Are Your Candidates Excited or Frustrated by Your Recruitment Process?

Are your candidates excited or frustrated by your recruitment process?

UX (User Experience|) and customer journeys are frequently talked about these days in marketing and retail (both on and off line).  So it seems eminently sensible that recruiters should also look at creating customer journeys for their recruitment process. 

What is a Customer Journey?

In order to really understand their customer and what they experience, marketers use techniques and tools to put themselves in their customer’s shoes, work out what the ideal experience (journey) could look like for their customers, and then ensure everything works towards bringing that experience to life by making it as efficient, engaging and enjoyable as they can for their customers in order to drive brand equity and sales

Why is this relevant to recruitment?

This should be no different for companies and recruiters trying to engage with, attract and keep the type of talent they are looking for.  Sometimes it doesn’t matter how good a location is, the company reputation, the salary, or the benefits package – these days a bad candidate journey can not only lead to losing a specific candidate but costs the company time and money. The candidate also has the ability to engage with social media, their friends and their colleagues to share the experience. 

It goes without saying, that a great candidate journey can also have the opposite effect and is more likely to lead to other relevant hirings.

What aspects of a Candidate Journey are important?

1. THE CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE

The candidate experience is what the candidate is actually doing and feeling.

Candidate journeys take that experience and help recruiters understand what a candidate goes through at each stage of the hiring process. This then helps them devise the strategy they want the candidate to experience moving forward – enabling them to design a new candidate journey around what they want candidates to do and feel (which should then lead to improvements in the overall candidate experience).

For example, discovering candidates get frustrated and feel devalued by the length of the hiring process can lead to revising the customer journey to ensure the process runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible at every stage.

2. EMOTIONAL CONNECTIONS

As with all marketing decisions, emotions have a value and can influence the options we are considering. These emotions create preferences which lead to our decisions.

Similarly, in recruiting, candidates go through a range of emotions from being mildly curious about a role to feeling genuinely excited, frustrated or satisfied. At Stopgap, we have seen from the perspective of a recruitment agency, the way candidates are engaged with during different stages of their journey which can often make or break an offer.

3. THE CANDIDATE JOURNEY MAP

A candidate journey map is a great place to start.It helps represent the candidate experience at different stages of the recruitment journey (both rationally and emotionally):

• Initial contact (ranging from disinterest to excitement)
• How they find out more about the company and role using the website, search, social, colleagues, Glassdoor, recruitment agency input (getting a bit more interested, less excited/more excited)
• Interview process
• Offer
• Post offer
• Joining the team
  
  

4. TESTING THE PROCESS

Candidate journeys also allow companies to test how candidates may react under different circumstances, identify inefficient recruitment practices and processes, test changes and continue to improve the candidate experience.

How Stopgap can help

If you are struggling with finding the right candidates and keeping them engaged throughout the recruitment process then Stopgap will be able to help.  From initial candidate engagement right through to supporting you and the candidate during the entire journey – we do our best to ensure everyone involved has the best experience possible. We are also happy to give advice and feedback on our perception of the candidate journey and what we would recommend to improve your candidates’ experience moving forward.