Article: Candidate Experience is falling short.

After a fruitful decade in which companies have grown and unemployment has fallen, we find ourselves in a different sort of world to the one that we have become accustomed to. As a huge number of companies batten down the hatches, smarter leaders within these businesses will be keeping their eyes on the horizon.

Recessions always end, and when this one does, companies will begin to grow once more and create an atmosphere where keeping their candidates feeling engaged and personalised throughout the recruitment process will be a priority in order to beat their competition to the best talent.

Monitor Expectations.

For those companies that do monitor and analyse their candidate feedback (or just the successful candidate in most cases), they focus on what the candidate expected from the recruitment experience and did the process match their expectation? Then they simply stop there. A candidate will have a so much more information to offer. The number of factors making up their expectations on any given recruitment experience will be influenced by prior experiences, competitor processes, their peers, personal experiences and other factors. It’s a really rich source of data for you. If you can get the data out of them…

Research from Gartner, however, shows that only a fifth of candidates in 2019 were candid around their true expectations. Worryingly, those companies that received honest candidate expectations felt they would struggle to implement this into their recruitment process. So there’s a clear divide between what can be implemented and the lack of transparency coming from the candidates. What’s the incentive for their candor or transparency?

As candidate experience remains at the forefront of recruiting strategies moving forward, we believe that a three part process is key to developing your best possible candidate experience and start seeing your offer conversion rates and quality of hire metrics soar.

Manage the expectations, honestly.

As an organisation, simply be open a clear about what sort of experience you can actually deliver within your recruitment process. These will change as available resources and priorities change, of course, so the process of managing your candidates expectations throughout the process is vital, not just at the start, and will be key for your engagement and overall candidate satisfaction/NPS levels.

Experience Blueprints.

Research, analyze, understand, deploy. This is the model we promote when it comes to advancing your candidate experience based on real life data that is specific to your candidates and your organisation. It is the best way to ensure an honest candidate experience. Your new joiners don’t want to turn up on day one and find a completely different employee experience waiting for them from their candidate experience.

What works well for most of our clients is the creation of workshops for your new joiners, one a quarter for example, where you create a safe environment for them to discuss their experiences throughout the recruitment process. What worked for them? What didn’t? How did it compare to other processes they were in? Analyze all this specific data and push it towards the blueprint for the delivery of a strong candidate experience for your future joiners. This will allow you anticipate priorities that are reflected in your process ahead of time. It’s also great for employee engagement. They feel involved in building a better experience for future joiners.

Candidate Persona-lisation.

Most organisations recognise the pitfalls of a one-size-fits-all approach to your recruitment process. And whilst there needs to be an element of consistency, there also needs to be an obvious customization to suit the candidate persona. Having a coffee with the team final interview might work well for a sales person, but not so well with an introvert data architect who intends to work remotely.

According to Gartner, firms have found that they get much better results in terms of quality of hire when they formulate a ‘bespoke to persona’ approach to recruitment. You can, of course, still ensure there is one fundamental recruitment process, that is simply tweaked towards whichever candidate persona is being engaged.

It is through working with your line managers and the new joiners, that In-House recruitment teams can soon develop these tweaked recruitment processes, which are fundamentally the same, but littered with personalisation towards different candidate personas. This then allows you to offer a much more personal recruitment process, which steers away from a one-size-fits-all approach, which is outdated.

Finally.

At a recent DBR virtual meet up, one of the main take away points about the management of recruitment data (which includes NPS / survey results geared towards developing the candidate experience), is that there is an ugly habit in the industry where data is molded to reflect more positive results.

Don’t. Don’t be afraid of negative feedback or results. It gives you a real reflection on where you are vs where you want to be so although reporting negative scores or feedback is not enjoyable, your candidate experience relies on honest feedback in order for you to build your best possible candidate experience.