If a candidate has a poor experience while being recruited to your staffing firm, it can be bad for business.
A negative candidate experience can harm a business’s reputation, cost the company money, and cause candidates to stop using that company’s product. According to Talent Board’s Candidate Experience Research report from 2016, if a candidate has a negative experience during the interview or hiring process, 41% say they “will take their alliance, product purchases, and relationship somewhere else.”
Ouch.
Furthermore, according to CareerBuilder’s research, 42% of candidates who were dissatisfied with how their application was handled would never seek employment with that company again.
The data is clear: a poor candidate experience can negatively impact your business.
Studies found that “44% of workers who didn’t hear back from an employer when they applied for a job said they have a worse opinion of that employer. In a separate study, nearly one-third of job seekers (32%) reported they are less likely to purchase a product from a company who didn’t respond to their job application.”
Losing candidates to a bad recruitment experience raises the cost of recruiting new candidates and cuts into profitability. A candidate who has a poor recruitment experience might post about it on social media. A candidate who had a bad experience is 50% more likely to share it on social media than if they had a good experience. They also might not purchase your products again. This loss in revenue might seem small, but a bad reputation can build over time.
Over a quarter of workers have had a bad experience while applying for a job.
According to respondents, the primary culprits for a bad experience are:
As you can see, the vast majority of these issues reported by workers are communication problems. Candidates applying for jobs often feel like they aren’t being heard. How do they know that their application was received? Who is telling them that the company cares about their candidates? Why do I want to work there if they don’t care about me?
The truth is this: the vast majority of workers (82%) expect to hear back from employers when they submit their application. Sadly, 75% of candidates who applied for a job in 2012 didn’t hear back from the company. By not hearing back from the employer, 32% of applicants said they would change their spending habits and not purchase products or services from that company.
A great candidate experience during the hiring process can make a major difference in your company’s online reputation, recruiting costs, and profitability. It’s to your benefit to spend time and money designing a great candidate experience throughout the application, interview, and hiring process.
Well executed, a hybrid approach that combines technology with a deft personal touch can ensure that candidates have a good experience, lower costs and necessary staff, and catch problems with a candidate’s experience and fix them before they become issues that can negatively impact your business.
Why lean on technology to solve your problems? For starters, the hybrid approach to a good candidate experience can make it more affordable for your company to run. Using smart technology automates some of the busy work and gives the staff you can employ more time to respond and intervene personally in sensitive situations.
Great software can also do the data analysis for you to help you identify candidates who are having problems in situations where you otherwise might not have been able to. How often do you call candidates to check in on their progress, and they ignore your phone calls? Would they, perhaps, be more responsive to an automated NPS survey sent by text message following their first interview? If they respond poorly, say with a 3 or 4, you can follow up with them by phone immediately. But if they respond with a 9 or 10, you know that things are going well, and you never have to pick up the phone at all.
In fact, a system like Sense will run these surveys, collect the data, and aggregate the results continuously on your behalf.
Smart software can also let you continuously measure candidate and contractor satisfaction throughout their lifecycle with your company, from applicant to candidate and from candidate to contractor. These measurements are done through NPS surveys and automated check-ins using multiple communication methods.
This is only a sample of what a great piece of candidate experience software like Sense can provide. Imagine what your hiring managers and recruiters could accomplish if they were freed up to focus on making sure their candidates had a great experience. They could turn Detractors into Promoters with the right intervention and a personal touch.
Imagine the changes your company could make to improve the candidate experience overall if you got immediate feedback from the candidates at every stage of the process. You could create a great hiring experience that gives your happy candidates a reason to market your company for you.
Want to learn more about how to design a hybrid candidate experience of the future in your company? Request a demo of Sense today.
