Candidate Experience – Best Practices

“It doesn’t matter how much voice you give to your employees if you don’t actually do anything with that, it doesn’t matter”.

This is just one of the many great things I’ve heard on the 3rd and 4th of May while attending an online event for human resources pros, Talent Summit.

This event was brought to us by HireVue and Glassdoor, gathering a crowd of amazing speakers like: Lou Adler from Adler Group, Jennifer Newbill from Dell, Kirsten Davidson from Glassdoor and many others.

From Employer Branding and onboarding specialists, to recruitment and interviewing gurus, it was a pleasure to spend my nights listening to their insightful ideas and tweeting with other HR fellows from all over the world.

How does your candidate and employee experience look like?

The main idea wrapping up all the seminars of the event is that technology and the constant flow of information shifts the candidates and employees to a consumer position.

For the purpose of the article I will divide the consumer journey in 3 main areas and talk you through the main insights for each of them.

Awareness & Consideration

• First of all, if you are not taking care of your own employer brand online, someone else will. You should focus on developing an employer branding strategy that reaches your wanted talent through the right channels, at the right hours and communicating your employer value proposition through different types of content.
• Since candidates behave now as consumers, looking for information about your company long before they even get to the decision point, social media becomes an important factor in your communication strategy.
• Create programs that will engage your employees to be active on social media. Share their journeys and empower them to share too.
• Use different types of content on different social platforms. Measure awareness (impressions), engagement (clicks), followers, response rates and sentiment (both internal and external).
• Transforming your career website in a distribution instrument rather than a destination will help you engage with your consumers in different touch points during the recruitment process.
• Use remarketing to draw your candidates to you before the decision point.
• Survey your digital users regarding your career site and pivot based on their feedback.

Interest & Recruiting

• Inform your recruiters and hiring managers on the commitment you’re making to your candidates.
• Use your career website for letting your candidates know more information about your recruitment process.
• Train your hiring managers to ask difficult interview questions. The more difficult the question, the more satisfying the job.
• Consider video interviews as a recruitment instrument.
• Use a 40/40/20 “less is more” plan for building an “A” team while recruiting: 40% networking, 40% email; 20% job advertising.

Employee experience

• Using social media in your organization can create stronger connections and better employee experience. It’s amazing to give your employees instruments with which they can speak up, but the more important thing is how you implement their feedback.
• In order to promote great work in your teams, you should do 4 things: encourage effort, reward results, educate, celebrate careers. During the onboarding of a new employee create connections, instill pride, focus on belief & share the little achievements.
• Create connections cross-unit by inviting your newest employees to as many meetings as you can.
• Give your newest employees a mentor and assign them a buddy who can help them through developing both their hard and soft skills.
• Prepare starting kits (backpacks, pens, agendas, T-shirts, etc.) for your new employees.

Nowadays, the access to information is making a difference, but the winning companies will know how to use it in their favor. So go build your own consumer journey, check out the touch points with your candidates and employees, from the awareness stage all the way to the hiring one. Build them with the help of social media & other digital instruments, focusing on your consumers all the time.

If you want to find out more about the event and discover some insightful conversations, follow the hashtag #TalentSummit on Twitter and be part of the community.