We recently hosted a webinar, Inside the Candidate’s Head: The 5 Stages of the Candidate Experience with SmashFly. We talked about the candidate experience and why making an impact at every stage is imperative with experts at SmashFly and Glassdoor. Throughout the broadcast, we received many questions from attendees and wanted to address them.
Catch the full webinar recording and some frequently asked questions below:
Q: If you’re a smaller company, would the candidate experience fall to HR?
A: We recommend that the department who works most closely with candidates owns the success of the candidate experience. In most organizations, this will be Talent Acquisition. However, in smaller organizations without a dedicated talent acquisition function, HR would own the candidate experience.
Q: Our workforce is mostly Baby Boomers, however our head of HR wants us to completely revamp our hiring process to attract Millennials. Where do you recommend we start?
A: Great question! We recently wrote the guide to recruiting recent grads & Millennials -- you can download it here. Ultimately, Millennials care about growth opportunities, work/life balance and workplace transparency. Identify examples of this within your organization and promote it within your recruiting and interview process.
Q: Would it be beneficial to have a “retention” department (separate from recruiting) to ensure feedback from candidates and employees is received, posted and responded to?
A: A dedicated department could be costly. Assign one member of your team to be responsible for the project mgmt of soliciting and responding to reviews. This can be part of this employee’s quarterly goals. Note: they do not need to be the one responding, but should be managing the response timelines, criteria and consolidating feedback to share with key stakeholders.
Q: How do we keep candidates updated when they’re in the pipeline and we are not sure where they stand or when they’ll receive an update? I.e. how do we keep them warm?
A: That can be tough. However, we encourage companies to be as transparent as possible -- even if you don’t know exactly what’s going on in your hiring manager’s mind, you still need to follow up with candidates and be transparent. Meet with your hiring manager and get an update on where they’re at with the candidate. Then, set realistic expectations with your candidate about how long it will take to get back to them and what the next step is. As long as you’re honest and upfront, it’s okay if you don’t have everything figured out.
Q: As a staffing agency, we recruit resumes although there may not always be a specific role we’re hiring for. How do we convince candidates to come in to interview if there isn’t a specific company we’re hiring for?
A: Transparency is the best policy: if you won’t be hiring for a specific department for a while, you can fill those opportunities with content that might help candidates’ career trajectory, like interview tips or industry news. The fact is that most candidates grow their skills over time and we want to be able to develop ways to keep engaged with them even if it’s the not the right fit today so we can keep top of mind when there is the proper fit down the road.
Q: How do you document and keep track of “passive” candidates, or people you want to keep warm?
A: This varies based on the ATS as well as any recruitment marketing solutions you purchase. Once you’ve identified how to access the contact information of your passive pipeline, nurture the relationship with consistent content about your organization and employee stories.
Q: Who should be responsible for recruitment marketing -- marketing or recruiting?
A: Historically, we find “recruitment marketing” is just a way for recruiting teams to act like marketers to attract talent, so this would fall under your recruiting or talent acquisition function. We also wrote the book on this -- Recruitment Marketing For Dummies -- to help recruiting teams do just that.
Q: What happens when a candidate has “buyer's remorse”? How do you convince them they made the right decision at your company?
A: First, we encourage transparency throughout every stage of the hiring process -- nothing is worse than being sold on a position or company only to accept a job and realize it was all a ruse. Be upfront and honest about the pros -- and cons -- of your organization to avoid buyer’s remorse in the first place. But, if you do have a new hire who feels duped, sit down with them 1:1 to truly understand what was promised during the hiring process and how they feel let down. Then, you can work to address that specific issue and put together a plan to ensure that employee still has a favorable working experience at your company!
Q: Would sharing employee stories during New Employee Orientation be appropriate?
A: 100%. While we recommend reviewing the employee story before it’s shared with the greater group, these are exactly the types of sound bites that new employees will go home and share with their friends and family. Remember, more than half trust content provided by employees as a source of information on a company (Edelman Global Trust Barometer Survey, 2015).
Q: How would you suggest measuring each stage of the candidate journey?
A: Engagement metrics are great, and Google Analytics can give you insights like time on site and traffic sources to your career page and your jobs. Surveying and encouraging constant feedback is a great way to track anecdotal information from candidates at each stage of their journey as well.
Q: What are some best practices for capturing candidate leads before they actually apply for a job?
A: The best way to capture leads is through a talent network form in the apply flow. In order to capture more leads, you need to attract more of them to your career site and your jobs. And you do that through recruitment marketing channels like SEO, PPC, retargeting, social media, events, content marketing and more. Events are a great way to encourage a captive audience to sign up for your talent network – we’ve seen organization have iPads ready for sign ups.
Every channel you use in recruiting should point to two call to actions: 1) Join our talent network and 2) apply. Lead conversion should be a major goal for every recruiting initiative.
