Improve the Candidate Experience to Get Better Talent in the Door FasterYou never get a second chance to make a first impression.HR professionals trying to improve their candidate experience and talent acquisition leaders face these challenges: Shifting gears: A changing job market means that candidates have more power to turn down roles. If their candidate experience is poor, top talent WILL drop off during the application process.Getting with the times: Recruiting is stuck in the past, with limited ATS functionality, poor career sites, and outdated talent acquisition methodologies limiting the ability to “wow” talent.Finding the problem: The candidate experience is rarely viewed from a holistic standpoint, so it can be hard to pinpoint issues.Lack of concern: A LinkedIn survey found that 0% of recuiters felt that candidate satisfaction was a top concern. So even if it is a problem, no one cares!All resulting in…Organizational repercussions: A poor candidate experience means that the time to fill positions is longer, which costs the organization in productivity, recruiting costs, and lost time.Stakeholder frustration: Candidate experience issues are harmful to the candidate, but are likely causing frustrations for hiring managers and the talent acquisition team too.If you don’t treat your candidates like your customers, you will lose out financially. A CareerBuilder survey showed that 32% of job applicants felt that they were less likely to maintain consumer ties with an organization who had ignored their job application. A poor candidate experience hits you right where it hurts – the bottom line. Organizations can no longer afford to be lazy with their candidate experience. Candidates, and in particular, top talent, will expect to be courted by employers, instead of the other way around.Sites like Glassdoor mean that your hiring process is transparent to other potential candidates – if you’re doing a bad job, people will know, and then they won’t apply either.The candidate experience matters because attracting top talent matters – high performers are critical to the success, engagement, and revenue of the organization.Your team needs to use ACE (accuracy, communication, empathy) throughout the entirety of the candidate experience to really optimize processes.Learn why the candidate experience is so impactful, including who a poor experience affects and what the repercussions of it are.Understand the ACE (accuracy, communication, empathy) principles, and how they affect the candidate experience. Review and improve 3 critical pieces – online career experience, applicant tracking system, and talent acquisition team – before getting a more granular look at how to fix the overall candidate experience.Use our Candidate Experience Assessment Tool to pinpoint where in your candidate experience you are encountering roadbumps. The candidate lifecycle is broken into 5 segments – employer brand, application process, screening & communication, interviewing, and offers & follow up – so that issues can easily be identified and addressed. Review advice for the 5 segments and learn how to solve problems as identified by the assessment tool. Get step-by-step action items on how to implement best practices, as well as a checklist for each segment to make sure you’ve hit the major points, and an assessment of that segment to ensure that you’re doing well.Use our Candidate Experience Service Level Agreement Template to establish timelines and procedures with hiring managers and the talent acquisition team that allow them to do their jobs effectively while keeping the candidate top of mind. Communicate key changes to hiring managers and the talent acquisition team.

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