Technology Archives - Page 11 of 11

Candidate experience is becoming a popular topic of discussion in the talent acquisition and recruiting community—with good reason. According to a CareerBuilder survey, 78 percent of candidates say the overall candidate experience they receive is an indicator of how a company values its staff. What’s more, the same survey found that 86 percent of job seekers believe employers should treat candidates with the same respect as current employees.

The results of CareerBuilder’s survey illustrate that the lines between the candidate and employee experience are blurring, making it critical for organisations to strengthen their candidate experience. In this post, we outline the importance of improving the experience of your candidates and how organisations can streamline the hiring process.

What is the Candidate Experience, and Why Does it Matter?

In order to build a strong candidate experience, it is important to understand what is and why it matters.

So, what is the candidate experience?

The candidate experience is the sequence of interactions a job candidate has with an organisation throughout the recruiting and hiring process. These interactions can include correspondence that a candidate receives from an organisation’s HR department, recruiters and its software systems.

Common candidate experience touch points include:

An organisation’s career site
Job advertisements
The online job application process
Any communication from an applicant tracking system
An organisation’s interview process
Any correspondence with HR professionals, team members or leadership
Notifications about a candidate’s application status
Candidate rejection letter or job offer

What is a positive candidate experience?

According to Talent Board’s CandE Research Report, candidates rated “communication” as the number one way to engage talent. So, organisations looking to craft a positive candidate experience should communicate clearly and honestly with job seekers to create the type of candidate experience they value.

A positive candidate experience meets the following standards:

Communicates realistic expectations for the job and work environment
Clearly communicates an organisation’s employee value proposition
Outlines all of the employment details to candidates upfront
Provides an easy and mobile-friendly application process
Respects a candidate’s time at all stages of the application process
Provides a pleasant and smooth interview experience
Seamlessly transitions selected job applicants into new employees
Maintains a kind and respectful process for rejecting job applicants

What are the Benefits of Improving Candidate Experience?

Improving candidate experience not only benefits candidates and job seekers, but it can also have a positive impact on an organisation’s workforce. Below, we outline three ways a strong candidate experience improves the overall talent acquisition process.

Improve applicant retention

According to research conducted by Indeed, applications with 45 or more screener questions lose 88.7 percent of their potential applicants to application abandonment. Improving the candidate experience often begins with refining the application process. A short and streamlined job application process will increase the likelihood of job seekers finishing job applications, thereby increasing an organisation’s applicant pool.

Create a better first impression

Research from labour economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger suggests a growing interest in joining the gig economy. The number of Americans working these “gigs” has risen from 10.1 percent a decade ago to 15.8 percent in 2015. Nearly 40 percent of workers in these jobs have a bachelor’s degree or higher. This means that organisations are not only in a battle with competitors for skilled talent but also with the candidates who may want to work for themselves.

To win the war for talent, organisations need to see candidate experience as more than just a part of the recruiting process; it is also a sales tool that can help win over top talent. A job application is often the first interaction a candidate has with an organisation. So, making a great first impression on top talent with a superior candidate experience will help organisations differentiate themselves and stand out as great places to work.

Increase brand awareness

The candidate experience affects more than just job applicants; it also plays a significant role in how consumers view an organisation as a whole. If an organisation offers an exceptional candidate experience, candidates are more likely to share the experience with colleagues and write about it online. What’s more, a survey conducted by Software Advice found that 71 percent of candidates are more likely to purchase from a company they feel treated them well throughout the recruiting process.

How Technology Can Help Improve the Candidate Experience

Technology continues to shape the way job seekers search for work and how organisations find and hire qualified talent. The rise of social and professional networking sites, mobile devices, job boards and online applicant systems means that creating a meaningful candidate experience often begins with crafting a technology-first approach. Below we list three ways in which organisations can use technology to improve their candidate experience.

Offer a mobile-friendly candidate experience

Research conducted by Indeed found that 78 percent of Millennials, 73 percent of Generation Xers and 57 percent of baby boomers conduct job searches from their mobile devices. This means that organisations looking to improve their candidate experience should look to create a mobile-friendly recruiting environment for job seekers. Organisations should make sure that their career website and other resources candidates may need while applying for job openings are mobile-friendly.

Affinix™, PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology, is designed as a mobile-first platform for both candidates and recruiters, ensuring seamless engagement from any mobile device at any time throughout the application, scheduling and screening process.

Quick questions to ask yourself to improve the mobile candidate experience:

Is career-related text and content easily readable on mobile devices?
Are job pages optimised for better visibility in mobile search?
Is navigation of the career site and job application simple on mobile devices?
Will candidates have to go through trial and error to complete applications on mobile devices?

Clear Communication

Establishing timely and clear communication between candidates and recruiters is essential for developing a positive candidate experience. However, many candidates are left without feedback or status updates on their application. In fact, a Talent Board report found that 47 percent of candidates were still waiting to hear back from employers more than two months after they applied.

The right technology platform can help by sending automated messages to candidates via email or chatbot technology letting them know their application status. You can even craft messages letting a candidate know if they did not get the job. While missing out on a job is never pleasant, receiving prompt feedback communicates to a candidate that their application and time were respected.

