When you work in HR, it can be easy to forget that recruiting is a two-way street, and candidates get a vote. But if you log onto your branded employer portal and click through your application process yourself, you’re bound to find a wide variety of opportunities to improve your overall candidate experience and candidate journey.
Even better, get somebody who doesn’t work at the company to go through the process and tell you what they think, external perspectives are even more valuable. When evaluating your process, here are 7 questions you should keep in mind as you conduct a review of your candidate journey map.
In order to build a rewarding employee experience, you need to understand what matters most to your people.
-Julie Bevacqua, CRO at Rise
1. Is it easy for talent to find open roles at the company at the pre-application stage?
When applicants are searching for a job, the experience they have on your site should be smooth, intuitive, and easy. The more steps an applicant has to take to apply, the less likely they are to do so. This means you should avoid doing things like requiring users to create a login and password at the pre-application stage just to apply to a vacancy — this a major buzzkill.
It’s also important that the content of the job description is well-written and accurately describes the role. If your description is poorly written or seems to list an impossibly wide range of responsibilities, this is likely to stop an applicant from applying.
2. Alternative Channels for Sourcing, Why Does it Matter?
Make a list of all the channels you use in your talent acquisition strategy. You probably have a branded employer portal and listings on major job boards such as Indeed and LinkedIn. These are important channels that can’t be ignored, but they’re not enough on their own. Luckily, there is a way that you can massively increase the number of applications you get.
Social messaging platforms are an oft-neglected method of getting in touch with talent. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have over 2 billion daily users combined.
Lead generation and SDR specialists have been utilizing social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook for years. It’s a logical choice, given that social media is where customers spend a lot of their free time. If brands can understand the importance of relating to their customers — why can’t recruiters? Never stop thinking of creative ways to recruit employees.
3. What Impression Does Your Company Make on Job Sites?
51% of job seekers look for jobs almost exclusively on online job boards, according to a 2020 report from Glassdoor. No matter which board you use to post your listings; it’s important that your company’s reputation and tone of voice is consistent across all of them. Why?
Changing jobs is an extremely consequential decision for applicants. Switching employers can mean a change in lifestyle, salary and even career direction. Throughout their job search a candidate needs to feel that they can trust a potential employer.
Having a consistent message across each platform builds trust. It’s also worth trying to improve your rating on employer review sites. 84% of job seekers say they check review sites before applying.
4. Are you Engaging Passive and Active Talent?
It’s important to understand what circumstances can result in someone ending up on your career's website. The channel they arrived from can give you a hint as to what their intentions are or where they are in the recruitment funnel.
The best way to analyze and aggregate behaviors are to divide candidates into two groups, passive and active. Active candidates are those actively searching for a new role and passive candidates could have landed on your careers website by accident. Either way, both groups offer quality candidates.
Check your careers site traffic analytics and see which channels your traffic comes from. Active candidates tend to come from direct and organic channels, which often means they’re typing your company name and a careers-related keyword into Google.
Applicants may also arrive from referral channels such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn, likely wanting to check out your company website after seeing a vacancy posted on one of those platforms.
Traffic analytics is the best way to get deep insight into how you can grow the traffic channels that are working best for you. After examining the data, you may be able to think of some new ways of attracting talent.
5. What Are Your Tactics to Engage Passive Talent?
Passive talent comes in many forms, it can be someone who’s accidentally ended up on your careers page, or joined a webinar hosted by your company. We can discuss two main ways to attract and engage passive candidates — paid and organic engagement.
Paid engagement includes things like employer branding campaigns, paid job postings, and promoted content targeted at your sought-after candidate personas. If your current strategy isn’t working, it’s worth doing some targeted campaigns on LinkedIn to engage directly with the candidates you need.
Organic engagement is a very important tool, it doesn’t require budget resources, but this can mean results take longer to show up. The best source of organic employer brand content is the people you already have. Using real people’s stories helps build trust with candidates, and gives them a sense of what it would be like to work with you.
Another way to engage with passive talent is to build a community around your consumer brand. For example, if you are a sports company and have a growing social media fan base, you can then make potential candidates aware of the vacancy by posting in this community.
6. Are You Communicating With Your Candidates Well?
Whether it’s a status update, an answer to a question, or something else, candidates want quick communication and transparency.
So take a look at your career site with the following in mind. Imagine a situation in which a candidate is going to interact with your brand career touchpoints and ask yourself:
- How well are you delivering your communication?
- How many communication methods are you offering?
- Is the UX user-friendly?
- Which inbox does your career email address go to? Is this inbox checked regularly?
- Are you prioritizing communication channels correctly?
One of the biggest challenges recruiters face is trying to reply to everyone. Chatbots can come in handy here, as they can be used to handle repetitive questions and provide instant answers to applicant’s questions.
To give you a sense of just how effective a chatbot can be, after Airbus implemented their recruitment chatbot, they were able to remove their careers email address from the website just 5 weeks after going live.
7. Are There Easy Fixes You Can Implement to Make Your Candidate Journey Better?
Yes, there are! And if you take a look at your existing candidate journey with the above perspective, you’ll be sure to see them.
Here’s a few easy ones you can do right now:
- Evaluate your job descriptions and make sure they are well written
- Do a tone-of-voice audit on your email communications, making sure they are consistent and clear.
- Check if your careers site optimized for mobile
Time how long it takes for your careers site pages to load as slow loading times can cause candidates to skip over your vacancy. You can use this tool from Google to measure how well your site loads.
Another thing you can do is integrate Employa with your existing ATS. Employ is an AI-driven recruiter that makes the recruiting process transparent for both parties, building trust and making communication easy. Try our free demo to see how you can use Employa to set up the ideal candidate journey.