How High Does Your Candidate Experience Score?

Your organization’s candidate experience can be the biggest predictor of how easy or hard it is for you to hire good talent. The kind of reputation your company has when it comes to how well you treat your candidates, from how easy you make it to get hired to how you handle rejected applicants, will determine whether or not top talent even bothers to apply when they see your job postings.

Knowing what your candidates are experiencing is a critical part of recruitment. Without a good candidate experience, you won’t just miss out on high-quality hires, you can actively discourage anyone from wanting to work for you. A bad experience during hiring can make candidates assume working for you will feel the same way.

[Related: 4 Reasons Why Candidate Experience is Driving Recruiting in Today’s Market]

So, how does your organization measure up when it comes to creating great candidate experiences? Are you providing a good hire

The Job Description

Does your job description tell a candidate what they need to know, or does it fall flat? Making sure your job description is accurate, honest, and includes all important information is critical to attracting quality candidates. 

[Related: 6 Red Flags in Your Job Descriptions That Put Off Candidates]

Failing to achieve this sets a candidate up for disappointment and the company up for a failed hire: out of the one in three employees that quit in their first 90 days, “job role not matching job description” is one of the most often cited reasons workers give for bailing on their new job.

A bad job description can also do any of the following:

• Fail to give candidates a good reason to seek employment with your company
• Make job-seekers skip the listing because there’s not enough information
• Discourage potential candidates who see a laundry list of non-skills-related requirements 

Are your job posts delivering a great candidate experience?

+5 Our job posts are detailed in regard to what we offer employees, clear about job roles and responsibilities, and truthful about job challenges and benefits.

+1 We try to create great job descriptions but we find there is occasional confusion or mismatches between expectations and reality.

0 What’s so critical about a job description? We can always clarify things later with the right candidate. 

The right candidate may not even apply if the job description doesn’t give them confidence that they will be a good fit. Use Crosschq Analytics to create profiles of employees you consider quality hires, then craft job descriptions designed to get similar people into your hiring funnel.

The Hiring Funnel

A whopping 92% of applicants never complete an organization’s online application. Why? Most cite the process as too long, too complicated, too repetitive, or too arduous. Candidates are less and less willing to tolerate what they see as a disregard for the value of their time. 

With the added factor of multiple assessments being part of many companies’ pre-hiring process, many candidates self-select out of the process early on. You may want to reconsider how the initial steps of applying to your company are handled if you aren’t seeing the applicant volume you need, or if the quality of candidates isn’t meeting your needs.

Is your hiring funnel delivering a great candidate experience?

+5 We’ve worked hard to automate and streamline applying to our company to remove barriers and attract quality candidates.

+1 We’ve tried to make our application and assessment process easier, but we’re still seeing low completion rates.

0 Who cares how long applying takes? If applicants can’t be bothered to go through the steps, they must not really want the job.

Making sure the application and recruitment processes run smoothly is critical for attracting and employing great talent. TalentWall™ by Crosschq overlays your ATS, showing you where candidates are self-selecting out of the hiring funnel and giving you insight into where bottlenecks exist that make candidates put the brakes on the application process.

The Interview Phase

The interview is often heavily weighted when it comes to decision-making around hiring. However, interviewing can be a flawed process, from how they are scheduled to who conducts them to what questions are asked. Are you interview-ready, or do you need to refine your approach?

Typical interviewing processes only increase the chances of choosing the right candidate by a mere two percent. Further, most recruiters say candidates dropping off while waiting for an interview to be scheduled or even after an interview while waiting for an offer is something that happens all the time. 

Bottom line: Perceptions about your company before or during an interview can actually put a quality candidate off. Training your hiring managers to interview effectively is a critical part of improving your organization’s hiring reputation.

Does your interview phase deliver a great candidate experience?

+5 We use a collaborative interview approach so we can all get a feel for how the team dynamic might work.

+1 Scheduling interviews quickly has certainly helped reduce our candidate drop-off rate, but we still have to make offers to multiple candidates to get an acceptance.

0 Interviews are all about vibing, right? If I don’t “click” within a candidate, there has to be a reason.

Interviews are a two-way street: your candidates are using them to evaluate your company as much as you are evaluating them. Use Crosschq 360 to get a better idea of your candidate’s strengths and needs, then implement collaborative interviewing to let the team and the candidate get to know each other so both sides can make an informed decision.

So, what are your candidates experiencing?

15-20 points: 10 out of 10, would apply again! Your company is respectful of candidates’ time, and stays in communication with candidates throughout the process, even if they don’t get offered a job.

9-14 points: 4 out of 5 stars! You’re doing a lot of things right, and just need a few more details corrected to land a perfect score.

0-8 points: A big fat no. Candidates are telling each other to not even bother applying, their experience was so bad. Time to turn things around!

To learn more about how Crosschq can help your hiring professionals improve candidate experience, ask for a demonstration today.