Enhancing Candidate Experience: Why It Matters and How to Do It Right

In this blog I have talked about the importance of a good candidate experience and that currently most companies are not getting it quite right. This is especially important to note as each candidate can either preach for or badmouth your brand. Therefore, it is paramount to improve the candidate experience and create future ambassadors for your brand.

In this blog I will give you some solutions towards how to improve your candidate experience and fix possible problems; to find or attract the right people and to give them the best experience of your brand.

Fixing the basics

So how do you improve your candidate experience, avoid candidate backlash and become a better employer overall? Well first, let’s look at the basics and start off with the recruitment profile. The recruitment profile is, in modern day companies, maybe one of the most recycled documents. Not only in terms of layout, but often also in terms of text. Now this in and of itself does not have to be a bad thing, but try and be specific in what you are looking for and avoid general qualities that we expect all functioning human beings to have. Remember, the recruitment profile is not only important to find the right person, but it is also a profile on which you should base your communication (more on that later).

In your recruitment profile you should be brutally honest in what you need and very specific in what you are looking for, so don’t beat around the bush. Only then can you find the right candidate and can the right candidate find you. Furthermore, this has the advantage that you can always open up your scope later on if you cannot find the right candidate initially (trust us, this is better than a general profile which attracts 50+ candidates daily).

Another point here is that you might realize that you need something different than the candidates you have seen to fit the profile so far. Then don’t be afraid to change it and keep the profile as a base for the recruitment.  

Last but not least, if you want to attract new talent, then let others review the profile as well. Their insights and criticism might be crucial for something new and revolutionary. This is especially true if you need to replace a leaving employee with a new hire. In that case, you might not want more of the same, but something new and transforming.

Communication

Secondly, let’s talk communication. Marriage counsellors, salespeople, my mom and dad, almost everybody believes that the key to a good relationship is clear communication. Communication within recruitment often comes in three forms:

1. Digital communication (emails)
2. Telephone and video calls
3. Interviews and in-person meetings

Therein there are two things very important: speed and clarity. As this blog shows, most candidates believe that their experience would have been better if the communication (from the employer) would have been better. This includes responding and giving updates when there is nothing to give an update on, for example; when you are waiting for feedback. Try to keep the candidate up to date with the knowledge you have up until that point even if that is barely more than you have informed them last time.

One way of doing so could be automatically triggered messages which get send to the candidate once something happens to the status of his or her application. The reason is simple; the candidate feels involved and heard. They feel that they are a part of the relationship and the process. So be fast and be clear. That is what candidates are longing for.

How you design you communication is dependent on three factors:

1. the recruitment profile (you might address a VP of engineering differently than an intern)
2. the form of communication (emails, phone calls or face-to-face meetings)
3. how far the candidate is in the process (you can reject somebody in the beginning stages with an email, in final stages nothing less than a phone call is acceptable)

When in contact with candidates always show apathy and understanding for your situation. Every candidate has spent at least three to four hours on his or her application and they are very invested in your company. So, try to place yourself into their situation and treat them with care and hospitality. Understand that you are not only dealing with them, but also with their private life, preferences, values, their entire situation. It could be that a candidate had a rough day and is therefore easily frustrated, so be prepared to show understanding on a professional level. Try to connect as well besides just the job role and to create a bond with the candidate. Small things could be the weather, holidays or other events of that sort. Try to avoid religion, politics and social issues as you never know what their stance or background is on that. In that sense you have to stay professional and without bias.

This shows already that it is very hard to fit a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution and that is where we want to get at. This is not going to be an easy and simple fix, but there are solutions, which brings us to our third point: personalized standardization.

Personalized standardization

In the world of messaging there are mainly two ways of sending messages, either personalized or standardized. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Personalized messaging will create a better bond but it takes time and standardized messaging is easier to execute on mass, but it makes for a less strong bond. Therefore, I would argue to take best from both worlds.

