Improving Candidate Experience 2023

Candidate experience is how job searchers perceive and respond to an organization’s recruitment including attracting, sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and finally onboarding.

But, how do you know if you are giving your candidates a positive experience? Testing is one great way. Your organization can put this in place itself. Our first article on candidate experience drilled down on word of mouth and gives some easy implementation steps.

A positive candidate experience rests on reducing the job seekers’ perception that their time has been wasted. That includes they have been communicated with clearly, regardless of the outcome. This means that even if the candidate isn’t interviewed for the job, a positive candidate experience is important.

There are actual awards for this, it’s serious stuff! – the CandE Awards. Each year the CandE Awards recognize companies with the highest positive candidate ratings in their benchmark research.

Research by the Talent Board Candidate Experience Awards has four best practices in common:

1. They listen and communicate more frequently
2. They set clear expectations about the recruiting process from attraction to onboarding
3. They measure the candidate’s experience regularly and consistently
4. They are seen by candidates as having a more fair process relative to other organizations

The benefits of candidate experience in Human Resources

Great candidate experience benefits job applicants, and the ROI it has for both corporate and executive recruiters is also invaluable.

Candidate attraction and conversion rates

Some companies have candidates who are attracted to their company before they see a job advertisement based on their brand awareness that already exists. Applications are going to come much more easily to these organizations. Advertising may not even be necessary for these organizations. However, if you aren’t living that dream, improving candidate experience can drastically improve attraction and conversion rates.

Employer brand and increased profitability

Company brands can also be positively impacted. Your applicants are many times, also your potential customers. If an unsuccessful applicant comes away with a good feeling about your brand it can increase overall profitability. This is especially true if you are receiving a high volume of applicants for your open positions.

The challenges of establishing positive candidate experience

Although candidate experience is the top recruiting priority for employers, there are barriers that need to be overcome to improve upon it.

1. Lack of awareness

Candidate experience may have been neglected historically, as not being important enough to spend time analyzing. However this perception is changing with the increasingly competitive post-covid recruiting market, the rise in employer reviews sites such as Glassdoor, and the availability of HR systems to track candidate experience.

2. Volume of open positions

According to SHRM, the average number of open corporate recruiters is between 30 to 40. This workload makes it virtually impossible to offer a quality experience for all candidates.

Without a set of recruiting tech tools to help keep responses organized, corporate and executive recruiters are unable to provide the rate of response and quality communication that job seekers rank as essential to a great candidate experience.

3. expectations vs. processes

According to research, one of the top requests of candidates is to be notified when they haven’t been selected for the role. Not following up not only loses the candidate for the current role but also lowers the chances of the candidate applying to future roles. AI and automatic response funnels have come a long way in this area. Check your settings and you may find there is a simple solution to automatically inform a candidate know when their application has been closed.

Curious about the impact of your candidate experience outcomes. There is even an online Candidate Experience Resentment calculator for you to try. Have some fun testing out your numbers!