How Does Your Candidate Experience Stack Up?

The candidate experience is a powerful tool that can move any candidate from thinking, "Do I want to work here?" to "I want to work here!" Even if a candidate doesn't get the job at your company, we want candidates to have a memorable and positive experience.

It's hard to measure where your candidate experience is performing well or poorly without taking a first-hand look at the experience. Conducting a candidate experience audit will help you identify your current state, and it also helps you set goals of where you want to be.

By continually evaluating and auditing your candidate experience, you'll be able to better understand the importance and overall impact that the experience has on an organization's ability to acquire top talent.

What are the stages of candidate experience?

We've developed a proprietary audit system that breaks down the candidate experience into three key areas.

Attraction Measures how effectively companies are at attracting talent to their career site, and it also assesses the overall functionality of your site. This part of the candidate experience is usually talent's first tough point with a potential employer.

Connection A look at how well organizations communicate with their prospects and applicants through content and personalization. This typically includes the content and messages you are sending to candidates along with feedback throughout the process.

Transaction A walkthrough of the application experience from beginning to end. This is where candidates are converting from job-seekers to applicants.

What's does the current candidate experience landscape look like?

We conducted audits for 600 of the largest Fortune 1000 companies, and found that while some areas of candidate experience prove to be strong - there's still plenty of room left for improvement

Unfortunately, one of the biggest complaints that candidates have is the lack of communication from the company on the status of their submitted application. In fact, according to our audits, 75 percent of candidates don't receive updates once they apply for a position.

Another common pain point is that companies are failing to engage prospective candidates once they've reached their career site. This could be due to the fact that 96 percent of career sites fail to provide relevant and personalized content and job recommendations.

Most companies have plenty of room to grow in order to achieve a phenomenal level of candidate experience. After a candidate experience audit, you will not only have a better understanding of the current state of the candidate experience you are providing, but you will also be able to better set goals to help assess and improve in the future.

Ultimately, you want to make candidates feel secure and confident in their decision to work for you. By providing a positive and intuitive candidate experience, they will have clear expectations of how the entire process will occur, and be better prepared to determine if they are a fit for the job.

Maybe it's time to take another look at your candidate experience?