What Gives Your Candidates a Positive Candidate Experience?

So, what impacts a candidate’s perception and experience of a company’s employer brand and its recruitment process? There are many parts of the recruitment process that contributes to a positive candidate experience. Looking at the 4,9 million data points of candidate feedback we have here at Trustcruit we identify 3 parts: Communication, Relevancy and the Use of Time.

Communication

To create a positive candidate experience, communication is a central part. Through the data gained by Trustcruit, it is found that a simple act of getting back to a candidate after an interview is highly appreciated and valued by candidates. By reaching out to and giving every single candidate feedback after an interview a huge increase of the positive candidate experiences can be made. Even though it might not seem important to reach out to those who did not pass through to the next step of the recruitment process, it is. Think about the basic fact that the candidate experience is the perception and experience of a company’s recruitment process but also the employer brand. Even though a candidate got rejected it is still important that he/she developed a positive candidate experience so that the perception of the employer brand is not harmed.

Relevancy

When a candidate has gotten the opportunity to be interviewed, the relevancy of the questions asked during the interview are important. Candidates that feel that they are asked irrelevant questions usually contributes to a decrease in the CNPS (Candidate Net Promoter Score). Asking relevant questions is a tricky part of creating a positive candidate experience since the perception of what is relevant and what is not can be quite diffuse. But, by measuring the candidate experience and gaining feedback from candidates it gives a company the possibility to understand which questions that their candidates perceive as relevant or irrelevant.

Use of time

“Time is money”, like people usually express it. Searching for a new job might involve putting in a lot of effort and time into the process of finding a job that you are interested in and then working your way through a recruitment process. Having an efficient recruitment process is therefore one thing that a company can benefit from. Candidates generally like to be involved in efficient processes and more specifically appreciate when an interview is booked fast. If it takes a long time for an interview to be booked, the CNPS often gets negatively affected.

The time aspect goes hand in hand with the aspect of communication which both have a huge impact on the candidate experience but is not necessarily very complicated to work with from a company’s point of view. With small means and continuous development of the recruitment process, a huge impact can be made on the candidate experience. This means that it might be such a small thing as an email that contributes to a positive or a negative candidate experience. Therefore, make sure to develop a recruitment process that prioritizes the parts that your candidates appreciate no matter how simple those might be.