as a quantitative indicator, the old days to fill, but as a must in attracting top candidates. If you are not fast enough your competition will get the top runners.
You cannot consider any more that the recruitment is finished when the offer is signed. Because the candidates are job shopping, other, more attractive offers may show in no time modifying the candidate’s decision.

With all these changes what should a company do to win the war for talent: the new buzzwords are candidate experience and candidate engagement? HR should learn marketing techniques related to customer experience and transpose them in the recruiting and selection process to enhance the candidates’ experience. They also have to learn that employees’ engagement is starting from the candidate phase so this stage should be included in the overall engagement strategy.

This candidate-centric recruiting model requires engaging candidates at the right moment, in the right way, and is looking at every single stage of the overall candidate journey, starting from the moment a candidate becomes aware of your employer brand (“first look”), let’s say by looking at your website at the career page and extending flawlessly and seamlessly into employee engagement once they are on hired and the induction and onboarding process is starting (“first day”).

A new term is emerging regarding how to treat rejected candidates: we should Rejobify them. You may wonder if this is not too farfetched to think about the rejected candidates’ experience and to invest time and not only in their experience.