Over the last year, Modern Hire published several pieces that covered the importance of the candidate experience and hiring trends for the coming year. However, those pieces were published before the world was drastically changed by COVID-19.
Given the circumstances that have changed how many of us live and work overnight, we wanted to revisit those white papers to see what points still hold true, and what has changed.
In The 2020 Trends Report: Change Equals Opportunity, we wrote about an increased focus on hiring those considered more likely to be retained. Now, stability will be even more critical for companies, so keeping your retention rate high means making smart hiring decisions in the coming days and weeks.
We also expected technology to play a more significant role in delivering great candidate and recruiter experiences. Now that more of the workforce is working remotely, the importance of technology is greater than ever. Often overlooked, however, is the need to maintain a personal connection between candidates and recruiters when your talent acquisition moves to a more virtual format. Technology is critical, but it cannot relationship build for you. Technology is at its best when it enhances those relationships.
We also mentioned the importance of streamlining the hiring process. Top candidates go quickly, and if internal processes aren’t efficient and helping move things forward, the ability to land the candidates you want will be compromised. While this point may not read much differently now than it did when initially written, it holds.
The Truth About What’s Hurting Your Candidate Experience talks about the difference between a valuable hiring platform versus options that are more bells and whistles than actually beneficial technology. Now that interviewing and hiring at scale will be a much more common occurrence, the need for the right platform matters even more.
We conducted a study that concluded that 82% of candidates said their experience throughout the interviewing and hiring process influenced their decision to work at your organization.1
The first point we wrote about then is still the first point we would talk about now: shifting the focus to the candidate. With candidate-centric elements like text interviewing, virtual job simulations, and event scheduling in the hands of the candidate, you can deliver a high-tech, high-touch, branded hiring experience to all of your candidates.
Additionally, a platform that provides comprehensive support throughout the entire hiring process, including being able to manage and maintain communication in a branded experience, helps build deeper connections with the candidates.
Lastly, we discuss the use of artificial intelligence (AI), and how companies can use it to help the entire hiring process. We see AI as a great tool to help companies make better hiring decisions, and deliver top-notch candidate experiences to as many people as possible.
In both of these pieces, we identified several practices and platform benefits that will help any organization focus on delivering experiences to candidates that will reflect positively on the organization, whether each instance results in a hire or not. The candidate experience already mattered immensely to interviewing brands. And while we’re all redefining what work, productivity, employment, security, and community are during a global health crisis, it’s never been more critical to get hiring right.
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- Independent study commissioned by ModernHire with 200 candidates who actively searched for a job in the prior six months.
