When is the last time you checked up on your candidate experience?
It may sound silly, but auditing your career site is critical for ensuring its effectiveness. By using your own experience for reference, you can indicate what potentially works for prospects and what may hinder them from applying.
If it’s been awhile since you last ran through your career site, you may consider doing it today. Far too often, employers unknowingly put obstacles in place for candidates. In return, they actually repel the best talent instead of attracting them.
Easily avoid this recruiting blunder by doing a simple run through of your entire candidate experience. To help get you started, we’ve included the top 3 elements good candidates hate.
We’ve all seen this job ad before: “We’re looking for a driven self-starter who provides thought leadership through clear communication.” Not sure what that means? Candidates don’t either. To ensure you’re providing clear expectations, create job descriptions that are void of buzzwords or internal jargon. Instead, use down-to-earth language that clearly communicates the scope and purpose of the job.
There is nothing more frustrating to a job seeker than a long and arduous application process. In fact, the barriers to application often correlate with the drop off rate. The more obstacles candidates must go through, the less likely they are to finish applying.To avoid losing your best talent to a clunky application, provide better tools for the apply process. Whether you enlist a new applicant tracking system (ATS), or provide entry to a Talent Community widget, there are platforms specifically built to deliver a clearer path to apply.
Once a candidate applies, the best thing you can do is provide clear communication that you received their application, and set expectations around the next steps. If candidates don’t get any kind of affirmation, they’re likely to feel as if their resume went to a black hole. This only creates a negative stigma around your employment opportunities, and kills any opportunity that your prospects will refer other great talent. To facilitate channels of communication, invest in a messaging platform that allows you to send automatic replies, as well as custom messages. This also presents an opportunity to talk to your candidates on a regular basis. By building relationships with your prospects, you can create a pipeline of ideal talent—while inspiring those same candidates to get the word out to their peers.
Start the process now. Go to your career site, look around and put yourself back in the position of a job seeker. Read through your job postings, and decide whether they are accurate overviews of each positions.
Count how many clicks it takes to find your jobs. Run through the application process and see how you feel. If you were applying today, would you complete the process and feel excited about potentially working for your company?
