Do you know where your candidate experience begins and ends? Do you know what the wider boundaries of your hiring experience are?
Many people miss the fact that the candidate experience starts with your brand. It’s how the company appears to the world, what you say externally and how you portray life at the organization through the brand’s online presence.
The next step in the hiring experience is when a candidate applies for a job and receives a response from the company. This tone and manner of this response should be in line with the brand reputation that has already been built.
From this point on, touchpoints would be quite clear: hopefully the candidate would get an interview, then an offer and they accept. From here, the candidate experience extends to their first day on the job, and even though their onboarding period.
With so many touchpoints in the hiring experience, this creates numerous opportunities to impress or fall short of expectations in the eyes of your future employees. A negative or inconsistent hiring experience can permanently damage a brand’s reputation and ability to hire and retain quality candidates. It’s important to map out each of these touchpoints and to make them as meaningful and beneficial as possible, by considering a few points:
Your control over your reputation is limited
Today, a person has access to a surmountable amount of information about a company through very public online platforms like Glassdoor, Google and LinkedIn. It is these channels that will help inform the next decision of your potential ideal candidate.
The only control that you have over your employer brand online is to consider your hiring experience and make it so good at every step that even candidates who interview with you don’t get the job, will leave you a great review on the interactions that they had with your brand.
What are you posting?
Avoid posting long job descriptions that include paragraph after paragraph of dense, bullet-point language and meaningless industry-related jargon. Instead, focus on creating job posts and adverts that are written and targeted towards specific audiences, and that give valuable information about what the role entails and what will be expected of the chosen candidate.
Map out the candidate experience
It is important to map out every impression and interaction of your candidate experience. This will help you identify areas of success, troubleshoot areas that may need some improvement and opportunities to stand out from competitors.
Don’t be afraid to ask
Sometimes the best way to know how well you’ve executed your candidate experience, is to simply ask your candidates.
Whilst it is useful to monitor public platforms like Glassdoor and LinkedIn to gather an idea as to how candidates perceive your brand and hiring experience, a great approach can be to gather useful information through candidate surveys as well. Having a reliable source of feedback and information will help to continuously refine your external brand and your hiring process.
Make onboarding an experience
Onboarding is an important step in the hiring experience and should revolve around how a successful candidate becomes part of the company culture and fits in as an employee.
During the onboarding phase, a new employee should be shown how to do the specifics of their new job, and how to begin to navigate company, processes culture and more. Onboarding should be seen as your opportunity to create an employee experience that will excite new hires and motivate them to become ambassadors of the company externally.
Take control of your hiring experience
The hiring experience – from job post through to onboarding – shapes a candidate’s impressions of your brand. If your hiring experience is disorganized or left unconsidered, this could damage the way that candidates perceive your company and therefore your company’s ability to hire overall.
By owning every moment of your hiring experience as an employer, you can improve your overall brand impression and make it easier to hire great candidates who are excited to work with you and provide value to your company.
Let our team of recruitment specialists here at Supreme Staffing Group, take control of your hiring process, we will find you the most talented candidate who is skilled and the best suited for your team.
Supreme Talent – Expertly Matched. Lasting Success.
