Ensuring the candidate has a positive experience during the hiring process has moved up on the list of “must haves” for talent acquisition professionals. Even before the pandemic, employers were focusing more attention on how candidates felt about their interactions with the hiring company. The extremely competitive nature of the post-pandemic labor market has heightened this focus. Candidates, after all, are also customers. Walmart, for example, experiences a high level of overlap between their applicants and customers. They need a hiring experience that builds applicants’ loyalty regardless of whether they received a job offer. Candidates can also influence other applicants by sharing their impressions of the employer on social media and among family and friends.
Add An Extra Something to Your Hiring Process
Let’s say your hiring team has been working to improve your candidate experience. What your candidates experience during your hiring process is almost where you want it, but not quite. Like a good recipe, it just needs an extra pinch of something to take it from ordinary to outstanding.
We’ve compiled a list of smart, yet simple changes you can make to ensure a positive, memorable experience for potential new hires. You don’t have to implement them all to see a difference, just the ones that fit your organization. Perhaps best of all, if you already have a purpose-built video interviewing solution in place, these process improvements won’t cost you a penny.
Eliminate phone tag. The back-and-forth voice messages and emails which occur when scheduling interviews are as irritating to candidates as they are to recruiters. Candidates are already juggling a million things, including perhaps a 40-hour work week, so don’t waste their time with outdated scheduling methods. Use the self-scheduling feature built into Modern Hire’s video and voice interviewing technology and let candidates quickly and easily select an interview time that fits best with their schedule. This self-scheduling feature updates everyone involved in real-time, so there’s no chance of a double-booked slot. At Royal Bank of Canada, on average, candidates selected an interview time within 30 minutes of receiving an invitation. This efficiency alone helped shave a full week off the hiring process. With all its convenience, self-scheduling is a great way to start your relationship with top talent and improve your candidate experience.
Cut down wait time. Never forget that for candidates, days feel like weeks when they’re waiting for a callback, or a job offer. Unfortunately, the median time to hire, according to LinkedIn, ranges from 33 days for administrative positions to 49 days to hire an engineer. That’s roughly five to seven weeks!
You can speed up the process for your candidates without reducing quality by integrating video and voice interviewing. Invite candidates into an on-demand screening video interview using one day, and you’ll have applicants to review when you come into work the next morning. Keep the momentum going by emailing the top contenders’ responses to the hiring team and connecting the best-fit candidates with decision-makers in a live video interview from any location, the same or next day. Modern Hire clients have actually cut weeks out of their hiring process in this manner. When you cut down the wait time, you’ll have candidates thanking you, even if they aren’t offered the job.
Prep your interviewers. Every time candidates meet with new interviewers, they expect to tell their story from the beginning. Think how valued they will feel if your hiring managers have clearly spent advance time reviewing their file. No time to prep your interviewers like this? You can with a video interviewing platform. Simply email the best on-demand video profiles to your hiring team, then set up a brief panel-style meeting via video. Go over each candidate’s key points and coach your interviewers on the hiring experience you want to create. It’s a fast and easy way to get the hiring team to help deliver a great candidate experience. And for candidates, the hiring process takes on a more personalized feel.
Let candidates see your world of work. It’s hard for candidates to envision their future with you if they don’t know what it looks like, literally. You can answer their questions about work environment, cube space and work teams in words, or you can delight and engage them by presenting this same information via video. The Modern Hire foyer is a virtual location where candidates arrive before their live or on-demand interview simply by clicking on a link. The foyer is branded to represent your unique organization. Candidates can play welcome videos and job specific videos through the interviewing process – truly a warm welcome to begin the interview. You can also create video tours to show off your employees’ favorite spaces at work and ask potential colleagues to relay a story about their first day on the job via video. With all these options and more, your candidates get the insight they need to be truly excited about joining your organization.
Take the job for a spin. What if your most promising candidates could experience a taste of what the job will be like? Modern Hire’s Virtual Job Tryout measures job-relevant competencies that are proven to be critical to new hire success in the role. These pre-employment assessments provide candidates with a better experience and greater satisfaction by giving them the opportunity to engage in job-relevant tasks and demonstrate skills related to the job. And by minimizing reliance on less objective methods, such as resumes, recruiters have greater assurance their hiring is fair and compliant.
A multitude of issues could be hurting your candidate experience in this new hiring environment, for example, letting candidates wait days between application and interview, calling candidates to set up interviews rather than sending a text, leaving candidates in the dark about your employment experience, and allowing candidates and hiring managers to guess about job fit.
Modern Hire’s an all-in-one platform solution has helped over 700 brands, including more than half of the Fortune 100, cut time-to-hire, reduce bias and upgrade their candidate experience. Learn more about how you can improve your candidate experience.