Every interaction impacts the candidate experience, influencing whether they accept your job offer and how they perceive your entire brand. A positive candidate experience is critical to the success of any recruiting effort. As a key recruitment marketing trend , many companies are turning to automation to speed up the hiring process while maintaining a positive candidate experience.
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Why candidate experience matters
The hiring process can be stressful, time-consuming, and costly for any organization phone numbers philippines These challenges are compounded by labor shortages around the world, adding further frustration to the process. For recruiters, cultivating a positive candidate experience is crucial. Consider these numbers:
78% of candidates say their overall candidate experience indicates how a company values its employees.
More than 80% of people say their experience as a candidate can change their mind about a job opportunity.
Nearly 60% of job seekers have had a bad experience as a candidate. 72% say they have shared their negative experience on company review websites.
80% of job seekers say they would not reapply to a company that did not notify them of the status of their application, although 65% say they rarely or never receive that information.
One significant way employers can positively influence the candidate experience is through efficiency and responsiveness. Most candidates apply and interview for multiple positions and are eager to move quickly through the hiring process.
To accomplish this, recruiters must quickly review applications, schedule interviews, conduct interviews, and follow up with a second interview or regrets. Fortunately, recruiting process automation can help employers overcome these challenges and significantly improve the candidate experience.
Steps to start automating the hiring process
The steps below can help you lay the right foundation for recruiting automation and tracking.
Step #1: Create a Buyer Persona for Your Ideal Candidate
Defining your ideal candidate before the hiring process begins is essential, just as you would define buyer personas for your ideal clients. To do this, ask yourself a series of questions, imagining what the perfect member of your team would be like. Some useful questions might include:
What knowledge and experience do they have?
What are your goals in this position?
What is your attitude?
How do you manage conflicts or complications?
What don't you want in a candidate?
Answering these questions will help you outline what to look for in a suitable candidate, which can help you shortlist candidates before an interview. Shortlisting will save time for both candidates and you. You can do this by asking candidates to answer a few questions before the interview, conducting a quick phone interview, or even shortlisting candidates based on their resumes.
This information can help you compare and contrast candidates and minimise the number of unsuccessful face-to-face interviews. As a result of defining a persona and shortlisting candidates, you are more likely to interview the candidates best suited for the role. The more suitable the candidates are, the more likely they are to receive a quick response and enjoy the hiring process. Whether or not the candidate progresses to the hiring stage, the chances are that their candidate experience was a positive one.
Another reason buyer personas are important for your perfect candidate is that they help you make your recruitment marketing more effective. With this in mind, you may also want to ask additional questions to further refine this buyer persona:
What professional organizations is this person involved in?
What online news sources do you prefer?
How (and where) do you interact on the Internet?
These questions can be essential for connecting with passive candidates . The answers will help you reach these people where they are already online, as you won't necessarily connect with them through job sites or job listings.
Step 2: Create a landing page for candidates
Another great way to speed up the hiring process and improve the candidate experience is to use an applicant landing page. A landing page on your company website designed for recruiting purposes can be very beneficial, as it provides potential candidates with a clear path to an application. Let’s say candidates find a job opening on your website or a third-party job posting site. In that case, they can be automatically redirected to your landing page, which will instantly notify recruiters once they fill out the form.
You can design this landing page to limit candidates to applying for only one position, ensuring that they choose the position that best suits their skills and experience rather than any position. In essence, landing pages are an exceptional tool to get to know your candidates better and customize the application process as you see fit. Additionally, landing pages are much more convenient and efficient for recruiters to manage and obtain applications than traditional application methods. As a result, candidates will hear back from recruiters much faster, allowing them to begin the interview process promptly.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of using a landing page on your website for job applications is that you can keep all the data in your own CRM and typically collect more data than you would from an external job posting website. For example, using cookies, you can likely collect information about which of your web pages candidates have visited, along with other ways they have interacted with your company online (such as email sign-ups, opens and clicks, or social media interactions).