Why Candidate Experience Should Be Your Top Metric

Do you know the most common thing job seekers encounter? Poor candidate experience. From not knowing a role’s salary, to multiple interview rounds, to being ignored, bad candidate experiences are rife in the job market.

The candidate experience is often someone’s first look into your business, and can reveal the inner workings of your structure. For instance, if the hiring process is long-winded and spread across multiple stages, this can highlight that projects will need multiple sign-offs, and red tape will significantly delay processes.

A bad candidate experience, in turn, damages the business’ reputation and prevents them from hiring the best talent. Why would a candidate accept an offer from somewhere that doesn’t respect their time and effort?

Why is Candidate Experience Important?

First and foremost, creating a positive candidate experience is just good business practice! There are loads of external knock-on effects of a candidate experience, and the effect they have depends entirely on how good or bad your candidate experience is.

Talent as a Customer

As we get closer to the peak of the Talent Crunch, candidates are getting more power in the hiring process. Why?

Because greater demand for talent means that candidates have more choice. Ultimately businesses have to treat candidates like customers. For instance, there’s been significant investment into customer experience, but not into candidate experience.

This has to change if businesses want to keep attracting the best talent on the market.

Additionally, a bad candidate experience can even damage the customer reputation of businesses. In this digital age, businesses with poor candidate experience can easily get exposed online. There have been cases where candidates have taken to social media about their poor experience, and in return, the offending business receives countless negative reviews.

A good candidate experience is paramount to maintaining a good customer relationship.

It’s Good Business Sense

Setting the morals of a good candidate experience aside, it’s just good business sense.

Good candidate experience helps to develop brand loyalty, and gives you an ever-growing pool of talent when you need it. On the other hand, a poor candidate experience can alienate your desired talent, and make growing the business much harder.

As the Talent Crunch worsens, the biggest barrier to growth will be increasing your headcount. So by investing in candidate experience now, and developing that infrastructure, you’ll be in a much better position than your competitors.

So which would you rather: invest now and succeed later, or continue to struggle?

Making a Good Candidate Experience?

Now you understand why Candidate Experience is so important, knowing how to ensure your Candidate’s Experience is top quality is crucial.

Include Salary Banding

One of the worst feelings for a candidate is finding out they’ve been taking time out of their schedule, for a role that pays significantly less than what they’re currently on. This can be easily avoided by simply including the salary banding in the job description.

Some may argue that including salary banding lets your competitors try to poach your staff, but they’re doing that anyway. Instead, it actually ensures transparency between employers and employees.

In fact, it makes it easier to find salary benchmarks for certain positions and puts a greater focus on company culture.

When you consider that Gen Z won’t even apply if the salary isn’t listed, you’re already severely preventing future talent from entering your business. And while Gen Z may not be your ideal candidate right now, they will be in the future. This behaviour is unlikely to go away, so instead of fighting the trend – go with it!

You’ll see much better returns, both in the long and short term.

Limited Interview Process

Preparing for multiple interview processes can be exhausting and time-consuming. If candidates have to partake in multiple interview rounds, the candidate may determine that the job isn’t worth the effort (or accept a competitor’s offer).

Depending on how many candidates you have at that stage, this could dramatically affect your time to fill – leaving the position vacant, and costing the business in the long run.

Limiting the number of interviews will save crucial time, and allow decision-makers to focus on other aspects of the business.

Have Responsive Hiring Managers

It’s no secret that Hiring Managers get inundated with job applications, usually more than they can cope with – but we must remember that there are people on both sides of the hiring process. Searching for a job can feel like a job in itself, and when businesses can take months to respond (if at all) to applications, the best candidates can be ‘closed off’ to your opportunity by the time you get to them.

In turn, that means responsive hiring managers can make a world of difference.

Just being in regular contact with a candidate can make you stand out. For instance, even if a candidate is unsuccessful, appropriate feedback and constructive criticism can turn them into a future asset for your business.

On the other hand, if the only interaction a candidate gets is an automatic rejection reply 6 months after their application, they may deliberately not work for you in the future.

Investing in Your Processes

Changing your processes isn’t something that can be implemented overnight. It takes investment and dedication to properly overhaul your candidate experience.

With that in mind, it can be easier to get Talent experts to provide guidance and assistance to ensure a smooth transition.

So if you need these services, why not contact Fraser Dove and see how we can help solve your talent problems.