Even though candidate experience has no official definition, it is often used to refer to how applicants perceive and react to the recruiting, screening, hiring and interviewing processes. It can be measured by candidate feedback (collected through questionnaires), employee retention rates, and employee referrals.
Most employers didn’t pay much attention to the overall experience of their hiring process in the past, as the cost of a poor experience was low. If applicants had a bad experience with an employer the only consequences were that:
they probably wouldn’t apply again,
they might not buy from the company (if they did to begin with),
and/or they might tell close friends and family how they were treated.
But with the help of social media and the internet, candidates now have power to recount their experiences and express their feelings to a massive audience. Worse yet, a hyper-relevant audience: your future candidates. If a candidate is treated poorly, they can write bad reviews about the company on multiple websites.
Also, due to the pervasive nature of social media, candidates’ social circles have grown significantly. Social platforms like Twitter or Facebook enable candidates to reach a great number of people close to them fairly easily. This has the potential to lead to far more damage to the brand than it did before the Internet era.
On the other hand, a good recruitment experience can lead to more and better applicants, resulting in better hires. Employees and candidates will also be more likely to refer qualified candidates (and potentially even customers). Improved recruitment experiences can help lower your hiring costs and time to fill when it comes to open vacancies. It is important that today not only firms choose candidates, the candidates also choose the companies who are compatible with their values and expectation.
Steps you need to improve the candidate experience:
As hrmade, we can design your candidate experience journey for you. In first step; we conduct extensive analysis studies to take pictures of each stage of the candidate experience journey, along with focus group studies and surveys, we identify areas of development in the process. In the second stage, we offer benchmark reports to our customers. In third stage, we listen to the voice of the employees with the design thinking methods and prepare our design in the light of their ideas to make this journey more effective and systematic. After all, we prepare project action plans and follow up for the project.
For more info, keep in touch with us.