Social Recruitment Marketing

Enhancing the candidate experience also means reaching candidates where they are. According to Social Talent’s 2016 Global Recruiting Survey, 37 percent of survey respondents said that social media is the primary source of finding candidates. This shift towards a digital hiring model has seen the traditional résumé be displaced by the online footprint of candidates which showcases their skills and experiences.

PeopleScout’s Affinix platform can help organisations reach digitally native candidates with customised ads, optimised job descriptions, personalised landing pages, career portals and recruitment marketing that elevates job postings with robust content and campaign management.

Conclusion

Learning from past mistakes and successes is essential to improving the experiences of your candidates. While there is no such thing as a perfect hiring process, learning and evolving processes and procedures will improve an organisation’s ability to attract great talent and retain the strongest workers.

Improving the Candidate Experience

As the talent landscape continues to tighten, a competitive candidate experience is essential to attract and engage the best talent. In addition, candidates have come to expect a consumer-like application and hiring experience that is similar to other interactions they’re having online and on their smartphones every day. Chatbots can help improve the candidate experience and address these challenges through their ability to interact with candidates on demand, streamlining and assisting throughout the application process on the channels candidates prefer and when they are available.

Chatbots are effective tools for candidate engagement, and they are continuously evolving to make the application process easier for the candidate. Many candidates need to complete application processes outside of normal business hours. Chatbots allow candidates to receive answers to questions immediately, at any time of day. They can also answer candidate questions on company policies, benefits or culture, and when it gets stumped, a chatbot can contact a human recruiter.

Through chatbot functionality, candidates can contact organisations around the clock.
Chatbots can also take on some tasks throughout the application process that would typically be done by recruiters over the phone or through email. Extended job application forms may feel time-consuming to job candidates. Through a chatbot, candidates can provide that same information in a conversational way that feels less daunting.

Streamlining the Process for Recruiters

Throughout the recruiting process, recruiters often take on tasks that are necessary but don’t add value for candidates. Chatbots can allow recruiters to spend more time with the strongest candidates by taking on some of the administrative tasks.

Chatbots can handle tasks like scheduling interviews. With a strong candidate experience enhanced by chatbot technology, recruiters will have a wider and stronger pool of applicants, which enables them to identify and engage with the best talent more quickly.

Additionally, one of the most significant issues facing us all is time. Chatbots can help recruiters gain more time in their days by taking on some of the time-consuming tasks that recruiters handle, like responding to simple questions, scheduling interviews and gathering basic information from candidates.

In this tight talent market, that extra time that recruiters spend with strong candidates will give employers an edge. The unemployment rate in the United States is around record low levels, so strong candidates will have several options. When a recruiter has more time to spend with those candidates, it increases the likelihood that the candidate will choose that employer.

Implementing Chatbots in your Recruiting

When rolling out chatbots in your recruiting programme, it’s important to remember to strike the right balance between automated communication via chatbots and communication from a recruiter. Chatbots should be used for repeatable, automatable interactions, giving organisations the opportunity to enable recruiters to engage with best candidates in more high-value ways.

It’s important to remember that chatbots shouldn’t take on all of the candidate communication. They can automate some of the hiring processes, but candidates still need to interact with a recruiter. Studies show that candidates want an experience that includes a balanced mix of technology and human interaction – not just one or the other.

It is also important to keep in mind that simply launching a chatbot does not ensure success. Organisations need to take steps to continuously make their chatbots more attuned and responsive in order to drive successful engagements. This can take time, as well as the resources needed to understand the technology behind AI-enabled chatbots.

It’s also important to recognise that not all chatbot technology is created equal. Low-quality technology could mean that a chatbot would have a hard time answering common questions or respond inappropriately. That would harm the employer brand even more than relying on slower, more traditional communication. To make sure that the technology can effectively communicate, employers should look for a chatbot that is part of a larger technology solution that works throughout the entire application process.

For example, in Affinix™, PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology platform, chatbot assistance is integrated within the technology stack in order to engage with and assist candidates during the application process. Through Affinix, we can integrate chatbot technology on an organisation’s career page, during the interview scheduling process and to help candidates and recruiters prep for an interview, among other use cases.

Looking Forward

Chatbots can play an essential role in creating an improved candidate experience, but the talent acquisition industry has moved well beyond using just chatbots for communication. Now, AI and machine learning are transforming the industry. Rules-based onboarding functions, candidate sourcing, interview scheduling and candidate matching are being automated to enable talent acquisition professionals to spend more time with the best candidates and on critical talent acquisition functions that involve creative and strategic thinking. In addition to these evolutions, candidates may soon interact with chatbots primarily through voice, like Siri from Apple or Alexa from Amazon, rather than through text.

While chatbots, automation and AI are fundamentally changing candidate communications, we believe that striking the right balance between personalised technology and human interaction is key to success. PeopleScout uses AI and other emerging technologies that personalise the candidate experience while also enabling our talent professionals to spend more time on critical functions. Employers should look for a talent partner with a comprehensive technology solution, where chatbots are just one piece of the puzzle.

Solution: Technology

How to Improve Your Candidate Experience