What to do to make recruitment friendly?
Changes in the labor market have made it increasingly difficult to recruit qualified employees. At the same time, due to the development of technology, candidates more and more often share their opinions about employers on the Internet and willingly check the company’s ratings before applying for the job offers. Therefore, activities related to creating the company’s image and caring for positive experiences of potential employees already at the stage of the recruitment process become very important.
What is Candidate Experience?
Candidate Experience is the sum of the candidate’s experiences that contribute to forming an opinion about the company. Candidate experience relates to the entire recruitment process. We build positive impressions of the candidate not only during the recruitment interview but at every point of contact between the candidate and our brand. It is worth taking care of them both before, during and after submitting the application, e.g. already at the stage of constructing a recruitment advertisement, verifying competencies and providing feedback after the end of the entire process.
What does the Candidate Experience look like in Poland?
Candidate experience is gaining popularity. According to the Candidate Experience in Poland 2021 Report, more and more companies in the country notice the need to build positive experiences for candidates. Unfortunately, still, only 41% of candidates believe that potential employers care about their relations with them.
Candidates’ expectations
In the study, we can notice a large discrepancy between the perspective of employers and potential employees. Employers declare that in recruitment processes they use practices that positively affect the candidate experience, such as:
- detailed presentation of working conditions
- contact with the candidate
- the opportunity to meet the supervisor during the recruitment process
- short and simple recruitment process
At the same time, a small percentage of candidates encountered such practices on the market. For specialists participating in the survey, the most important in the recruitment process is a broader and more reliable presentation of working conditions (82%). However, only 32% of them believe that they have encountered such a practice.
78% of specialists also indicate the need to provide information on the amount of remuneration in the job advertisement, and only 29% received such information.
More than half of the respondents occupying specialist positions expect constant contact with the recruiter. 74% would like to receive information about the reasons for not qualifying for further stages of the recruitment process, and 63% expect information about the end of recruitment. Only a handful of candidates have met with this behavior from the company.
Candidates participating in the study also noted the simple and short recruitment process. However, only over 30% have positive experiences in this area.
Feedback from the recruiter
Changing jobs is one of the most demanding and stressful moments in everyone’s life. Therefore, it is not surprising that most candidates want to know the answers to the questions that bother them during the recruitment process and after its completion. Unfortunately, according to the report, only 12% of the surveyed employers provide information about the reasons for rejection to all candidates who apply for a given job. Most often, feedback is given only to selected people.
Even when the recruiter gives feedback, the content rarely meets the expectations of the audience. Candidates would like to find out how they were assessed, not only in terms of their competencies and experience (84%), but also the manager’s feelings (54%) and their fit with the organization (54%). Meanwhile, only a handful of employers raise these issues in a feedback interview.
Feedback from the candidate
Interestingly, almost 80% of the surveyed specialists declare that they would like to share their opinion on the recruitment in which they participated. Unfortunately, according to the survey, only 21% of employers ask about it.
This is a big mistake because in this way employers deprive themselves of a great opportunity to conduct a candidate experience survey, which could significantly improve the satisfaction of candidates and the company’s image.
The most common mistakes in Candidate Experience
There is still a lot to change in the subject of candidate experience. This is indicated not only by the data presented in the previously discussed report, but also by the results of the study Candidates’ experiences in IT in 2020 conducted by No Fluff Jobs. The respondents indicate there, first of all, the lack of communication adjusted to the level of their professional experience and detailed information on remuneration and development opportunities, as well as ignorance of the job specifications, or even the leader’s lack of concentration during the meeting.
Employers often make mistakes already at the stage of planning activities related to candidate experience. What pitfalls should we be careful about?
The belief that only the recruiter can influence Candidate Experience
During the recruitment process, the candidate meets with various people from the company. We build candidates’ experiences in the very first moments of their contact with the brand, e.g. in the recruitment announcement or a poster with information about the employer. All these materials should be attractive and consistent with each other. Even if they are created by different teams. During the recruitment meeting, the candidate can get to know various employees, e.g. a potential manager or team members. Each of them is responsible for creating a positive image of the company. Therefore, it is very important to constantly care for the organizational culture in which we promote the company’s values and the need to care for the image and experience of candidates.
Selective Candidate Experience
Feedback is most often provided only to those candidates who have completed most of the recruitment process. However, we forget about the candidates whose application was rejected at the stage of CV analysis. Remember that all candidates, especially those who are dissatisfied, form their opinions about the company, which they can later share with others. And candidates who have not successfully passed the current selection process may turn out to be excellent employees in another job for which they will apply in the future. Therefore, it is worth keeping in touch with them and leaving a good impression.
Bad timing of activities
Recruiters most often blame the lack of time for not being able to have contact with each candidate. It is worth knowing that most ATS systems allow you to set reminders, and even send automatic messages to the candidate, e.g. after moving his application to another folder or completing the recruitment. Thanks to this, without the excessive involvement of the recruiter, the candidate will receive information that their CV is waiting for verification by the department manager or that they have been qualified for the next stage of the process.
Activities not adjusted to the target group
Candidates have different expectations and needs. Therefore, before we move on to designing candidate experience activities, it is worth conducting an opinion poll. We will learn from them what aspects our target group pays attention to. During the research, we can also check what the candidates are satisfied within our recruitment process and what aspects they are dissatisfied with.
How to conduct a Candidate Experience study
NPS survey
One of the simplest and most universal satisfaction measurement tools is the NPS survey. It will work when we want to take the shortest possible time for candidates and at the same time obtain clear information about the evaluation of our company. In this survey, each respondent only answers two questions. The first question allows you to assess their level of satisfaction with the service on a scale from 1 to 10. In this case, you can ask, for example, about the recruitment process in general. The second question clarifies the answer. Importantly, the second question in the NPS survey differs depending on the candidates’ answers to the first question.
In-depth survey
If we want to collect more detailed data on candidate satisfaction, we can conduct longer surveys, e.g. by phone, e-mail or as part of an online questionnaire. In the survey, we can ask candidates to rate each of the recruitment stages on the scale or ask a few open-ended questions asking for a suggestion what we can improve to make the process more candidate-friendly.
Do you want to work with a recruitment agency that cares about a positive Candidate Experience? Contact us! 🙂