In the post-COVID world, top talent will choose their employers and not vice versa. Here are four ways to get the candidate experience right in a post-COVID world.
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Balamani
Author
Candidate experience is defined as the product of a candidate’s interactions with an organization across every touchpoint, throughout the hiring journey. Since employees are your first customers, how you, as an organization or HR professional, make them feel during this process determines whether or not they’ll buy from you, i.e., accept your job offer.
And similar to the sales process, candidates go through the various stages of the recruitment process that consist of sourcing (prospecting), screening (qualifying), shortlisting, interviewing, negotiating (nurturing and overcoming objections), and accepting the offer (closing the sale and relationship management).
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, there has been a tremendous shift in organizational dynamics. The uncertainty in the business world has been nerve-wracking for individuals who’ve either lost their jobs or looking for a new one. As candidates look for new opportunities their expectations from organizations have also undergone a transformation. They now expect:
- Transparency throughout the hiring process
- Setting clear job expectations from the get-go
- Clear and timely feedback and communication from employers
- Assuring job stability
- Human and empathetic communication
As we slowly embark on the path to recovery and things get back to normal, organizations will put the pedal to the metal to hire top talent. As you start gearing up for this process, here is how you can get the candidate experience right in the post-COVID world.
Long before applying for a role at your organization, a potential employee will research your organization online. Along with the official website and social media pages, they’ll find out more about you via websites like Glassdoor and Comparably, job boards, forums, and search engine results. And Candidates are more likely to trust peer generated reviews due to their authenticity.
In several instances, candidates may have interacted with you in one way or the other, which also influences their perception. Their interaction with you could range from buying your offerings, coming across your brand messaging, or getting a first-hand review of working with you from their friends or acquaintances.
These interactions form a positive or negative impression of your organization and determine whether candidates will apply for a job or not. In fact, a WorkTrends™ Global survey report noted that 45% of the candidates who had a favorable impression before applying will be interested in applying again if they are not selected in the first attempt:
Here are two best practices to strengthen your brand for the post-COVID world:
The first step to evaluating how potential employees perceive your brand is monitoring your reputation across employer reviewing platforms. Rather than rigging these websites by burying negative reviews under positive ones, try digging into the roots of the negative ones.
Understand the sentiment behind the negative feedback and respond to them accordingly. If convenient, ask ex-employees if they would be interested in speaking one-on-one to elaborate on their negative experience at your organization and what you could do to fix that for your existing and future employees.
Organizations often approach the branding process from the outside. They prioritize perception over company culture. Abetter way to improve your employer branding efforts would be to ask your current employees how they view the organization. Understand if their feedback matches with your brand vision. If not, implement vision internally before you work on transforming your external brand perception.
Applications like PathMotion and Altru Labs are useful for employer branding, storytelling, and user-generated content.
Working through the COVID-19 situation has taken a toll on employees’ mental health. The uncertainty surrounding job security, financial security, and the future is a huge cause of anxiety among employees.
As we head out on the path to recovery, it is natural for employees to be speculative of the organization’s health and their place in the larger scheme of things within the business. It is critical that you continue with your weekly/monthly townhall events and maintain open channels of communication with employees even as external uncertainty reduces.
Here are two best practices to improve candidate experience through transparency:
The simplest way to transparency and credibility begins with the job description itself. State the recruitment process, selection timelines, job responsibilities, expectations, pay, etc. early on in the process. Also, talk about the job learning curve, common challenges, training programs, and so on. The purpose is to set candidates up for success.
Salesforce has created a candidate resources section to help future employees prepare for the interview and selection process, in general:
Post interview, share honest feedback on how they fared in the process. If they didn’t get the offer, explain where they fell short or why they aren’t the right fit at the moment and how they can improve. It’s high time the “We will let you know.” routine is retired.
