People prefer working for companies that give them a positive hiring experience, and enthusiastic candidates make productive employees. Starting from their interaction with your job description, candidates begin to form opinions about your company, and these views influence their future at your organization.
With this in mind, you need to present a great reputation and take strategic steps to improve candidate experience throughout the hiring process. Join us as we discuss the importance of candidate experience in your organization and practical steps you can take to enhance your applicants’ hiring journey.
Why is it important to get candidate experience right?
Every candidate’s experience matters because even one applicant’s opinion can impact your brand’s image, quality of hire, and employee engagement. Below, we’ll see why you should get candidate experience right and what makes it important.
1. Stronger company reputation
Most candidates share their job application experiences with either their loved ones or the general internet. As such, negative reviews can leave your company’s brand with a poor public image, reducing your chances of attracting quality employees and engagement. On the other hand, when they share the positive candidate experience they enjoyed, they give your brand good publicity, which generates interest and facilitates company growth.
2. Higher quality of hires
Good candidate experiences improve public image and interest in your brand, which in turn increases the quality of responses to your job postings. Highly skilled individuals always want to work for top-notch organizations, and a good image encourages them to apply to your company.
Moreover, a good candidate experience motivates applicants to recommend your company and accept your job offer if hired or apply again if they’re not. With a stream of consistently solid applications, you’re more likely to get skilled, competent employees.
3. Increased employee engagement
An amazing candidate experience begins with your applicants’ engagement with your job posting and continues right up to the onboarding stage. The more valued they feel before they’re officially part of your team, the more energy and productivity they’re likely to show in their jobs when hired. In contrast, when candidates feel a company’s disinterest in their hiring experience, they’re likely to respond with similar indifference, creating unmotivated employees.
4. Indication of company culture
The way an organization treats candidates is an indication of its general values and ethics, and it tells the applicants what to expect when working in that environment. A company that pays little mind to candidates during the hiring process and offers no communication most likely has an unfriendly work atmosphere.
But, when a company ensures positive candidate experiences, it indicates a culture that values every employee, thus providing a sense of belonging and inspiring loyalty.
The impact of candidate experience on your business
When done right, candidate experience can significantly improve your organization’s output and work culture. Here are five ways a positive candidate experience impacts and changes your business.
1. Higher sales and profit
A 2019 Talentegy report stated that 34.39% of candidates with poor experiences were negatively influenced and unlikely to purchase the company’s products, while 19.66% were very unlikely to. A good candidate experience endears applicants to your brand, and they could end up doing business with you or even referring you to someone else.
Whether they’re hired or not, as long as they’re treated right, candidates can add to your client base, thus boosting your potential for sales and profit.
2. Strong brand identity
Candidate experience is one of the factors that determines your brand’s identity, as it’s usually a measure of your company’s level of appreciation and respect for people. While it may not appear obvious, candidates scrutinize your company’s ethics during the hiring process, and many share their observations publicly.
By speaking highly of their experience with your organization, they communicate that you prioritize sound values and work culture, which enhances your company’s public image.
3. Reduced hiring costs
A competent hiring process should be as cost-efficient as possible, especially with the average cost-per-hire amounting to almost $4700, according to a 2021 SHRM report. A poor experience can make candidates reject your offer, and with a high rejection rate, you’ll need to prolong the hiring process, which increases costs.
Candidates who enjoy their hiring experience will be motivated to accept the job if offered. As such, you can fill positions more quickly, removing the need for extensive talent searches and keeping your hiring costs within a practical range.
4. Employee retention
A good candidate experience ensures proper communication during the hiring process and leads to interactive, engaging preboarding and onboarding sessions. All these give the candidates a sense of belonging in your company while helping them understand your expectations and their roles. This proves to be an effective employee retention strategy, as they’ll feel job satisfaction with these factors in place, reducing the temptation to look elsewhere.
5. Increase in company growth and innovation
A fair, transparent, and immersive candidate experience gives you a wider, quality talent pool to choose from. Having such applicants lets you hire eligible, skilled employees who bring unique abilities and experiences. With strong team diversity and competence, you can attract more opportunities, improve your problem-solving tactics, and generate higher output in your business.
How to improve candidate experience
It’s not enough to know the benefits of a good candidate experience; you must also understand how to implement it. Your candidates’ view of your organization depends largely on how strategic and implementable your steps are at this stage. That said, here are four straightforward ways you can improve candidate experience.
1. Write clear job descriptions
A 2022 SHRM article reports that 92% of people never finish job applications. Several job descriptions today are unclear, communicate very little about the organization, and are sometimes plain dull. It doesn’t matter if your organization is pumped and prepared for candidates; bad job descriptions immediately turn top talents off.
To attract quality applicants, keep your job descriptions brief but engaging and maintain an inviting tone. Tell them why they’d be happy in your company, as you want applicants to feel that you’re excited to have them join your firm. Additionally, remove lengthy sentences or difficult words, highlight important information like responsibilities and qualifications, and be as inclusive as possible.
