How to Audit Your Candidate Experience

Positive candidate experiences are essential to attracting top talent and enhancing your company brand. In a recent survey, 96 percent of respondents who had positive candidate experiences said they would either apply to the same company again or refer someone else. At the same time, 46 percent of candidates in a related study rated their experiences as poor or very poor.

Where do you stand? As you audit your process to better serve your organization and your candidates, keep these key strategic factors in mind.

Social Recruitment

Your social profile should be an accurate reflection of your company and its unique brand. If you’re too close to your social recruiting strategy, ask another manager to assess it and provide feedback. They have a vested interest: They want good candidates for their openings.

• Where do you have a social presence? Maintain current, active participation on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and also find out which other platforms are routinely visited by your target audience. Regularly review your profiles, posting history and response process.
• Include links to your company website on all social platforms. Make sure your content accurately reflects your business and its goals, objectives, mission and vision.

Career Site Success

Your career site is likely to be a candidate’s first impression of your company. It only takes seconds to form that impression, so make them count. Evaluate your career portal and website for:

• Design: It should be attractive and uncluttered. Often, less is more.
• Ease of use: Be sure your site can be easily navigated as well as liked to myriad social and mobile platforms.
• Quality of content: Keep it relevant, so visitors stay informed and interested.
• Quantity of content: Organize content into reader-friendly bullets, lists, subsections and visuals.

Have an objective third party visit your career site and try to search for a job. Don’t send them to the link. Instead, have them search for it just as a candidate would. Develop five or six questions for them to answer regarding ease of site navigation on a 1-5 scale.

Mobile Accessibility

Is mobile important? The proof is in the numbers – and 89 percent of employees who say they will look for new jobs in the next year also say their mobile device is an important tool and resource. Nearly the same number – 84 percent – believe that mobile will be the most common way people search for positions within the next five years.

• Attract candidates by making your career site mobile friendly. One in four job hunters report that they would not even apply at a company whose career site was not mobile optimized.
• Have someone check your career site on a mobile device and try to apply for a position. Time this, both when they already know the job they are seeking and when they need to search and then submit an application.

Communications and Feedback

What better way to improve your candidate experience than to ask people what they like or disliked about it?

• Ask new hires to complete a short survey. This can be set up in an onboarding software solution to be sent at a certain time. Allow results to be submitted confidentially and complete this step while the hiring process is still fresh in their minds.
• Just as you should request feedback, it is important to provide it. More than 37 percent of candidate frustrations during the hiring process are the result of not receiving any sort of feedback from employers. Create response rules; for instance, mandate that candidates receive a response from you about their hiring status within five days after they interview or inquire. Monitor this regularly and ensure that candidate communication remains a top priority.

As you perfect your strategy to hire and retain the best talent, consider partnering with the executive search consultants at BrainWorks. Our staff are known as industry leaders in their niche practice areas including marketing research and consumer insights, relationship marketing and decision sciences, and data analysis for consumer products. Contact us today to learn more.