What came first: an efficient hiring process or a positive candidate experience? A positive candidate experience doesn’t waste candidates’ time. In order to do that, your team needs an efficient hiring process. Since candidate experience and efficiency are very much intertwined, you may wonder whether a positive candidate experience was a direct result of an efficient hiring process, or vice versa.
So how can you get a more efficient hiring process—and enjoy the added benefit of a better candidate experience? You need to focus on the following areas.
A great employer brand doesn’t just help with candidate experience. It also leads to a more efficient hiring process by creating more high-intent applicants. Applicants that are fully aware of your company culture will be interested in moving through your team’s hiring funnel. They will, ultimately, be more eager to accept your team’s job offer.
Here’s how your company can improve their employer brand.
According to the National Association of Colleges and Employees (NACE), the average time from job posting to an interview is 38 days. Couple this with how the average time from interview to offer is 24 days, the average recruiting team’s time-to-hire hovers around 62 days.
That’s not going to work, though, if you want top talent. Do you know how long top talent is available for? Ten days.
Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent
A high-tech and high-touch hiring process helps reduce your team’s time-to-hire. To achieve this, you can leverage technology in your recruiting and hiring process in the following ways:
Incorporating technology for these aspects will give candidates the fast response time throughout the interview process they want.
Back in the day, companies had inefficient hiring processes and weren’t aware of how much a negative candidate experience hurt them. In the Age of the Candidate, however, those days are a distant memory, with a tight labor market and the power of social media to spread negative press shifting the power toward candidates.
Interview feedback is an example of the new power dynamic. Today’s candidates—94 percent of them, in fact—overwhelmingly want personalized feedback after an interview. Companies that don’t provide feedback aren’t going to curry any favor with top talent.
As LinkedIn suggests, your team needs to provide feedback no more than three or four business days after an interview. If your team waits longer, they risk candidates becoming disengaged with your team’s hiring process. Or worse, candidates have a negative candidate experience and no longer support your company, like what happened with Virgin Media.
Gen Z and Millennials want to receive information about the interview process from companies they’re interviewing with. It’s the second most-important aspect of the hiring process for them—right behind quick responses from an employer about their interview outcome.
Your team, therefore, needs to provide a high-touch interview process. They should overcommunicate with candidates about company culture, what the role entails, interview agenda, and any other pertinent information. Articles that describe, in detail, what are the position’s daily tasks are very helpful for potential applicants to fully understand what the job will be like.
You may think creating an efficient hiring process while also improving your candidate experience may be a monumental task. That’s not the case. Just copy what Nasdaq did to save their team 100 hours per week and cut their time-to-hire by 50 percent, all in one year: They partnered with WayUp.
By partnering with WayUp Source, Screen & Coach, Nasdaq notified all applicants within 24 hours of applying whether they’d be moving on in the process. Qualified candidates were then able to schedule a phone screen with WayUp’s early-career specialists. These specialists then provided personalized soft-skills feedback to all candidates—regardless of the outcome—and followed up with their applicant status in under 24 hours.
An efficient hiring process or a positive candidate experience is a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Your team’s talent pool, regardless, will hatch more high-performing early-career employees if you focus on achieving both.
