Articles

Making a Shift in Recruiting: The Candidate Experience

By Ashley Preuss on ClearedJobs.Net

At the Best Recruiter 10th Anniversary Celebration, Principal and Co-Founder of CareerXroads Gerry Crispin discusses Talent Board’s vital candidate experience data and how expectations, fairness, accountability, listening, and closure impact candidate experiences in the recruiting process.

Recruiting has been evolving for a number of years and the candidate experience in particular is really changing the way we’re thinking about recruiting. Inspired by changes happening in the recruiting space, three of us started a non-profit called Talent Board to promote and elevate quality candidate experience. Many of us like to think we treat candidates as customers, it’s a great aspiration but we seldom do. Candidates truly are stakeholders in our companies, and in years prior we haven’t necessarily been their champions, thereby putting our ability to hire at unnecessary risk in the long haul.

Who really is a candidate

It’s easy to define a candidate as someone who’s qualified or someone who gets past the application stage, but everyone is a candidate. They become a candidate the moment they express interest. It’s the moment that they press ‘submit’ on their application.

The reality is, once they believe they’re a candidate, they now have expectations about how they will be treated. If you’re not paying attention to those expectations, you put yourself at extraordinary risk.

Measuring the candidate experience

We have about 300 companies a year actively participating in the Candidate Experience Awards. It’s the largest collaboration of employers sharing data about how they treat candidates that we’ve ever seen. Employers share all of their different touch-points throughout the entire candidate journey and then the candidates share their side of the experience.

As of September 2018, we had over 130,000 candidates completing surveys and sharing how they were treated. We have an opportunity to make a shift in recruiting with this data. You need the data in order to go to your bosses and show that what you’re doing has an impact. If you don’t get invested in being able to do it better, it will impact your long-term ability to hire.

Five practices in particular stand out from the data, with 80% of your candidate’s experience based on them: expectations, fairness, accountability, listening, and closure…

 

Read Full Article Here

Join the CandE Newsletter

Stay up to date on the latest Candidate Experience Events, Insights, Information, CandE Deadlines, Research & So Much More