The experience that candidates have when engaging with your company through the recruiting and hiring process is one of the most critical factors in your program’s success. What a prospective employer thinks of your company, before, during and after the recruiting process – whether hired or not, can have significant impact on your results.
This “candidate experience” (or CX) has shown to be long lasting and impactful on the total pool of other, potential candidates. Building a strong employer reputation will help drive quality candidates to your firm and increase the likelihood that those you seek will be interested in your organization. A poor experience can harm your employer reputation, and correspondingly turn off the best candidates and make bringing onboard those you want most exceedingly difficult.
Our latest ebook on Driving Candidate Experience dives deep into how to ensure you are delivering a quality experience through best practices, tips, checklists and more. While there are a number of pieces that top performing companies put in place to improve their CX, one of the most important is having the appropriate systems in place.
There are a number of ways that technology can ensure you deliver a candidate-focused experience. Today, a modern, collaborative applicant tracking system (ATS) is a ‘must have’ to put your hiring program in the best position to achieve its goals.
Without such an ATS to ensure positive first impressions and candidate journey, you’re reducing the likelihood of delivering a positive CX. Without the right platform in place, you can inadvertently end up with confusion, ghosting, miscommunication, etc. that can deter these candidates from considering or joining the company, and adding to a negative employer reputation.
The ATS Functionality You Need to Deliver a Superior Candidate Experience
Some of the functionality that an ATS provides to ensure a strong CX includes:
Branding Consistency
A modern ATS can ensure candidates have a consistent and positive experience (showcasing the “why you should work here!”), differentiating a company from most others. Deliver consistent branding across every touch point, from a career site and email communication, to organized and professional interviews.
Career Page
Ensure a “you want to work here” presence when first engaging with prospective candidates. The right ATS can provide a smooth and seamless experience for candidates when reviewing open positions from your corporate website.
Candidate Chat
Use always on and available ‘recruiting bots,’ Facebook Messenger and other ATS-integrated tools to engage more tightly with candidates and deliver a more personalized experience.
Interview Support
Maintaining a consistent process is an important element of any high performing program. From defining the perfect candidate to establishing candidate criteria for each position type to preparing necessary info for each interviewer to evaluating candidates with agreed scorecards to collecting feedback, a modern ATS provides organization and defined processes throughout the interview cycle.
CX Survey
Automatically measure the experience candidates had with each recruiter and interviewer to deliver meaningful feedback and improvement practices. Ideally, your ATS can deploy surveys with a ‘smart question’ sequence, so each survey adapts to the candidate taking it.
CX Reporting
A modern ATS can track performance scores and appropriate KPIs, to better understand candidate motivations and how they learned of opportunities (to identify best performing sources).
Process Efficiency
A range of modern ATS automated features provides a wealth of benefits such as: steps to send notifications, ‘smart’ workflows to advance candidates and schedule interviews; timely candidate communication, etc. This way, process delays are eliminated and the candidate’s journey is much more efficient with every recruiting step not requiring human touch automated.
Only by using a modern, collaborative ATS can you easily take advantage of the benefits these candidate experience focused features provide. To learn more, check out our Driving Candidate Experience ebook and uncover the key to achieving recruiting success!
