How can I help my hiring team provide a great candidate experience?

To stand out in today’s competitive job market, employers and hiring teams must provide candidates with the best experience possible. Josh Jones, the Manager of Talent Acquisition at Employ Inc., shares his insight on what will enable your hiring teams to provide a great candidate experience.

1. It starts with people

Having the right people on your interview teams and enabling them properly will ensure that your candidates are being fully vetted. While also having a great candidate experience, I would recommend having some sort of formalized interview training where you can fully describe your interview process and the purpose of each interview. You will also want to be sure that all of the information is documented and accessible so that you can direct your hiring teams to that location. If they have questions or need refreshers in the future. In the interview training I have conducted, I usually cover our full interview process, including each step, and the why behind the step. I also talk about the dos and don’ts of interviewing—being on time, being friendly, and asking open-ended questions. Having the right people on your interview teams can have a huge impact on the quality of interviews that your candidate receives, which definitely impacts their experience.

1. Next comes process

It’s also absolutely critical that you have a well-defined interview process. This also can greatly impact the candidate’s experience. Imagine not having a well-defined process but you know you want four people to interview the candidate. So you schedule a series of interviews, and the candidate goes in for the first interview, answers some questions, and then goes into the second interview and some of those same questions come up again. And maybe that happens again in the third interview. How are we able to learn much about the candidate when we’re getting the same answers repeatedly? Does that really add value to your interview process? If you took those four same interviewers and gave them direction on what each interview should with a specific purpose, this ensures that each interview step adds value for the hiring manager as they receive that feedback so they can then make an informed decision. This also keeps the candidates engaged throughout the process.

1. Use technology

Recruiters do not have easy jobs, but if we can equip them with the right tools, they can be much more effective. Having the right tech stack will ensure your recruiting teams or hiring teams have the right tools in place to effectively and efficiently review applicants and interview candidates while shortening your time to hire. Some questions you can ask yourself are, how easy is it for people to apply? What information are you capturing in their application process? What barriers might you have that keep candidates from applying to your company? Having a well-crafted career page is just kind of the first step in your overall tech stack. There are also really awesome and simple-to-use scheduling tools that can automate the scheduling part of the process. This eliminates some of the emails or calls and the back and forth between recruiters and candidates, which gives my recruiters more time to essentially be sourcing and interviewing versus playing that admin role.

For more information, you can check out this video: