Your candidates form an impression of your business long before receiving an offer letter. Even some of the earliest communications you have with candidates can influence how they feel about your organization.
The moral of the story: How you treat potential hires during the hiring process matters.
In fact, a positive candidate experience makes it 38% more likely that top talent will accept your job offer.
On the flip side, a negative candidate experience can cause as many as half of candidates to cease all engagement with the business ever again!
In light of the importance of offering a positive candidate journey, here’s a simple plan to help you achieve precisely that.
Let's dive in!
Starting Off on the Right Foot
The first candidate journey touchpoint occurs when the candidate becomes aware of your job opening. This can happen through social media, your careers website, an online job board, etc.
At this stage, it’s vital to present a clear job description, so that candidate expectations of the role align with reality. Needless to say, this includes providing an accurate impression of the job responsibilities involved. However, it's also worth going a step further and conveying your company culture. So, be sure to write your copy in the voice of your employer brand. You could even include a video capturing a 'day in the life' of someone working for the company.
Salary is also crucial for making an impact at this stage. Unfortunately, many companies don’t display wages and compensation packages in their job postings, despite 81.6% of job seekers saying salary is the most crucial part of a job ad. This makes it all the more important to ensure you're offering a competitive salary. Fortunately, identifying fair and competitive compensation isn’t as hard as you might think. Using software like LaborIQ makes it easy to determine competitive pay for a specific job role based on current job demand, location and industry trends.
Map Your Journey
The best recruiting teams clearly communicate to candidates during each stage so that they’re clear on what to expect. Don’t underestimate the importance of this - 80% of candidates are discouraged from applying to other roles with a company if they don’t receive any notification about their application status.
Again, technology plays a significant role in this process. AI software can automatically notify hiring staff and candidates when a change in recruitment funnel status occurs. It can also provide insights into which stage(s) candidates drop off and request feedback from candidates at the end of their journey. Then, with this information in- hand, you can identify where there’s room for improvement and continue to optimize your candidate journey.
Using Technology to Streamline the Candidate Journey
Glassdoor reports that 58% of users look for jobs on their phones, many of whom also apply for jobs using a mobile device. As a result, it's wise for HR teams to invest in quick, mobile-friendly technology to help streamline the job application process. At this point, it’s also worth noting that one in five candidates won’t complete an application that takes more than 20 minutes to complete. As such, accellerating applications with simpler, more intuitive forms, is a must.
That said, there are plenty of other ways technology can help streamline the candidate journey. For example, automatically completing basic candidate information from their resumes so that candidates can avoid the monotony of entering the same details more than once is a huge plus.
HR teams could also consider utilizing pre-employment assessments to determine whether a candidate is a good fit. Then, based on these test results, the software filters out those who are the best fit before the interview stage. Accordingly, both candidates and hiring managers get faster answers.
Find the Right Solutions to Sustain a Quality Candidate Journey
The key to planning and sustaining an incredible candidate journey is to map out your touchpoints and involve everyone affected by the hiring decision. Remember, using the right software is vital for ensuring the best possible candidate experience. Namely, by setting realistic expectations from the get-go regarding the nature of the role and compensation. Needless to say, a competitive salary goes a long way in motivating candidates to engage with the application process. You can have confidence that you’re offering exactly that with LaborIQ.
