Improve recruitment: 5 ways to boost candidate experience

Guest blog by Credentially.

There are more job vacancies than unemployed people in the UK for the first time since records began. Moreover, the recruitment industry has seen significant growth over the last few years, with greater demand for flexible working opportunities and greater online access to information and people. So naturally, there's a lot of competition to find and hire the best candidates, and the industry is very competitive. So, to stay ahead of the competition, recruiters must adapt and find creative ways to attract the best talent.

Below are five fantastic ways to improve candidate experience throughout the recruitment process.

Keep your candidates engaged throughout

With most of the recruitment taking place over email, LinkedIn and phone calls, great communication is vital in the recruitment process. Despite so many resources and the internet at hand, it can still be difficult to maintain communication, especially when you have so many other candidates or things have gone quiet on the client's side.

Worry not - there are clever little ideas you can implement easily to maintain engagement and make the candidate feel well looked after.

One simple thing to do is to write blogs on practical tips for a job search. Then, after publishing the blog online, send it via email to your candidates as offering advice, e.g. a blog on how to best prepare for face-to-face interviews. The candidates will appreciate the gesture and feel you're looking out for them. Furthermore, this email campaign can be sent to numerous candidates and be personalised to mention their names. We'd recommend softwares such as HubSpot to achieve this, but feel free to type personalised emails individually. Utilising different channels such as social media, email, and blogs will help improve your online recruiting.

A key part of the recruitment process is onboarding. Credentially specialises in onboarding in the healthcare industry. Their experience and research found that candidates anticipate a long onboarding process despite their onboarding being much faster than the industry average. This is because their candidates had no way of tracking their progress, so no way of knowing how long onboarding would take. Credentially’s solution was simple but effective. On their client dashboard, they added a section where candidates can see which steps are involved in the onboarding process and track their progress from having to upload certificates to a DBS check, which candidates love.

Explain the perks

Companies often have to battle it out to get the best candidates, from offering lucrative pay to swanky new offices with cool bean bags and a pool table. Offering great packages, which can include equity, holidays and flexible working, is an excellent way for you to attract candidates. Despite putting forward these offerings, you may find candidates unfazed or accept a role elsewhere with similar packages.

The key is knowing all the perks on offer, understanding which relates to your candidate and having a conversation with them about it.

Whether that's explaining the maternity leave package and hybrid working options to someone who would be looking to start a family soon. Or if the company is offering a share package, knowing which candidate requires you to explain in depth what that means for them, from the values of a share to tax implications. If your client offers an electric bike discount scheme, find out how your candidate plans to travel to work.

Transparency is key here, and candidates will appreciate your time on them. Once they've understood the package better, your client will be a more attractive company to work at.

Feedback

It's very common to get things wrong, and there's always room for improvement. In fact, I'd like to congratulate you for taking the first step in recognising you can improve. The next step is figuring out what and how. This article holds great ideas and insights on how to improve your marketing efforts, but we also highly recommend you ask your candidates too!

Whether it be the final call when they've accepted an offer or holding an exit interview. Learn from your candidate's experience, and ask them to be honest about their experience during the recruitment process.

Most importantly, take it on board! Candidate feedback will only improve your recruiting strategy.

Automate and streamline your processes

Automating your hiring processes will only save your HR team time and energy, which can be better spent elsewhere. We're in the age of tech, software and AI, which means there are plenty of options out there you could be looking into.

Modern recruitment software can be a great tool to track progress and help nurture candidates. However, no one HR software can cover everything or at least do everything well. An example is onboarding - which your current HR software won't cover or only has basic tools and features. Whether you use Trac, Eploy, or other ATS, these will be missing many aspects of the onboarding process.

Chances are you're conducting the onboarding process on an Excel sheet. As a result, you have tons of data, row after row, which is extremely difficult to keep track of, especially when done manually.

The onboarding stage requires a lot of tracking of documentation, training, DBS checks and more. Therefore, you must have a process to streamline all of this.

The Credentially software streamlines healthcare onboarding, with a traffic light system to flag those who have not completed their onboarding process and AI technology to recognise expiry dates on certificates and automatically send our expiry reminders.

Keep the process short

No one likes to spend unnecessary time on simple tasks, and candidates leave the application process if it's too long. Candidates should be able to apply to most roles in under 5 minutes. If not, candidates can find many other roles to apply to within 5 minutes rather than spending more time on yours.

Rather than asking candidates to fill out application forms, allow them to upload their CVs. After all, they spent a reasonable amount of time creating a CV. Why, then, should they rewrite it all into your form?

Job listing websites such as Indeed and LinkedIn offer an excellent feature for candidates to upload their stored CVs to a job listing in one click. Utilising such a feature will increase and improve your candidate pool.

This is a guest blog contribution for the REC website. The views expressed by guest writers reflect the individual's personal opinions.