2. Set expectations throughout the hiring process
Candidates are always more comfortable when they clearly understand their instructions and know what to expect from your company during the hiring process. Leaving them in the dark about your timelines, evaluation criteria, or the next steps to take can make them lose interest in your open job role.
Instead, keep your hiring process as transparent as possible, giving them insight into the stages they can expect after applying. Inform them about details like when to expect a response, interview criteria, or skill assessment formats. Also, be sure to maintain this standard even after hiring, providing the new employees with necessary preboarding and onboarding information to smooth their transition.
3. Communicate often and early
You risk candidates walking away from a job due to poor communication. Open communication is vital for a successful hiring process, as it shows candidates that you see and value them while keeping them informed.
From the application stage until their onboarding ends, message candidates thanking them for their participation and informing them of the next stage. Moreover, don’t sideline applicants who didn’t make the cut, as sending polite emails can encourage them to make another attempt.
Keep in mind that your messages should be similar to your job descriptions—friendly, brief, and informative. They should also be timely and allow for feedback or questions where necessary.
4. Evaluate them fairly
A lack of proper evaluation can make candidates mistrust your organization and reject your offer, regardless of how nicely you treat them. Thus, you must provide a fair, reliable assessment, and Vervoe provides an excellent solution for this.
Our assessment library has several job-relevant skill assessments that reflect technical ability and organizational fit without being ambiguous or complex. Vervoe also offers realistic job simulations that replicate tasks in that role and show you how the candidates are likely to respond when faced with them. With these features and a reliable AI-optimized grading tool, you can ensure consistently accurate, fair assessments for all candidates.
Before administering these tests, communicate your pass criteria to help the candidates understand what you’re looking for and prepare adequately. You also want to make the tests flexible and ensure a conducive, welcoming environment in the case of in-person evaluations.
5. Keep your hiring process simple
While ensuring that each stage thoroughly detects unskilled candidates, you also want to prevent unnecessary complexity or difficulty. An over-complicated hiring process is bound to discourage applicants, leading to a poor candidate experience and overall disinterest in your company.
Remove redundant interviews or assessments and check that each stage requests job-relevant information that you don’t already have to prevent repetition. You could also leave more detailed steps like extensive background checks for top qualifiers only rather than your entire batch of applicants.
6. Collect and implement feedback
It’s important to get your candidates’ perspectives on their hiring experience as they could offer insights that you may not have noticed. After every hiring process, collect feedback from candidates, whether they were hired or not, asking what they liked or disliked about your hiring methods.
Also, thank them for their feedback before proceeding to make changes based on their responses. This shows them your commitment to a better candidate experience and helps improve your overall hiring process.
How Vervoe improves candidate experience
Choosing an evaluation method that guarantees the right hire and provides a good candidate experience is a chore. With the variety of hiring strategies used today, what’s the best way to conduct thorough assessments without compromising candidate experience? The answer: our reliable, feature-rich recruitment platform—Vervoe.
Vervoe is a hiring software with features that provide a robust candidate experience and simultaneously identify the best candidate with job-relevant skills. Unlike traditional hiring methods that introduce bias, our assessments and job simulations are straightforward but detailed, resulting in a simple hiring process that expertly recognizes competence.
Our assessment library is rich with over 300 pre-made job assessment templates and a question bank with over 300,000 questions from which you can create custom assessments. The assessments also come in a variety of formats, including multiple-choice, video, presentation, and spreadsheets. This way, you can choose the styles that resonate best with your candidates to make the process more comfortable for them, improving their candidate experience.
Vervoe’s AI optimization tool automatically grades candidates’ responses according to your organization’s job requirements and preferences. It also shows performance reports detailing how each candidate compares to others and the basis for their rank, ensuring fairness and transparency, which heighten candidates’ trust.
Furthermore, Vervoe offers job simulations that test candidates in realistic everyday tasks that they’ll face on the job. In addition to being immersive for candidate experience, these simulations show you how they’ll tackle challenges on the job, improving your decision-making. Our software also provides branding options, personalization settings, and candidate support, all of which boost interaction, interest, and engagement, leading to a comprehensive, profound, and memorable candidate experience.
Hire with Vervoe for better candidate experience
Your candidates’ opinions about your hiring process influence a significant part of your organization’s identity and culture. As a result, you must ensure that they enjoy every part of the process, including the assessments, as they set the stage for hiring and onboarding.
Vervoe gives you a fair, objective hiring solution that picks out the best candidates without stress while providing applicants with optimum experience. Using our assessments, job simulations, branding and personalization features, and AI optimization, you can ensure a fair, interactive evaluation for all candidates.
So, what are you waiting for? Schedule a demo with Vervoe to improve candidates’ experience with your organization today.
