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The recruitment process is a two-way street. As much as companies want to avoid hiring bad talent – employees also don’t want to get hired by companies with bad candidate experience.

Candidate experience is a critical recruitment component for modern workplaces. In today’s competitive work environment, providing a positive candidate experience is essential to attract the top talent your way.

But unfortunately, not many recruiters are still focusing on the candidate experience. Around 67% of job seekers have said they have experienced a negative hiring experience in the last 12 months.

So, if you don’t want talented professionals to bad-mouth your recruitment cycle, you better follow a few simple things to improve your candidate experience.

Top 8 Strategies to Improve Candidate Experience

Whether you want to retain your current employees or impress new talents, improving the candidate experience is vital for your HR policy. Candidate experience helps you build a strong employer brand to attract top talents in your industry.

Here’s how you can quickly improve candidate experience in your workplace:

1. Define recruitment process

A transparent recruitment process is the best strategy to improve candidate experience in your organization. When job seekers know how your recruitment process flows, this will ease their self-doubt, nervousness, and confusion.

According to 83% of job seekers, it will automatically improve their candidate experience when employers tell them a clear recruitment timeline and structure. To make this process easier, recruiters leverage recruitment software that enables them to effectively communicate with candidates in an automated manner so they can focus on the big picture while still building candidate relationships.

Recruiters can clarify the following things to job applicants:

  • State all steps of the application process
  • Timeline to complete each process
  • A person who candidates can contact if they need any assistance
  • Offer recruitment tips and resources, etc.

2. Use situational judgment tests

Situational Judgment Tests, aka SJTs, is a dynamic strategy to improve candidate experience. In this strategy, a situation is demonstrated to candidates that might occur during the recruitment process to access their response.

You can create short videos showing different recruitment situations and share them on your company website or Linkedin profile. This will give candidates a fair idea about your recruitment process, and they can better prepare themselves.

3. Automate repetitive steps from your recruitment cycle

You might not notice, but your recruitment cycle has many manual, repetitive steps that you can automate to accelerate the recruitment process to save your and your candidates time. Recruiters use platforms like modern recruitment CRM to automate various stages of their hiring workflow.

For example, you can automate your communications and create nurture campaigns that help candidates stay on top of their hiring process. This will ensure your team doesn’t go radio silent on them while juggling with several hundred tasks and candidates at a time, while still building a strong relationship with candidates.

In short, try to make your recruitment process as simple and quick as you can.

4. Build an attractive career page

Career page is a perfect place to build your employer brand and excite new candidates to apply for jobs in your company. Plus, in this digital age, every person first goes online to find relevant information before applying for a job. In fact, 59% of job seekers first check the company’s career page before applying for the job.

Thus, you should create a dedicated career page on your website to provide all the information about your recruitment process to candidates. You can try numerous different things to design an engaging career page, such as:

  • Showcase your workplace photos
  • Previous employees testimonials
  • Team culture policy
  • Easy form to apply for the job, etc.

5. Strengthen communication channels

Strong communication is the backbone of good candidate experience. There is nothing more annoying for job candidates than not knowing what the status of their job application is. 

Candidates have to plan lots of things based on the job application status, like quitting their current job or accepting another job. Thus, you should build a proper communication channel to keep candidates informed and ask their questions.

For example, your HR department can start an email campaign to inform all job applicants about the current recruitment status. Moreover, you should provide a contact number to candidates in case they need any help or additional information.

6. Introduce your team

Another interesting way to improve the candidate experience is by introducing your current employees to them. Job seekers are not only interested in the job description, but they also want to know the people with whom they will be working in the future.

So, you can use your company career page to introduce your team to new candidates. You can add testimonials, interviews, and social media profiles of your team members to your career page.

Here you can check out The Muse career page to see how they have used employees’ video interviews to build an employer brand and introduce their team to the world.

7. Ask for an accommodating schedule

This is a small strategy that can help you win over talented professionals. You should ask applicants about their available schedules at the beginning of the recruitment process. And you should try to book interviews or telephone conversations as per the schedule given by each applicant. It is a small step to build a positive candidate experience.

8. Ease candidates’ nerves

The anxious, nervous, and stressed job applicant is useless for you. When a person is under stress, he or she cannot provide the best answers or showcase their skills.

Therefore, you should try to ease down candidates’ nerves before starting your interview process. For example, you can create a positive ambiance in the room where job applicants are waiting for their turn instead of a stiff and monotonous corporate environment.

The Secret of a Good Candidate Experience

One of the most useful tips to improve your candidate experience is giving respect to your job applicants. You should treat all job applicants with an equal amount of respect and professionalism.

No matter whether you are hiring a fresher or experienced candidate for your company, you should provide the same level of respect to every candidate.

Besides this, you can build a good employer brand, use online tools and strengthen your communication channels to provide a dynamic candidate experience to your job applicants.

So, let’s wrap up this post and start focusing on your candidate experience.