The ebook Series “The Tru Files” from Kelly Services in cooperation with Bill Boorman collects insights and impulses from the tru events’ participants. In this guest article, Anke Thielemann from Kelly Services summarises the latest insights into candidate experience and gives 6 tipps.
About #tru
#tru is a series of so-called “uncoferences”, in which HR decision makers, bloggers and first movers within the HR world discuss about recent and future trends and developments in HR. Other than in normal conferences, there are no name tags, no presentations. The concept includes discussions on eye-level rather than long presentations or slide shows. The events has already proved to be a success in many countries in the United States, Europe or Asia. The numbers speak for themselves: 48 Events, 8000 participants and 10 great ideas.
Candidate experience – a major buzzword but still neglected
The latest edition is getting into details with the topic candidate experience. Nevertheless this topic seems to be what everyone is taking about, still to many organisations don’t seem to worry enough about what their candidates really experience. We think: this needn’t and shouldn’t be the case!
For example: It’s frustrating when candidates have to fill in endless questionnaires in addition when they simply want to upload their CV into a talent management system. And it even gets to the point where it becomes disappointing, when then, after this frustrating exercise of answering all these written questions, no reaction follows and candidates are not hearing back from organisations in month. They may not even know that their application was transmitted at all. In an even worse case, the application process may kick off in the first place, the candidates is invited to three, four interviews (and therefore invests a lot of time) and then never gets a single word of feedback, not even the information that he is not longer considered in the process. This leads to bad feelings, frustration and anger on the candidate’s side. Some candidates may even go to the length of cancelling their application and putting this organisation on their blacklist.
6 tips for a better candidate experience
All this can be avoided. There are effective steps to be taken with which companies can optimise and boost their candidates’ experience: with a mixture of process optimisation, automatism efforts and simply common sense. We want to give you six fundamental guidelines on how to better interact with your candidates:
- Concentrate on less, but better fitting candidates.
- Evaluate your application process for all your candidates – even, or especially, for those that were not successful. Asking only those you were successful might give you an distorted and incomplete picture. A complete evaluation becomes possible by realising an evaluation that randomly pics candidates at different stages of your recruiting process.
- The hiring managers have to communicate with the candidates as well and this is especially true for those being in the inner selection. The extent to which the candidates are satisfied and happy with the process is a direct result of the extent to which the hiring managers are involved.
- Learn from your customer management. Candidates should be considered as and treated like clients. So why not integrate your customer management into the process of engaging with your candidates?
- Offer added value to your candidates by e.g. giving them the chance to attend webinars.
- Consider all applicants as part of your talent network. Some candidates may be the perfect match to a future vacancy, even if you’ve refused them now.
Enthusing tomorrow’s talents
No one said optimising your candidate experience is an easy task, but it’s definitely worth it! Even today, you have the chance to fill tomorrow’s talent pool by listening to your candidates and treating them with true interest and respect.