It helps to create a dedicated content strategy for recruitment. Your purpose should be to make it useful for aspiring employees. This is the place where you can begin to define your core values as an organization and set out a path to implement them. For example, as a part of diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives, HubSpot has created an entire page where the company gives a detailed breakdown of employees by race, ethnicity, gender, and age group:
Platforms like VideoMyJob allow recruiters to create and share videos geared towards every stage of the hiring process. Personalized candidate communication makes the process transparent.
One critical defining criterion of positive candidate experience is the frequency of communication from the employer. Talentegy’s 2019 Candidate Experience Report surveyed 4000+ candidates and found that 63% of candidates aren’t happy with the employer communication after applying for a job.
Negative candidate experience is directly linked to poor advocacy. The WorkTrends Global survey reported that well-communicated candidates are more likely to recommend the employer to others.
In the post-pandemic world, regular communication will be a natural extension of transparency. Tailoring your communication strategy will save a lot of undue anxiety on the candidate’s part.
Here are two best practices to help you improve candidate communication:
One simple way to improve communication during the hiring process is to set up an automated personalized email campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to notify the candidate as they move through the hiring stages. You can send them relevant content to help them prepare for the next stages.
You personalize this communication by using tags that replace the candidate’s respective data (such as name, application number, etc.) in the email. Also, use your email address in the sender’s address field to know they have received it from a real person.
HR personnel often get asked the same set of questions by candidates about the job profile. Organizations keep an FAQ section on the website to answer these questions, but going through a long list of questions is tedious. An alternative is to use an AI-powered chatbot that can respond to candidates’ queries at scale. The machine learning capabilities allow chatbots to learn specific behaviors over time and can be programmed to recommend follow-up questions based on the queries.
Besides the run-of-the-mill recruitment marketing and ATS like Adrenalin and Beamery, AI-fueled apps like Arya Quantum and Brazen let you create chatbots to improve candidate communication.
Building a substantial talent pool is one of the ongoing tasks for recruiters. Besides new prospective employees, the talent pool also consists of candidates who applied for a job position but did not get selected. As the talent pool becomes expansive, recruiters need to engage with them regularly to stay on top of their minds.
In many instances, a candidate may not get hired for a particular job profile, but would be the right fit for a similar role. Having a relationship-building program can help HR people scout the right candidates in such cases.
When it comes to selling B2B products, salespeople run lead nurturing programs to stay in touch with their prospects. Similarly, nurturing your talent pool through relationship-building activities will be immensely helpful in the post-COVID era.
Following are two best practices to get started:
Apart from email lists, social media, forums, and messenger apps are rising in popularity among HR personnel to engage with the talent pool. LinkedIn groups can be powerful to scout active as well as passive candidates. Roche has created an exclusive LinkedIn group to post vacancies, news, and tips. Since the group is moderated by talent acquisition specialists, candidates can post their questions in the group, to get answers.
To accommodate the post-COVID work situations, you can also start hosting virtual events and live sessions on social media to interact with candidates. Messenger apps like Slack can be used to build a small community of people with niche skills, as these groups are relatively easy to manage.
Automation solutions allow you to categorize users based on custom criteria. Use this feature to segment candidates based on their experience, skills, and so on. You can create candidate personas to gain clarity in this aspect.
Creating segments will allow you to nurture them in a way that addresses their needs and wants and define the candidate nurturing program accordingly.
Software programs like Lever Nurture and Hire first allow you to connect with the right talent at the right time through highly targeted and personalized nurturing campaigns.
In the post-pandemic world, the situation will be quite different. Top talent will choose their employers and not vice versa. Therefore, it is imperative to stand out from your competitors via an exceptional candidate experience.
The last suggestion as we conclude the article is to use analytics data as the feedback mechanism. Monitor metrics like the application completion rate, drop-offs, source of hire, and applicants per opening, along with social media discussions, chatbot data to see the effectiveness of your candidate experience program.
To reiterate, the circumstances in the post-COVID world will be vastly different, and empathy, transparency, and top-notch communication should be a prerequisite for your hiring strategy to nail the candidate experience.
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