Ensuring a great candidate experience in your recruitment campaign

Developing a great candidate experience (CX) is a key component to securing top-quality talent. Not only does it provide candidates with a positive first impression of your business, but it inspires them to perform at their best within your recruitment campaigns.  

Our experts have collated some of the most important criteria to consider when developing a standout candidate experience. These are; attraction, communication, and assessment tools.

Begin with purposeful attraction

Attracting the correct individuals to your position is the first step in ensuring you deliver a great CX. One of the key elements of this process is how you choose to deliver information about the position to any potential candidates.

It is important to consider which channels and tools will provide you with the most appropriate means of reaching your desired audience. For example, promoting your position through social media is a fantastic way to hire younger or early career talent, however, it may not be so effective for more senior roles.  

There are many channels available for you to use, all of which can be tailored to fit your available budget and reach the desired target audience. See our list below for a few examples:  

• Social Media (Can be paid or free)
• Radio  
• Television
• Print
• Job Advertising Agencies (Indeed, Reed, etc)

Regardless of the methods you choose to implement, it is critical that the information you relay to candidates is exciting and dynamic. If an individual doesn’t feel immediately inspired or enticed to apply, then the chance of you hiring top talent will severely diminish.  

Being creative with how your content is presented can be a wonderful way of making your role stand out. Utilising video, audio and imagery within your recruitment campaign can help to attract a variety of top-level talent to your role.

Develop a sustainable method of communication

Once you have successfully attracted talent to your vacancy, it is time to consider how you communicate with them throughout the recruitment process. For many organisations, the most challenging aspect of this communication stage is ensuring candidate engagement throughout.

This should be a top priority when planning your campaign. Making candidates feel special and valued can play a big part in their overall engagement and investment in your organisation.

Maintaining regular contact

For many candidates, regular communication with a potential employer can positively impact their motivation to remain in the recruitment process. An effortless way of achieving this can be by using automated messaging systems. These messages can alert candidates at certain milestones in the recruitment process.  

As an example, candidates could receive a reminder prior to their upcoming assessment, or a message upon the completion of a test or assessment. These messages should contain helpful information. It could discuss the upcoming assessment for completion or share information about the next assessment stage (subject to their success) or when they can expect to hear from you next.

There are also other instances where candidates could require contact with you. In some scenarios, candidates may require unique assistance when completing a task or assessment. Therefore, it is imperative for you to always provide a clear line of communication. This open connection with your prospective candidates can reassure and inspire trust in those who are new to the job market.  

Utilise webinars

Webinars are a great tool for sharing information with all your candidates at one time. It provides a fantastic opportunity for candidates to learn more about a given topic and to communicate with your business.  

Many Tazio clients have utilised webinars to prepare candidates for upcoming assessments. These have included providing attendees with a taster of what to expect on the day, running through practise questions and providing guidance on how to use the candidate portal correctly.  

Another way that webinars can be used to improve candidate experience is by performing “tech checks.” These webinars involve running through all the technical equipment that a candidate will need to complete your assessment or online assessment centre. Checks should include both software and hardware requirements such as webcams, microphones, operating systems, device permissions and more.  

Encourage and deliver feedback

Providing feedback is another feature that you can rely on to improve candidate experience during your recruitment campaigns. For many individuals being able to provide feedback on their experience and receiving feedback on their performance, can provide a sense of transparency.

Sometimes providing individual feedback is not possible, particularly on high volume campaigns. However, using a branded feedback report you can deliver comments and scores from an assessment or AC direct to your candidate via email. This extra dialogue can show that you care about the development of unsuccessful prospects and provides them with a starting point for improvement.  

Contrary to this, candidates will also feel valued if you ask them to provide feedback on their experience of your recruitment process. Not only is this a terrific way to engage in further discussion, but it can also be a great avenue for your organisation to learn. Implementing an in-assessment feedback survey  is a straightforward way to improve candidate experience in future recruitment campaigns.  

Design your assessment tools correctly

Your assessment tools and how they are designed have a tremendous impact on candidate experience. There are many factors to consider when creating an engaging assessment, including:  

• How easy is it for candidates to use?
• Does your UI make it clear on how to progress?  
• Can your questions still be accessed by those with specific requirements?
• Candidates who require reasonable adjustments should not be placed at a disadvantage.  
• Do you utilise different question formats?
• Video, audio, written.
• Is your supporting material readily available and easy to understand?

Most of these considerations can be overcome during the planning and testing phases of your assessment or assessment centre.

The tone that you set with your assessment or assessment centre design, can influence a candidate's attitude towards your business. To give a quick insight into your organisation's culture consider using current staff to record video introductions, conclusion segments and much more. These real-life snippets can be a deciding factor in a candidate’s final choice of employer.

Tazio has the functionality to facilitate all the features discussed in this blog, as a part of your assessments and assessment centres.  

We hope that this blog has provided you with some insight into why candidate experience is so important to the success of your recruitment campaign. If you’d like to learn more about how Tazio software can help you to deliver a better candidate experience in your next campaign, contact one of our expert team members.

www.tazio.io/contact-us | 02922 331 888