Consequences of a bad candidate experience are devastating, both for your recruiting process and your company’s ability to sell products. In this blog post, we will present 3 most common causes of a bad candidate experience and suggest simple, yet effective ways to fix them.
“Candidate experience” is candidates’ overall perception of your company’s recruiting process.
It is the way they experience your company's whole recruiting process, from sourcing and screening to interviewing and rejection, or hiring and finally onboarding.
This means that it encompasses their whole candidate journey - all 6 stages through which job seekers go through: Awareness, Consideration, Interest, Application, Selection and Hire.
In the last few years, the term “candidate experience” has become one of the most important HR buzzwords in recruiting and hottest topic in recruitment marketing.
Why is everyone talking about candidate experience?
Candidate experience is not just a passing fad. There is a real need for it.
According to research, nearly 60% of candidates have had a poor candidate experience.
Here are the 3 most common causes of a bad candidate experience:
Research shows that the No.1 frustration during the overall job search is the lack of response from employers.
According to CareerBuilder survey, 75% of applicants never hear back from employers.
Imagine investing hours and hours into preparing your job application, only to never hear back from a company. How would you feel?
Yes, you are busy, we know. But providing a closure for each and every candidate doesn’t have to be a time-consuming and exhausting process!
How to fix it:
One of the biggest culprits of bad candidate experience are job application forms that are too long or too complicated.
According to CareerBuilder survey, 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity.
If you want to provide great candidate experience and stop losing talent, you need to optimize your career site.
How to fix it:
An unpleasant job interview can literally destroy candidate experience and cause candidates to opt out form your recruiting process altogether.
According to the LinkedIn survey, 83% of talent say a negative interview experience can change their mind about a role or company they once liked.
How to fix it:
According to CareerBuilder survey, the effects of one candidate’s negative experience can lead to a broader impact on the employer’s ability to recruit or sell products.
Further research showed that:
Not only can a negative candidate experience have a disastrous impact on your recruiting process, but it can also very negatively impact your company’s bottom line - and cost you big bucks.
You are probably familiar with the famous case of Virign Media, whose experts calculated that a bad candidate experience costs the company $5M annually.
This is because an unhappy candidate can easily turn into an unhappy customer who will boycott your company’s services or products.
In this blog post, we presented three most common causes of a bad candidate experience and suggested ways to fix them.
However, there are many more factors you need to consider if you want to deliver a winning candidate experience.
To deliver that perfect candidate experience, you should start from your candidate persona and carefully craft your candidate journey by paying attention to each and every touch point.
This might seem a bit complicated and overwhelming, but don’t worry, you can easily improve candidate experience in 10 simple steps.