Some (parts of) messages always remain the same “Thank you for your application”, “We look forward hearing from you”, “We are reaching out to you because of your experience at XYZ” etcetera. So, feel free to use standardized messaging, but always use a small personal twist in them so the candidate feels that you are trying to establish a better bond with them and that you are not simply copying and pasting every message to each candidate. This can be small talk about their application, something specific they wrote in their letter or CV, or something completely unrelated, just remember: it needs to be easily accessible for the candidate and politically correct. Holidays are a personal favourite of mine but try and figure out what works for you.

If you find something that works, stick with it, even if it becomes repetitive for you, because what is repetitive for you is not repetitive for each new candidate you get in touch with.

Higher integration and prioritization of recruitment

For most hiring managers recruitment is a necessary means to an end. They need somebody for their team and therefore they need to go through (the mostly unwanted) process of recruiting. That attitude needs to change.

Recruitment needs to be an ongoing part of the work of a hiring manager, even if there is no urgent position to be filled right now. At Google every employee is bound to spend 20% of his or her time on hiring (read more about what we can learn from Google here) and so should your hiring managers. Only that way you can find the talent you need. Weekly recruitment meetings need to be established wherein vacancies, candidates and feedback are discussed.

Direct feedback processes need to be created wherein the feedback does not go via a recruiter but comes from the hiring manager or reviewing expert themselves. This requires some training and practice, but yields better satisfaction as the candidate is directly getting feedback from the experts and able to ask them questions directly. This takes time of your HR employee’s hands which they then can use for sourcing better candidates and to look after their needs.

Involving the team will also create a better understanding for the struggles which accompany recruitment and makes the team also more understanding if some recruitments take longer than expected. This integration and prioritization of recruitment in your organization will ultimately affect the speed by which you communicate with your candidates, and that is ultimately the best thing one can improve according to candidates themselves.

In conclusion

Candidate experience is hard to improve, but necessary. It is an important aspect of your employer branding and requires careful planning and altering. The main points you should be focussing on are:

1. setting up a precise recruitment profile;
2. clear and fast communication;
3. personalized standardized messaging, and;
4. a higher integration and prioritization of recruitment.

If you need help with any of these aspects or if you need us to take off the entire process off your hands? Get in touch with us and see what we can do for you!

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If you do a quick search on the internet you will find countless articles on the workplace of the future. It is flooded with blogs on working remotely, AI impacting work, and working more data driven (I also wrote a few blogs on those).

So today I want to talk about something different, on how the workplace will look like if we are used to working remotely, working with AI, and working data driven. In this blog I will take a shot at the social impact of these evolutions and talk about future hierarchies and decision making, how working will be more intertwined with our personal lives, and how human contact and wellbeing will become more and more important in our work lives.  

Hierarchies and decisions

Currently decisions are still made in hierarchical structures where one person’s input might weigh heavier than another. Of course, there are differences in how steep hierarchical structures are, from very tall hierarchies (still mostly common in Asia and parts of America) to flat hierarchies (still mostly common in Europe).

In the workplace of the future, I believe that the hierarchical structures will not disappear, but change in form and appearance. In this sense the traditional manager will be replaced by groups and teams who check each other’s behaviour and performance. Driven by data and AI they will take decisions based upon crowd-based intelligence instead of hierarchical positions.

In a similar fashion, bonusses and salaries will not be a result of negotiations and charisma, but from data-based performance and team approval. There will be more transparency in why certain decisions will be made and more people will be involved in the decision-making structure. This will require a simplified model of decision making as more actors will be involved.

This will make for organisations that:  

• are more agile and can respond quicker to market trends;
• have less internal politics and bureaucracy, and;
• determine, plan and execute better decisions.

Want to find out more about our future hierarchies? Read this article from Collin Williams.

Work and personal life

If working remotely will be fully accepted and implemented in the future, then that will have an implication towards the division of work and personal life. I, and with me many others, believe that working remotely will be fully implemented in the future.

