Candidate Experience

The relationship between employer-employee has transformed dramatically over the past decade. The power in hiring, which has been always rested on the employers, has now shifted to the candidates. 

Great recruitment has largely become an experience-driven process now.

So, What is Candidate Experience?

Candidate experience is basically how a candidate feels about the company once they experience your hiring process. And these candidates‘ feelings’, whether good or bad, influence their decision to apply to your company or accept your job offer.

A stellar candidate experience has always been necessary for hiring teams. As they competed to show the best of them during a candidate-driven job market, but what happens when the dynamic changes?

Why is it Important ?

By things like engaging every applicant, building a strong company culture, and simplifying the application process will all help in improving the candidate experience.

Also, if you use the recruiting technologies, it eliminates tedious tasks such as interview scheduling, which in addition reduces the cost-per-hire by notable time savings.

In addition, if you make candidates happy during the hiring process, and employee retention also increases, saving money in employee replacement costs.

How to Improve Candidate Experience?

These are some candidate experience best practices:

• Make sure to hire to fill a real need
• Post clear job descriptions
• Try to make it easy for candidates to apply to your jobs
• Follow-up early and often
• Interact with candidates during every step of the hiring process
• Inform the candidates if you’re no longer considering them, as early as possible
• Give and try to be open to receive feedback

How to measure candidate experience?

If you want to measure candidate experience, then you can do that by surveying your candidates and monitor the changes over time. 

Try to keep the survey questions as short as possible. Your hiring software can be designed to help improve candidate experiences, which can have candidate experience surveys and analytics built-in.

Net promoter score (NPS) can also be to measure candidate experience. And to measure NPS:

1. Use a scale of 0-10, how likely they are to recommend the experience to a friend or colleague
2. Let’s say if a respondent who rate it a 9 or 10 will be counted as “promoter” and those who rate it between 0 and 6 as “detractors”
3. Analyze the of respondents who are promoters and the percent who are detractors by a percentage calculation
4. Observe this metric over time.

To read about more interesting topics like this;