Candidate experience

Candidate experience is king. 

Even if you don’t end up hiring the person, there is a good chance they will talk about you to their friends. You can decide what they will say. The best way to improve your candidate’s experience?  Care.  Measure.  Iterate.

Design the candidate experience

Whether you want it or not, every interaction with a candidate is an experience. The sooner you start caring about it being a positive one, the better for everyone.

By now, it should be enough to introduce a simple process that ensures the basics (such as respect or delivering on promises) and provides the interviewers with guidelinesAt a later stage of your company growth, you will probably want to have your candidate’s journey mapped and a unique experience designed.

Measure

One of the easiest ways to measure candidate experience is to create a candidate survey.

It can be as brief as a one-question survey (e.g. Thank you for choosing to talk to us – please tell us about your recruitment experience and if there is anything we can improve?). You can attach the link to the email ending your hiring process.

Iterate & Improve

Encourage all the interviewers to look for the holes in the hiring process.

Whenever they think that there is something that could work better, they should address it (e.g. they see a candidate getting lost while looking for the office). Because hiring involves so much interaction with people, there are always going to be unpredicted situations or things to improve. While it might not always be visible from the recruiter’s seat, the more every employee cares about the process, the better it turns out.

candidate experience