How to Build a Positive Candidate Experience

The world of recruiting and hiring is constantly evolving and new strategies and techniques are constantly coming up that can help recruiters and hiring managers to create a more effective recruiting process that not only makes the process better for candidates but recruiters as well. There are many ways that you can create the best candidate experience for your applicants and many companies will not use the same strategies in order to achieve the experience they are looking to give their candidates. This being said, there are some strategies that can be extremely effective for all types of businesses.

Some businesses may have a candidate experience manager or management system that tracks candidate engagement and offer suggestions. Other businesses may choose to improve their candidate experience by working to create a simple, streamlined, and quick interviewing process that gets back to candidates quickly and keeps them engaged throughout the entire hiring process. Creating this effective interview system can seem time-consuming and challenging, but with the right tools, like Qualifi’s on-demand phone interview platform, it does not have to be difficult. Qualifi helps you offer asynchronous phone interviews that candidates can take whenever is convenient for them and the AI helps you to easily highlight candidates who are the most qualified without bias so all candidates are able to have an equal opportunity for getting the position.

What Is Candidate Experience?

The term “candidate experience” has gotten a lot of attention and use over the past few years, especially as more and more businesses have noted the success that having a more pleasant experience for their candidates has brought them. But, simply hearing the term candidate experience does not necessarily tell companies what makes a good candidate experience and many companies have tried a number of different strategies and technologies to help them find the best system for both their candidates and their employees. After all, what is the benefit of a good candidate experience if it comes at the expense of your current employees?

So, what can companies do to create a better candidate experience without overworking their recruiters and other hiring professionals? There are 3 things to consider when creating a positive candidate experience that all businesses should keep in mind. These are building trust, your brand voice, and a better work environment. Tell your candidates what you are looking for upfront, tell them what your business values, and make sure you are communicating with them throughout the hiring process. The recruitment process is where candidates get their first impression of your business. You can use that to really show them your brand. Ask consistent questions and showcase your company’s tone. And finally, don’t forget about your current employees. If your employees are happy and love your company, candidates will see that and want to be a part of it. This easy candidate experience checklist is based on candidate experience statistics, 2021 especially showed a large increase in the focus on candidate experience and company culture to further entice candidates to stay engaged in the hiring process.

Why Is Candidate Experience Important?

Doing a Google search can be a great way to get a general overview of the benefits of good candidate experience in recruitment. For example, if you search for something like “why is candidate experience important 2021” you will come up with a number of results that talk about statistics from 2021 that show improved hiring processes and higher candidate quality. You may also see results explaining how to improve candidate experience. Some of these recommendations are likely to be applicable still today, even though it is no longer 2021. For example, offering consistency and flexibility in the hiring process — like using on-demand phone interviews rather than traditional interviews — and including benefits rather than simply a salary are still valued by candidates today.

Candidate Experience Best Practices

Creating a positive candidate experience is essential to being able to hire the best talent on the market. This is because these candidates are the candidates that everyone wants to hire, which means that they are able to be much pickier with who they decide to work for. If you want your business to be the one that these candidates want to work for, you need to give them a reason to want to work for you.

Because candidates do not know what it is like inside your company, the recruitment and hiring process is the first impression they get of your company. You want to make sure that the impression they are getting is a good one that is accurate to what your company is like to work for. In your hiring process, you’ll want to focus on having human communication that helps candidates to feel connected to your company and your brand, creating a consistent and unbiased interview experience, and offering flexibility. Candidates appreciate companies that recognize that they have busy schedules and other responsibilities in their personal lives as well. Allow this flexibility by opting for on-demand phone interviews rather than video interviews.

Candidate Experience for 2022

Just like the years before, the strategies for how to attract employees in 2022 and talent acquisition strategies are likely to share some similarities to the previous years of hiring strategies, but they will also have their own specific trends and metrics. Finding employees in 2022 will likely be a different experience than finding employees in 2021 when businesses were facing the Great Resignation, but, it is likely that 2022 will face its own recruitment challenges.

The tremendous focus on candidate experience may be one of the recruitment challenges 2022 faces in the sense that businesses that do not offer the type of candidate experience their applicants are looking for may not be able to keep up with the hiring trends 2022 will bring. To find out more about these trends — such as improved communication, positive work culture, and removing bias from the hiring process — it can be helpful to look for examples of recruiting metrics. Finding examples online can be a great way to ensure that you are able to keep up with the best talent 2022 has to offer.

Candidate Experience Examples

Companies with the best candidate experience systems are likely to be the companies that are going to attract the best candidates. This is because candidates want a pleasant experience when they are applying for a job because that sets the tone for their experience working with the company. Because of this, the candidate experience in recruitment is constantly becoming more and more important. One way that you can improve your candidate experience is to offer asynchronous or automated phone interviews. These allow your candidates to take your interview whenever works best for them and makes it easy for your recruiting team to easily assess and get back to candidates promptly.

The next thing on the candidate experience checklist that many great candidate experience examples have in common is ensuring that the hiring process does not lose the human touch — even if it is done asynchronously. A platform like Qualifi can help you to create efficient on-demand phone interviews without losing your brand voice or ideals.