Recently we hosted our very first live webinar here at Zocket, talking about creating a winning online candidate experience in 5 actionable steps. Did you miss it? Don’t worry we got you covered with a free replay.
But first of all, let’s talk about why paying attention to your online candidate experience is crucial to the survival of your business in the long run.
You might think we are exaggerating with this statement, but the signals are alarming and closing your eyes about it is surely not beneficial.
Online Candidate Experience Matters!
Think about it, your employees are your company’s biggest assets. Attracting and hiring those who identify with your purpose and values will thrive in your organization, giving you a head start to your competitors.
There are many different reasons why a great online candidate experience drives the success of your company.
One of it is the societal development and talent shortage we are currently facing in all industries, with the greatest influence on highly skilled and highly educated sectors.
The signals are:
– Declining unemployment rates.
– Baby boomers leaving the industry.
– Automation is not catching up quickly enough that we are able to completely balance that out.
To ensure that that your recruitment process and your online candidate experience do not affect the size of your talent pool, it’s critical to nurture your potential candidates on the market right from the start.
So, what are the 5 Steps you can take to create a winning online candidate experience?
1. Assess your status-quo
First things first, asses what you’re doing right now. You have attracted employees before that have the feeling they are in the right place.
Keep and protect the elements that work and function. But also, be open to understand any bottlenecks that might exist.
When assessing your status-quo, we suggest to look specifically at 4 things:
– Assess your employer brand
– Assess overall candidate experience
– Document and assess your application process
– Do a bias check
2. Drive with your company’s purpose
One of the main reasons we see whether candidates apply to your company is your purpose. Candidates need to feel emotionally attracted and connected to it.
Your purpose must be real. It has to be felt and carried throughout your organization – Real outweighs pretty. But also make it clear and simple that it is easily understandable by everyone.
3. Dare to be authentic
Authenticity, another of those buzz words. But it shouldn’t be undervalued when talking about improving your online candidate experience.
We don’t say that you have never been authentic in the past. But you can appeal more authentic with just a few small changes that match the promise to the reality.
Maybe you will receive less applicants in the process, BUT the candidates that apply will have a better fit to your company and culture.
Four things to look at when improving your authenticity:
– Real vs Stock images.
– Differentiate departments.
– Ensure employee buy-in.
– Humanize your career page.
4. Demand consistency
Most of your candidates visit your website, social media channels and company review sites to gather information prior applying to work for you.
To increase trust and understanding, it is important to ensure consistency across all those channels.
We understand, a big struggle working against this consistency is that different parts are managed by different departments and teams. For example, your website is managed by the marketing team, whereas LinkedIn and other recruitment arms are managed by HR & Recruitment.
However, all this is controllable and should be managed to appear consistent to your candidates across all channels.
5. Adopt a candidate-centric mantra
A critical peace when looking at your online candidate experience as a whole is actually putting the candidate at the center of this process.
You need to walk in their shoes to understand their journey. Letting them lead the way and learn from it. Each step of the process should support their decision, giving them the information, they need to make a well based decision. Also, looking at your process with an independent and unbiased review.
If you want to learn more about boosting your recruitment process by creating a winning online candidate experience in 5 actionable steps, sign up for our free webinar replay.
We at Zocket believe that people are so much more than what can be shown on a CV and the best-fit job matches are a blend of skills, talents, culture, personality, and personal preferences. Our goal is to help companies understand this and take the necessary steps to future-proof and humanize the candidate experience, putting the candidate back in the picture.
