How to Improve Candidate Experience in Recruitment

Here are some ways you can enhance the candidate journey:

1. Make it easy for candidates to find the information they need fast. Set up a dedicated careers page on your business website with employee testimonials and a sneak peek at what working for your company is like. 
2. Put names to faces. Send out a short video about the hiring team to introduce yourself to candidates. This video can also be a great place to reveal more about your workplace and company values. 

Give applicants a simple way to contact the most appropriate person. This could be providing timely responses to candidates via email or having hiring managers open up their LinkedIn profiles for some back-and-forth dialogue with prospective applicants.

2. Develop clear job descriptions

Fuzzy job descriptions (JDs) confuse prospective employees and line managers when it comes to interviewing and managing their new employees on a daily basis. In fact, a recent poll on LinkedIn showed that 67% of recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates said that unclear JDs are a common barrier to job interviews.

What’s more, there’s a disconnect between what information hiring managers think is clear on a JD and what a candidate gleans. Three-quarters of hiring managers believe their JDs are clear enough, but just 36% of candidates agree with them. 

Vague language, such as “competitive salary” and “self-starter,’ is open to broad interpretation. Pay and benefits should also be clearly defined. If you're looking for someone who works using their own initiative, spell that out rather than using terms like “self-starter,” which can mean different things to different people.

Instead of listing the job responsibilities and the education or experience required, think about the specific hard skills, soft skills, competencies, and traits the ideal candidate should have. Also, consider that many skills today are learnable, and (depending on the role) not everyone needs to have a decade of experience in a specific role.

Here are some ways you can create a positive candidate experience with clear JDs:

1. Be ultra-specific about expectations and avoid sweeping statements that confuse or mislead candidates.
2. Avoid the use of abbreviations. If you want to use them, spell out what they mean. Many abbreviations can have double meanings and add confusion. For example, HR can mean human resources or hourly rate!
3. Highlight the qualifications and experience you need. Rather than stating “years of experience in accounting and finance,” put: “2 years of experience in auditing and preparing departmental budgets.” Make it clear which experiences are essential and which are “nice-to-haves.”

3. Reduce hurdles

65% of companies lose out on their best candidates because of lengthy hiring procedures.

Making candidates jump through hoops with hurdle after hurdle and interview after interview creates a poor candidate experience. Extensive online applications with numerous (and duplicative) fields to fill out, along with asking for additional documents like cover letters, evidence of qualifications, or work samples, can:

• Discourage the best candidates from applying
• Lengthen the application time 
• Increase the chances of mistakes via typos or input errors

Errors can disqualify great candidates because they’ve unknowingly entered something wrong in the drawn-out process. By this time, a great candidate can be overlooked, or they may lose faith and drop out of the application process. 

Here are some candidate experience best practices for reducing hurdles:

1. Include clear instructions about the application process. Guide candidates through the entire process, from completing the application to the stages afterward and the timescales. This can help reduce confusion and minimize errors, leading to a smooth candidate experience.
2. Reduce the number of fields on your application form. Do you need to ask for qualifications again if you’ve already asked for them on their resume?
3. Simplify the application process with fewer steps. Consider combining initial candidate screenings and interviews into one session.

4. Improve communication via automation and mobile-friendly practices

Poor communication during the hiring process is frustrating for the recruiter and candidate. Providing conflicting information and having lengthy response times can cause them to lose interest. 

With 35% of respondents identifying poor communication and responsiveness from potential employers as frustrating during their job search, candidate-centric recruitment practices that make communication easy can keep the hiring excitement high and the momentum going.

Even so, recruiters have to tackle changes in candidate communication preferences when hiring. Since over half of candidates now prefer to receive text messages to arrange an interview rather than an email or phone call, adapting to trends can sometimes help create a better candidate experience and maintain interest.

Here are some ways you can improve communication across your hiring processes:

1. Use pre-hire assessments to understand candidate personalities and communication styles. Confident candidates are typically OK with a more assertive communication style, whereas less confident folks might need more constructive feedback. 
2. Evaluate your communication processes. Get feedback on how you give and receive candidate information to work out how to improve them for the next round of new hires (more on this later).
3. Use automation to automatically schedule interviews, send important reminders, and coordinate other vital forms of communication.

5. Remove “free work/samples”

Yes, it takes time and effort to both apply for a job and review resumes. However, asking for free work to determine if someone is a good fit creates more barriers to entry for candidates, and worse, can become predatory when companies receive actual unpaid work under the guise of work samples. 

Here are some ways you can still review candidates’ skills without asking for “free work:”

1. 1. Using pre-hire assessments to gain a comprehensive view of candidate fit. These assessments offer an objective way of allowing applicants to highlight their abilities and strengths without making them feel as though they’ve been taken advantage of with free work. Multi-measure assessments like Wonderlic Select use leading industrial-organizational psychology to measure cognitive ability, motivation, and personality relative to a specific role.

• Asking to see previous work. Often, a candidate’s portfolio can reveal the type and quality of work they’ll be able to deliver at your company. During the interview stage, you can also ask targeted questions about how they tackled past projects to gauge their problem-solving skills at a high level. 

• Considering alternatives. If you really need to see how a candidate would tackle a specific project or task, paid assessments or paid sample projects can provide a more equitable way of revealing the type of work a candidate can create within certain parameters or with a certain prompt. Just make sure to pay market rate! 

6. Make the candidate experience engaging

Your people are your greatest asset. When actively engaged, employees are more productive and motivated to do their best work. Yet, actively disengaged employees who oppose their employer’s goals make up 15% of the global workforce.

By engaging candidates in a fair and thoughtful hiring process, you increase the likelihood of applicants feeling respected. They’re also more likely to get a sense of your company culture, which will help them figure out if the role is the right fit. 

So, even if they don’t land the job, they’re more likely to pass along the word of a great experience and become ambassadors for your organization.

Here are some ways you can make your candidate experience more engaging:

1. Give candidates a way to showcase why they’d be a good fit for a role based on their experience, natural tendencies, and intrinsic capabilities. Wonderlic elevates the candidate experience beyond resumes, helping candidates feel that their whole self is being considered rather than judged solely on their experiences.
2. Share assessment results as a thank you for participating. With Wonderlic, candidates receive their test results at the same time as recruiters, giving them critical insights into why they may or may not be a good fit for a role. This can help them work out where they excel and where they need to improve for future job applications.