Beside the challenges and opportunities which that brings, this will also have an influence on the division between our work and personal life. Obvious things come to mind as the working day has no ‘solid’ start and finish anymore. So, you might pick up your laptop during the evening, do a laundry run between meetings, or go out for a coffee with the family when there is not a lot to do. This has the advantage that we can become more flexible in how and where we work, but I would argue that this can also result in a lot of new forms of stress.

Since we do not have a solid end of our working day, we will experience a constant ‘working-mode’ kind of pressure in our mind. I would therefore argue that in the workplace of the future there will be more emphasis on planning and the use of calendars to structure your workday, and that this will be required by employers to prevent needless amounts of stress.

What’s more is that I believe that retirement as we now know it, might be a thing of the past. We live in a time that the proportion of elderly population will become relatively larger and that they will live longer as well. It is technically and financially not possible anymore to maintain ‘early’ retirements anymore in the current system as most people stop working around the age of 65 (and often earlier).

This system worked when people lived up until the age of 80, but currently people are generally becoming older. What has also always baffled me is that people at the age of retirement immediately go down from a full week of working to absolutely nothing. I believe this to be a wrong way of retiring. Firstly, because stopping too early with working is detrimental for your cognitive ability (see this article). Secondly, because it drops a lot of people in a mental hole, often feeling social isolated and without a sense of purpose. Thirdly, because these people are often capable of working longer if we rethink our perception of retirement.

I believe that in the future we will go to a step-by-step retiring system, involving medical advice and personal preference. An example of this could be a long-term plan where somebody starts to work 75% at the age of 60, 50% at the age of 67, all the way down to 25% at the age of 75. Other ideas could involve different or less intense functions and shorter working days. Of course, there will be people who will read this with a bit of healthy scepticism and will say that it is physically or mentally not possible to work that long. To them I would say that their arguing is sound if they base those ideas on current-day working conditions. I would argue that future work will become less physical and mental intense due to atomization, robotization and the utilization of AI.

Human interaction and wellbeing

As technology and working methods advance towards working remotely, there will be a bigger future emphasis on human interaction and wellbeing. More and more people will look for ways to interact with colleagues as they make up a large part of their social life and life in general. We already start to see the first signs on the wall with the COVID-crisis: people start meeting up for lunch meetings again and are showing up at the office for a couple of days a week.

So, despite a global health crisis, we still long for human interaction. In the future this will mean that there will be more emphasis on events that promote human interaction despite the working-remotely working culture. Things you can think of are: regularly reoccurring teambuilding events (going from once a year to once every other week), lunch meetings, culture promoting events, working remotely in teams etcetera. The employer of the future will support this in the future as it is important to maintain the company culture and the loyalty of his or her employees.

In an ever-changing world more driven by data, we believe that more and more companies will take a vested interest in their employees’ health and wellbeing to keep them at the top of their performance. This might mean that future employers will get involved to help out their employees with personalized health programmes in accordance to how their employees sleep, eat, drink and feel. So, in this sense data will be collected at the future workplace to analyse how the employees are doing and in the same sense will personalized health plans be a part of the future workplace. You might think of personalized food plans, wellness and mindfulness programmes, and personalized ergonomic working stations.

In conclusion

In this blog I’ve tried to look beyond just stating the future ideas of working remotely, AI, and being data driven and gave a sense of the implications that these developments might have. I believe that the future workplace will be ruled by mass-intelligence, driven by data, and focussed on health, wellbeing and performance optimization of the employees.

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First impressions matter. So being aware of the first impression of a new employee in your company is crucial to his or her future performance. That’s why in this blog I’m taking a closer look at onboarding.

