If You Build It They Will Come: Are You Creating a Good Candidate Experience?

Good Candidate Experience

As an agency recruiter, you’ve worked as a middleman between your clients and the candidates they need. You’ve experienced firsthand the rigor and demands that any search brings. Your clients are concerned about whether they’ll find the right person to fill an open position without going over the budget. On the other side, candidates are worried that they won’t be able to find the next step in their career. In fact, Career Builder found that almost three-quarters of job-seekers see the hunt for a new position as one of the most stressful events in their life. 

For agency professionals, there’s a lot of focus put on the experience you give your clients such as timely hires, pre-vetted candidates, and expert counsel. More importantly, you are also a partner to the candidates you place. By giving candidates a positive and low-stress experience, you can establish a reputation that you truly care about the success of candidates (even after you place them at a company). This ensures that when the time comes, you have a candidate that seeks your services again, or better yet, refers a friend to your recruiting services. 

Here are a few ways you can give a great candidate experience:

Give Candidates More Information

Your recruiting team spends a lot of time and energy ensuring your clients only see the most qualified candidates for interviews. For job seekers, 49% said it was the recruiter’s responsibility to improve the candidate experience through their screening process. Vetting candidates and weeding out those who are clearly not right is a time-consuming but critical process.

Neither you, nor your candidates like their time wasted. Taking steps to provide more complete information in your job descriptions, calls, and meetings with candidates can save time for everyone. In some cases, almost 75% of resumes submitted are from clearly unqualified candidates, many of whom misunderstood the requirements of the job or simply skipped through a lot of the qualifications.

In your application process, clarity will help a lot more than keyword stuffing. Give potential candidates a clear look at what the position requires and they will self-select when it isn’t right for them. Above all, make the application process easy for candidates to explain their skills. It will save your firm time and money, and provide a better experience for candidates.

Learn From Your Candidates’ Experience

There’s a lot to be learned from the candidates you work with, especially those you aren’t able to place. Most firms ask for candidates’ feedback to learn more about what they want from a position or employer. This is a great opportunity to ask what they thought about working with you and find areas to improve the candidate experience.

This requires you and your firm to leave ego at the door. Don’t assume because you put a lot of time and investment into your candidate experience that it’s great. Anonymous feedback can help identify your candidates’ struggles and allow you to not only empathize but also to make your hiring process smoother for job seekers.

It may seem obvious to ask questions about what candidates liked and disliked about the recruiting process or if there were any parts that felt repetitive, but they can give you good insight. After all, you want to build a great experience for your candidates; ask questions that uncover inefficiencies or room for improvement. Otherwise, what’s the point in gathering anonymous feedback? 

You Know Your Ideal Client, What About Your Ideal Candidate?

Ideal customer profiles drive many professional sales and marketing teams. For many companies, these profiles inform the messages, platforms, and methods they use to secure new business. The same thinking can be applied to your candidates, though it’s difficult to specify the exact skills needed for every position, you can develop an ideal candidate profile for any position you’re recruiting for. It will help focus each search to source the right talent for each client.

Using data you’ve gathered about your highest performing candidates can inform your candidate sourcing efforts. You’ll be able to build a better talent pipeline with high-caliber professionals, reducing the time it takes to place a candidate, and giving your clients the right hire. Gathering similar data from your clients can add to your candidate profile and create a powerful tool for candidate sourcing. As you can gather valuable feedback from your candidates, it provides information about what motivates your ideal/future candidates.

To read further about improving the candidate experience, check out another Crelate blog about how recruiters can optimize the candidate experience.

If it’s time to improve the experience for the candidates you work with, the team at Crelate Talent can help you get the right CRM and ATS solution. Schedule a call today.

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