Why Candidate Experience is Important and How to Do It Well

Recruitment managers see 2023 as a watershed moment in the hiring process. Because many operational and market aspects have altered forever, firms are keen to discover how to recruit superior personnel in 2023.

As recruiting talent gets more difficult, recruiters are increasingly concentrating on creating a positive applicant experience because of the clear and visible rewards it provides.

As a result, candidate experiences are how candidates see your business as they progress through the various stages of your recruiting process. It is getting more significant for a variety of reasons. It is because strong applicants have many options, and if you do not make your business an appealing place to work, they will be reluctant to consider you further.

Why is Candidate Experience Important?

Candidate experience is crucial because it helps recruiters attract top talent, which makes more individuals likely to take a career in the firm, increases recommendations, and improves employer branding, among other things.

So Here Are The 3 Reasons Why Candidate Experience is Important:

• Building a strong reputation – As we go forward in 2023, the rise of digital platforms has made applicant and employee reviews and ratings more generally recognized and relied upon. As a result, a good applicant may significantly contribute to your organization's reputation.

• Carve A Stronger Position – Therefore a great applicant experience may put you in a better position since candidates view the positive experience as an indication of a stronger organization that processes things that will help them perform better once recruited.

• Engage better from the start – Hence, an excellent applicant may emerge if you engage with the possible recruit at every touchpoint from the beginning. This improves engagement, which in turn improves your most crucial Hiring Agency KPIs.

3 Benefits of A Positive Candidates Experience

Hence, among the many advantages of a pleasant applicant experience, the following are the top three:

1. Attract Better Talent

While you would want to analyze the applicants thoroughly, there is also the issue of attrition - candidates dropping out at various stages of the recruiting process - with the strong candidates developing techniques so that more competent individuals remain in your selection process until the conclusion. As a result, you have a larger pool of candidates to pick from.

2. Fetches You a Better ROI

The goal of all of this expertise is to enhance candidates' experiences, hence making the recruiting process more efficient. Therefore a better applicant experience reflects how mature your recruiting process is, and a good candidate experience delivers a greater Return for all the resources you invest in your hiring process.

3. Enhances Your Employer's Brand

All hiring managers understand that prospects conduct extensive research on a business before applying. Hence, in 2023, your employer branding is closely tied to applicant experience, and the advantages of a positive experience flow down to your employer branding.

How Can The Candidate Experience Help You Hire a Better Candidate in 2023?

As we can see, applicant experience is quite beneficial in terms of improving corporate branding and obtaining a greater ROI. Yet, how might applicant experience help you hire superior employees in 2023?

Here Are 5 Ways:

1. Better Acceptance Rate

You've watched more candidates walk away without taking an offer than you'd want to recall, and all of the resources you've invested in analyzing background checks and processing papers have been squandered since better applicant experience is associated with greater acceptance rates.

Companies that give a superior candidate experience have more applicants accept the final offer, and there is a good reason why prospects interviewing with you are also evaluating other employment offers.

As a result, they are more willing to relocate abroad and are more likely to work in more than one location.

As a consequence, they are assessing you in the same way that they are assessing other firms. When customers see how much you appreciate the selection process, they will realize how much you value people, which will immediately lead to a better post-offer conversion rate.

2. Stainger Leverage Through Candidates You Turned Down

Hence, one intriguing aspect that businesses frequently miss is the influence of rejected applicants. You undoubtedly turned down dozens of candidates for everyone you chose. The applicants you did not choose have an impact on the caliber of people you will be able to recruit today and in the future.

So many of these candidates will be sharing their experience online, offering reviews, and ranting about your hiring process, so if you have provided timely communication, say thank you for their time, updated candidates on their hiring status, and made them feel valued and important, the rejected candidates will walk away with a favorable opinion of the organization and your hiring process.

We noticed that more employees are being employed remotely, thus candidates are increasingly responding to the experience evaluations and ratings that others have provided online about your firm.

The higher your rating and reviews, the more applicants will apply.

3. Improved Application Completion Rate

The application completion rate, or the percentage of applicants who complete the full application as a percentage of the total number of candidates who started this process, is a reliable measure of whether your candidate's engagement is on track.

As a result, the length of time it takes to process your applications will influence how quickly prospects drop out. A recruiter's research, for example, suggests that if your application takes more than 15 minutes to complete, the application completion rate might drop by 365%.

So you can learn a lot from this one way of looking at it is that if you can make your employer brand stronger and your whole applicant experiences exceptional, you might be able to avoid it.

As a result, the recruiting process step should focus on how to reduce application time so that individuals may complete a large number of transactions with a single click of the mouse since there is no reason why your application time should be too long.

Hence, if you can reduce the time it takes to complete your application, you will be able to improve candidates' recruiting experiences and have a larger talent pool to deal with.

4. Higher Referrals from Existing Employees

So, if you want to buy a new car, you will most likely be speaking to existing customers, or people who are currently using that model, and if the users are happy, they will say good things about the model, which will make you more likely to buy that model, so accepting a job offer is not significantly different. If your present workers are satisfied with your business, they will tell others about your excellent recruiting and onboarding processes, for example.

Because the opinions of current employees are highly respected, your future recruits will pay close attention to them.

They see this as a sign of a strong business and become more inclined to pursue career prospects with your company - all thanks to effective candidate experience management.

5. Richer Pipeline for Future Hiring

Good recruiting managers respect their candidates' time. Updating accurate job descriptions, keeping candidates informed at all stages of the selection process, and swiftly responding to their inquiries. All of these indicators indicate that the firm is investing in a 1:1 Best Consultant Agency.

When you have more exceptional candidates than positions, you must inevitably turn down some of them. When you are kind enough to thank them and explain why they were not recruited, it is not as part of some clever recruitment strategy; it is about demonstrating that you appreciate their abilities and their time.

Best practices for candidate experience guarantee that proactive recruiting managers look beyond the present needs or talent pool. It aids in the development of a future pipeline. That way, if demand arises in the future, they will be able to reap the rewards.

Final Words

Regardless of the size of your firm, you want to ensure that every stage of the recruiting process is maximized. A strong candidate experience strategy is not a choice; it is required. Yet, it is a significant difficulty.

Communications are an important part of creating a great applicant experience, and they can be efficiently automated if you have good talent management software.

The massive shift brought about by the epidemic is here to stay through 2023 and beyond.

To help you hire better, your talent management system will need to rise to these obstacles. You will be able to establish fantastic, future-proof teams if you can harness your hiring system to consistently give a superior applicant interview experience.