Onboarding somebody into your company is a lot like welcoming somebody into your house. As with all welcomes, it is not just a first coffee and a short introductory chat. It is a continuous demonstration of cooperation and affection. A good onboarding process is paramount for the productivity of your employee and his or her integration with the team. It encompasses everything from the first small introduction over a cup of coffee until the more formal monthly one-to-one meetings. In this blog I will give some practical advice on how you can improve your onboarding process and the integration and engagement of your new employees. If you’re thinking: “well most of this doesn’t apply to us because the COVID-19 crisis is forcing us to work remotely”, think again. Onboarding is now more important than ever to create a well-functioning team, you just need to rethink your structures in a digital matter. More tips on that here.

Handbooks and more

Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first. As a part of any onboarding process, there are a lot of practical matters and questions that your newly hired employee has. Handbooks are a great way for employees to peacefully read through and find an answer for their questions, in the first turbulent weeks of a new employment. In the same line, make sure that the handbook has a FAQ as well, where the employee can find the most frequently asked questions, just to make it a bit easier for him or her.

It does not all have to be dull practical stuff, however. You can also include more interesting things in your handbook such as:

• A formulated version of your vision, mission, strategy, culture and values.
• An overview of your team members, including pictures, practical information and fun facts.
• An overview of your customers/clients and stakeholders, and a short summary on each and every one of them.  

Meeting the team(s)

If you want to feel at home, you need to know who are living in the house. It is therefore important to have meetings with the different teams. Now this is where things become a bit difficult to define. As companies differ in size, it becomes more difficult for them to involve everybody in the process. Meeting the team is a process that starts off large, with a lot of people involved, and is narrowed down over time.

Normally the process looks like this:

1. A (digital) announcement of the new employee, who he or she is and what he or she will be doing, for the entire company.
2. A short (digital) introduction of the employee to the entire company (or a larger part of the company).
3. A more thorough introduction with colleagues from different departments with whom the employee will work closely with.
4. A meeting with representatives from the HR, Legal, and Facilities/IT departments.
5. A meeting with the closest colleagues of the employee (or the entire department). Hold this meeting off-site, perhaps as a lunch meeting or afternoon coffee so that the team can really spend some quality time to get to know the employee.
6. One-to-one meetings with the manager.
   

Introduction and training

After you’re done with shaking hands, just like at home, it is time to take a coffee and sit down to talk about some more serious stuff. In this sense I am talking about more thorough introductions on what the company does and how they do things, what they stand for and how they communicate this. Employer branding is a big topic in these introductions and trainings. You need to give the newly hired employee a good idea of what your brand represents and how this translates in his or her activities.

This is also the moment when an employee gets their first introduction to the internal systems, ways of working and contact persons, including possible clients. In this sense it is good to have a training set up from a more senior employee or somebody from the IT department to make sure that the new employee can work with the systems you use. Client or stakeholder meetings are also a big part of the process. A senior employee should take the new employee with him to introductory meetings with the potential clients and stakeholders so they get an image of who you are working for/with.

Another part of this process are job-specific trainings which can be ongoing, but which get introduced in the onboarding process.

Feedback

So now that you have bombarded your newly hired employee with as much information as you possibly can, it is time to harvest some information as well. This means: one-to-one meetings with feedback. These are often meetings between the newly hired employee and his or her manager, where both parties can give feedback to one another. These meetings should be held regularly and continuously throughout the career of your employees over at your company. Try to have such a meeting roughly every month with your employees, even their first month. Of course, everything is still fun and games then, so there will not be that much feedback coming from your employee but try to challenge them even then already. Is there really nothing that the company can improve? How was the first impression? Was it well enough? Is there anything that should be improved? Remember, the image that the company gives of to its own employees often also translate into the same image that they give off to clients and stakeholders.

In conclusion

A good onboarding process is everything from the first handbook until formal meetings with clients and stakeholders. It is a large process which, if done correctly, can kickstart the career of your new employee within your company. In this blog we have given a brief overview of all the essentials. If you want to have a more detailed roadmap of what a good onboarding process looks like, click here.

If you need help setting up your onboarding process, just reach out to us and we'll set up a meeting to see what we can do for you!

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