Grace Carter is a recruiter at Do My Assignment and Assignment Help services. She improves candidate's experience, works with HR departments on easy onboarding and writes business documentation. In addition, Grace teaches creative writing at OX Essays educational website.
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Candidates talk– it’s human nature and perfectly understandable. If you keep a candidate waiting, they will talk. If your hiring manager is rude or condescending throughout the interview, they will talk. At best, they tell their friends about it. Worst case - your unhappy candidate leaves a negative review online and shares their experience with the world.
This is detrimental to your talent brand and can actually cost you candidates down the road.
However, it’s not easy to create a perfect candidate experience. For one, you probably have a lot of applicants to manage. There are so many tasks related to hiring just one person that it’s difficult to focus on the overall process and consequent candidate experience.
Still, to ensure that your candidates leave happy - whether they are hired or not - you can certainly do a lot.
Communicate
Communication is arguably the biggest predictor of candidate experience. Unfortunately, the majority of companies simply neglect this from the start. For instance, a candidate sends in a resume and gets no response. Their application is rejected but they are not informed. They follow up and hear nothing back.
Those companies think it doesn't matter. If a candidate sent in their resume then of course it’s received, right? If they’ve been rejected, they’ll get the hint after a while, right?
Wrong. Put yourself in your candidate’s shoes - they want to know that you have received their email. They can’t wait to hear anything from you, even if it’s something mundane.
Of course, with a large number of candidates, this can get complicated. That’s why experienced recruiters leverage tools that automate these tasks so they can focus on more strategic and high-level projects (like curating a positive candidate experience!) rather than administrative duties.
Structure your hiring process
You should always start by building a plan for your hiring process. This will make everything easier and more comfortable both for you and your candidates. “The best way to have a seamless and effective process is to create a plan of how everything will flow. Separate the hiring process into manageable tasks and handle each one as it comes. Prepare properly to avoid issues,” says Melinda Lower, a recruiter from Academized and UKWritings.
Take care of your candidates
All those little things that you can do for your candidates really make a difference. For instance, offer beverages and snacks while they wait, give them a tour of the office, send a car to pick them up and so on. All of these little things in combination with politeness and kindness can really create a wonderful experience.
Be transparent
An important part of email communication is transparency. Let your candidates know about the structure of your hiring process, basic requirements and so on. What will come in handy to you in this process are tools like StateOfWriting, Do My Assignment, ViaWriting, Paperfellows and SimpleGrad.
Ask relevant questions
The best candidates like to be challenged and prove their worth. Ask them relevant and important questions that will give you a chance to get the full picture of your candidate.
Communicate your values
Even though most recruiters still believe that organizational culture and company values are topics for the first day at work, it’s way better to introduce what you are all about from day one of their hiring process. Some candidates will simply not be in line with your company values and it’s best to find this out early. Respecting those values should be a part of your requirements and as such, it should be discussed as soon as possible.
Send rejection emails
Most companies avoid this step but it can be of big value to the company image. “Even though it doesn’t seem like a big deal at first, sending rejection emails can be a big deal. It means a lot to the candidates to know how they did on the interview. They don't want to hope for too long. You’ll be surprised at how many of them respond with a ‘thank you’,” says Danny Murray, a HR manager at Essayroo.
Over To You
Even with all these practices in place, you won’t be able to please every candidate and that shouldn’t be your goal. Aim to communicate openly and offer support to your candidates throughout the interview process– soon enough your superior candidate experience will be selling your culture and attracting talent for you.