Candidate Experience
Retorio's guideline for candidate experience. Insights why AI is crucial for a contemporary and successful candidate experience.
Why candidate experience matters
Candidate experience matters because it will determine the overall company image; this, in turn, affects their decision to accept the job offer or the way they speak about the company to friends and family.
Leaving candidates with a bad impression has two effects:
- scaring away eligible candidates already in the process
- creating bad employer branding (negative word-of-mouth/ online reviews on websites like Glassdoor or social media) for future applicants. Indeed, 64% of applicants say they would share negative application experiences with friends and family and 27% would actively discourage others from applying.
On the other side, 73% of job seekers say that the process of looking for a job is one of the most stressful events in life. Thus, by creating a recruitment process that is both enjoyable and exhilarating for the candidate you will stick out from the pool of average employers.
Attracting tech talent
The war for talent is on. Finding candidates for positions -especially in software engineering and tech jobs- is becoming an even harder struggle for hiring managers. The fact that 50% of all software developers plan on switching jobs in the next year, offers both threat and opportunity.
Creating a candidate experience strategy begins knowing where to look. In fact, more than 73% of job seekers today are only passively looking for a job. Thus, by keeping in contact with top candidates via LinkeIn or Xing and considering initial applications you will manage to stay competitive.
Firstly, there are a few eligible websites where to look for full-stack engineers, data scientists, back-end engineers, or senior software engineers: namely ...Angellist, Coderbyte, Github, Stack Overflow and many more.
Secondly, knowing what engineers are looking for -beyond compensation- is key to attracting talent:
- Community
- Challenge
- Growth
This means working in a supporting team on an interesting task with the opportunity for personal development.
Even if you don’t work in a cutting edge industry or your company doesn’t get a ton of tech press, highlight what you do offer your technical recruits. Keep it authentic by sitting down with a technical recruit and offering them a vision of where this company intends to go--and how they can be an integral part of shaping it. If this doesn’t excite them, share other value-adds for a recruit, like development stipends, the yearly work trip, or the ability to work remotely.
Thirdly, if you are certain to have found a top candidate, be also willing to “change the job” by customizing it. Maybe tasks originally envisaged for the open position can be taken over by in-house employees and others directed to the new candidate. Most important is you stay open for suggestions and alternative ways of applications -as relationship building with tech talent lies at the core of this era’s candidate experience strategy.
Attracting Millennials and Gen Z
Millennials (those born between about 1980 and 2000) are forecast to comprise 75% of the global workforce by 2025. Gen Z, the generation born between 1995 and the early-to-mid 2000s, depending on the source, is the first generation born into a digital world.
Evidently, these digital natives are a handful—and hold a handful of expectations on how the candidate experience should work. They don’t remember the world before the Internet. They expect speed and follow-through on services and products. The interconnectedness of social media, Google, and everything accessible within a few clicks means digital natives are used to playing the comparison game—and they’re good at it. Their behavior is similar to modern-day consumers---and what they're looking for in their recruiting experience.
What is Candidate Experience?
Candidate experience describes the way candidates perceive the company throughout the process of application. This experience shapes their impression of the employer and expectations about future interactions.
In a way, this can be compared to customer experience in commerce, where customers likewise, interact with and perceive the company and product.
The overall experience a candidate gains while applying for a job includes:
- initial job search
- application process
- job interviews
- feedback (job offer or rejection)
- onboarding of the candidate
These are also crucial times and opportunities where you should communicate with your candidates. This means acknowledging their application, scheduling an interview and thanking them for the interview --making a job offer or rejecting them for the job.
If you have a custom for each of these steps, you are already shaping your candidates’ experience.
Applicants want a rapid, effective, and trusted interview process.
Compared to previous generations, Millennials prefer protecting their own time. Much like how they shop on Amazon—personalized and with only a few clicks—they’re demanding a fast and personalized application process. A poor candidate experience invokes the same frustration we feel when we try to make an online purchase: the frustration of making an account, awaiting card approval, or putting in endless personal details. Consumers walk away from such e-commerce sites; qualified candidates would do the same from such a hiring experience.
For Millennials, their principal motivations are adaptability, feedback, and a strong sense of purpose. Gen Z focuses on privacy, autonomy and meaningful experience.
Therefore, recruiters need to change their strategy in how they attract and identify talent. This includes amping up their hiring process, delivering a solid candidate experience custom-made for these target groups.