8 Steps to Create a Positive Candidate Experience

Want happy, productive employees and a standout organizational culture? Start by creating a positive candidate experience. In a candidate-driven market, it’s more important than ever to consider your recruitment process from the candidate’s perspective.

Learn why the candidate experience is valuable, ways to create a great candidate experience, and how you can benchmark success.

Strategies to create a positive candidate experience in recruitment:

1. Have a clear idea of the job you're hiring for
2. Write an accurate, yet enticing job description
3. Make it easy (and even fun!) to apply
4. Send prompt communications and updates at every stage
5. Personalize the interview process
6. Provide the hiring team with all the resources they need
7. Provide prompt interview feedback
8. Keep in touch in between offer acceptance and onboarding

What Is the “Candidate Experience”?

The candidate experience is how a person feels as they go through a company's hiring process—from the moment they read the job description. It’s one of the most important factors for attracting talent and has the power to impact whether or not a candidate will apply or accept a job.

A candidate’s experience, character, and skills are becoming more important than ever.. Why? The employer-candidate relationship has seen a power shift in the past decade, especially with the great “re-shuffling” as the pandemic rewrote corporate recruiting rulebooks.

Historically, employers were able to call the shots during the hiring process. Now, this power has shifted to the candidates.

What Are the Benefits of a Positive Candidate Experience?

A good candidate experience is necessary to find hires.

A great candidate experience, on the other hand, helps you win over top talent, and benefits your recruiting strategy.

When you take your recruitment strategy from good to great, you’ll:

The benefits of a positive candidate experience

Implications of a Bad Candidate Experience

How To Provide a Great Candidate Experience

A great candidate experience requires work throughout the hiring process. Here’s how you can improve the experience for every candidate by making small changes from the job requisition, all the way through to onboarding:

1. Have a Clear Idea of the Job You’re Hiring For

A hiring process quickly falls apart when the team lacks clarity on what they’re looking for in a candidate. If the vision is unclear, it can cause the recruitment process to be lengthy and disorganized for both you and the candidate.

You may hire the wrong person or possibly end up not hiring anyone. Everyone involved in the hiring should understand the role they’re looking to fill, and what skills are needed. Establishing clarity early on can save time down the line. 

2. Write an Accurate, yet Enticing Job Description

First impressions are powerful. Consider your job description as a glimpse into what it could be like to work for your company. How would you like candidates to feel when reading it?

A job description needs to describe more than just responsibilities and requirements.

In a candidate-driven market, you’ll have to answer the golden “What’s in it for me?” question. Here’s how:

• Lay out any perks and benefits up top to show that you prioritize their employee experience. 
• Include a company description that explains what you do, your overall mission statement – and why it’s important. 
• Make sure the job description and skill requirements are accurate. Speak to the hiring manager and team members to clarify main duties. 
• Use clear, factual language throughout – as an organization, you’ll champion confidence and trustworthiness. Candidates will be able to better determine their fit and feel good about applying. 

Components for a Candidate-Focused Job Description

3. Make It Easy (and Even Fun) To Apply

As a candidate, there’s nothing more frustrating than filling out a lengthy application form, only to then be asked to upload your resume which has the exact same fields included.

Behind the scenes, we know application questions can help with filtering and screening processes, but from a candidate’s perspective, they’ve had to explain themselves twice.

To prevent candidates from clicking ‘X’ halfway through, make it easy to apply by keeping your application simple. Ask focused and relevant questions to show respect for your candidates’ time.

Consider also making your application process totally mobile-friendly, as this widens the applicant pool (nearly 90% of job seekers use a mobile device when looking for a job) and encourages a user-friendly experience.

We’ve covered how to make the application process easy, but what about fun? Some applicant tracking systems allow you to easily add brand colors, videos, and imagery to the applications and careers pages. 

Engage candidates by showing what it’s really like to work at your company – use short videos of current employees to share welcoming messages and even record them asking specific questions. Your applicant experience should stand out!

4. Send Prompt Communication at Every Stage

A personalized candidate experience must involve prompt, timely communication, ideally at each stage of the hiring process. If a candidate has taken the time to fill out an application form, they expect a response.

When faced with radio silence they may assume they filled out the application incorrectly or it failed to go through the system.

Send all applicants a warm “thank you” message after they apply, without delay, that explains you’ve received their application, and send out an automated email (or even SMS) so your team doesn’t need to reach out personally.

Send out a prompt thank you message to set the bar – you’ll need to maintain this level of communication throughout the hiring process. The candidate should be informed of their application status and when they’ll hear from you next.

When Should You Communicate During the Hiring Process?

