Today’s no longer a “recruiters market” but instead a “job seekers market”. What does this mean? Gone are the days where recruiters and hiring managers had the upper hand in placing job advertisements and having pools of applicants to choose from, eagerly looking for any available work on offer. Instead, job seekers have become more aware and conscious of the businesses they are applying to, looking more for what an organization can offer them instead of just a secure, salaried position.

What is the candidate experience?

Candidate experience is all about how job seekers “perceive and react to a company’s recruitment cycle” from attracting, sourcing and recruiting to interviewing, hiring and onboarding.

It’s all about the interaction between a job seeker and your organization – primarily during the recruitment stage. Candidate experience improvement strategies involve the re-evaluation of every single touchpoint a job seeker would have with a prospective employer to essentially make the organization appear as an “employer of choice” to said job seeker.

A majority of candidate experience touchpoints occur during the recruitment stage. Here is a list of the components that make up these touchpoints:

• The job search: this can be through a social media post advertising the position on LinkedIn, a job advertisement on job search platforms such as Monster, Glassdoor and Indeed, or even through your own careers page via your website.
• The job application: the instructions telling job seekers how to apply for the position or the process of supplying their details for a potential interview.
• The pre-interview process: this includes the first call or method of communication to introduce yourself as the hiring manager or recruiter for the role they applied for.
• The interview process: this includes the structure of the interview process, whether there are multiple people to interview the candidate, what they need to bring, where it is held, how long it goes for and the questions you ask.
• The post-interview process: how you let candidates know if they have made it through to the next stage of the interview process or how you inform candidates they are unsuccessful. This part includes completing reference checks and negotiating contract changes with successful applicants.
• Onboarding: how you train new employees, setting them up with the necessary resources and systems they need to get their job done and introducing them to the team.

Although most candidate experience touchpoints occur during the active recruitment stage, it does exist in passive forms, with 48% of the job seekers basing their candidate experience off previous interactions or relationships with the hiring organization before they applied for a job.

Why is it important to deliver a positive candidate experience?

Candidate experiences can make or break the chance to hire quality employees. Each of the individual candidate experience touchpoints addressed above can significantly impact job seeker attraction rates if not done correctly. The facts speak for themselves and illustrate how each stage of the recruitment process is as important as the next to facilitate an overall positive candidate experience.