Fact: You can’t improve quality of hire without attention to your candidate experience. You may be measuring quality of hire according to hiring manager satisfaction, first-year retention, and other post-hire insights. All are essential indicators, yes – but they’re also after the fact. A candidate experience platform helps recruiting teams approach quality of hire from the front end before job offers are made.
What is a candidate experience platform?
A candidate experience platform is virtual hiring technology that works to engage candidates in a talent acquisition journey. Hiring is a two-sided process after all, and a critical step in forming any good partnership is understanding the other side’s perspective. With a candidate experience platform, recruiters can create educational, personal hiring experiences that enable candidates to make an informed decision. Advanced platforms like Modern Hire also bring data-driven hiring capabilities to the process. By inviting candidates into hiring and using objective data for decisions, you can measurably improve quality of hire.
An advanced candidate experience platform will offer many tools for increasing candidate engagement. Here are six ideas for using it to improve quality of hire:
- Be transparent with better communication in each phase of hiring. Good communication shows you respect your candidates and helps build their trust in you and your company. A candidate experience platform lets you keep candidates up to speed with efficiency and keep top talent engaged in your process. Put yourself in your candidates’ shoes to plan touchpoints with just the right amount of frequency. Also, give your messages some personality! What can you say to help candidates feel you genuinely appreciate their participation in your process? You can look to the language your organization uses to thank customers for inspiration on tone and length.
- Show candidates their fit with pre-hire assessments. Use the job simulations and job-related exercises in your candidate experience platform to help candidates envision their fit for the job. This type of experience can get candidates even more excited about working in your organization. It can also help candidates who were unsure about the role but applied to it see that it isn’t the right fit for them. Either way, candidates learn more about your employment experience and have meaningful opportunities to demonstrate their competencies. At the same time, you get accurate predictions of candidates’ future job performance to use for data-driven hiring.You don’t have to worry that using pre-hire assessments will cause candidate drop-out by lengthening your hiring process. Research shows that assessment length is not a predictor of completion rates. The highest completion rates come with a candidate experience platform that takes candidates end-to-end through the hiring process. Learn more about candidate completion rates and attrition in our white paper.
- Engage candidates right at the start with a text interview. Text interviews are easy to complete and brief, and they’re informative for both recruiters and candidates. They also bring candidates immediately into your hiring process when utilized in a candidate experience platform. Use text interviews to ask a few simple questions related to job qualifications, such as possession of a CNA license or forklift certification or ability to work the third shift. Right away, you and your candidates know if they will move ahead. Candidates have a good experience, and you only advance those who are qualified. A platform like Modern Hire can automatically invite qualified candidates from text interviews into the next step in hiring and let the others politely know they won’t be considered.
- Get and give candidate feedback. Candidates themselves are a good source of information about your hiring experience. With a candidate experience platform, you can ask for and collect candidate feedback data to help you detect issue areas and target your improvement work. The ability to provide feedback makes the process more engaging and personal for your candidates too.Giving feedback is a valuable strategy as well. According to Talent Board, companies see a 15% increase in candidates who report a positive hiring experience when they are given specific feedback on job fit after an assessment. Not sure what to say? Be transparent with the assessment results, then offer a few brief but robust tips they could consider moving forward.
- Move it along with technology. The best candidates only go a few days in the job market before they accept an offer. There’s no time to waste, and a candidate experience platform can help minimize candidate wait times and prevent the hiring delays that could cost you top talent. The Modern Hire platform integrates tools like automated interview scoring, candidate auto-advance, and automated scheduling to increase speed-to-hire, so you get to job offers faster with qualified candidates.
- Tighten up your collaboration. What does the transition from working with you to interviewing with a hiring manager look like for your candidates? It can be seamless or make candidates feel like they are starting at square one again. Choose seamless by using your candidate experience platform to tighten up collaboration. Forward candidates’ recorded on-demand interview responses and assessment data to hiring managers so they can get to know candidates in advance. You can also meet virtually using the platform to bring hiring teams up to speed on the shortlist and top talent before starting interviews.
These are just some ways to maximize your candidate experience platform’s use to create personal hiring experiences for candidates and improve quality of hire. If you’d like to see technology-enabled hiring through a candidate’s eyes, request a Modern Hire demo today.