Your candidates should always know where they are in the hiring process, and what the next steps are. Here are examples:

5. Give the Candidates the Choice on How, and When They Interview

To set your organization apart from the competition, create a personalized hiring process. Giving control to the candidate shows a lot about your company – you’re prioritizing their preferences and that you want to provide them with their best version of a hiring process.

Providing a personalized candidate experience is easier than it sounds. A scheduling platform can integrate with work calendars, allowing teams to auto-share real-time availability.

Candidates select an interview based on available time slots. Certain recruitment software allows you to offer candidates the choice of picking their preferred format of interview – say a live video interview, a pre-recorded video interview, or even an in-person interview (where possible) – all based on your team’s availability.

No manual work needed. It’s a win-win – candidates get to pick the type of interview that works best for them, and your team gets to see the best version of the candidate.

6. Provide the Hiring Team With All the Resources They Need

Within five minutes, it’s easy to tell if a candidate has prepared for their interview. Similarly, a candidate can detect if their interviewers have done their due diligence.

Without the right preparation, hiring teams may stumble over their interview questions, ask questions clearly answered in their application, or simply seem disengaged.

For a candidate who’s been waiting for the opportunity to interview for your company, this can be a really frustrating and disheartening experience.

Anyone involved in hiring should know how to interview effectively and fairly. Recruiting teams must provide other decision-makers with interview training, and employ a recruiting platform that offers built-in tools to support them during the structured interview:

• Access to candidate profile: Within the interview link or interview platform, hiring teams should be able to easily access all other information about the candidate. 
• Pre-set questions: Recruiters should work with the hiring manager to come up with suitable, relevant questions. 
• Rating scales: For an easy way to evaluate, a rating scale (say, a scale from 1-5 or 1-10, should be available for each question).
• Rating guides: Keep evaluations objective with criteria for each score given.

7. Provide Interview Feedback

Candidates want to hear your thoughts, regardless of whether they land the job or not.

Nearly every candidate (94%) wants to receive interview feedback.

However, there’s a big disparity, with only 41% of candidates ever receiving interview feedback before.

Many companies don’t provide feedback for two main reasons.

1. The candidate got the role, so they may assume feedback isn’t really necessary.
2. They may shy away from giving feedback to rejected candidates, for fear of legal issues.

A good interview experience is still possible, even if the candidate isn’t chosen for the role. By providing constructive feedback, you’re helping to support rejected candidates in their job search. Additionally, these candidates may be more inclined to explore future job opportunities with your organization.

Quick tips to provide respectful constructive feedback to any candidate

8. Keep in Touch In Between Offer Acceptance and Onboarding

A candidate’s experience continues beyond the point when they sign their job offer. Those few weeks between accepting the role and starting at a company can be full of emotions.

How you communicate during this time can really make or break the candidate's experience. Radio silence can be worrying and increase the likelihood of candidate ghosting.

On the other hand, communicating with the candidate too much (e.g. sending training materials, meeting invites, numerous memos that could be shared within the first week) may overwhelm the candidate.

Consider sending them a “starter pack” to welcome them to the team. This will help to create a positive transition from candidate to employee, plus it’s a great opportunity to share your company culture.

Depending on your budget, this could be an email with useful information and friendly messages from the team. Or you could send them a welcome kit, complete with branded swag to help them feel like a member of the team from day one.

How To Measure the Candidate Experience

The candidate experience is personal to each individual. If you’re only rating the success of a candidate experience from internal observations, you’re missing out on important insights.

How can you benchmark the experience and continue to improve? 

Promptly Send All Candidates a Survey

After a candidate exits your hiring process, hired or not—send them a survey about their experience.

Keep the questions simple and short – aim for five scale-based or multiple choice questions.

Send surveys to rejected candidates about a week after they’ve exited your hiring process – they will probably give you the most honest feedback after a bit of breathing room. Hired candidates might feel more pressure to be positive.

Look at the Solid Data

In your applicant tracking system (ATS), you have access to a lot of real-time data—these statistics help you interpret candidates’ experience:

• Was time-to-hire longer than usual? 
• Were there bottlenecks in your hiring process that slowed down a specific hiring stage?
• What was the dropoff rate (what percentage of visitors left the recruitment process before completion)? And, was it during a specific hiring stage?
• How many of your candidates were referrals?  
• What’s the overall offer acceptance rate? Does it differ depending on the department or location?

This information can help you pinpoint specific areas where you can improve, particularly when combined with the results of candidate surveys.

Conclusion

The voices of candidates matter. Their experience with your company can truly make or break their perception of your business and influence the actions of other potential candidates.

In our candidate-first work climate, it’s more important than ever before to provide a great hiring experience for everyone who applies. Even better, by going above and beyond, you’ll stand out, secure top talent, and build a stronger team!