Have you ever wanted to know what separates the highest-rated candidate experiences from all the rest? Or how those experiences were transformed and improved over time? Or the specific actions that elevated these experiences to award-winning levels?
If so, you’re in luck! Simply check out Talent Board’s 2022 Candidate Experience Benchmark Research Report. At the back of the report are nine insight-filled case studies of 2022 CandE Award winning companies and how they’ve invigorated their recruiting processes to better engage talent and achieve their hiring goals.
Here’s a small taste of just some of the strategies and tactics they’ve employed over the past year or so—strategies and tactics that every TA team should consider:
Move candidates through the interviewing process more quickly. Knowing how crucial it is to move with speed and purpose in the highly competitive post-COVID talent market, Apeel Sciences eliminated a significant piece of its assessment stage for candidates interviewing for entry- to mid-level roles, as well as limiting which roles require on-site interviews. The company’s TA team felt it had lost out on too many excellent candidates, which prompted it to carefully analyze its recruiting/interviewing process to determine what could be jettisoned or improved upon.
Increase pay transparency. Pay equity and transparency continue to gain momentum as more and more states adopt legislation or are seriously considering doing so. But forward-thinking companies like FAIRWINDS Credit Union are getting ahead of the transparency curve not for legal reasons but for competitive ones. The organization now posts starting salaries for every external job posting, which has inspired unsolicited positive feedback from candidates, particularly during interviews, and has made conversations around pay more comfortable and fruitful.
Raise the bar on candidate communications. The TA team at Baylor Scott & White Health has made a number of key improvements to the company’s candidate experience over the past year, but among its most important are the enhancements it made to candidate communications. These include application acknowledgement emails, creating a monthly newsletter, improvements to its Careers website chatbot, creation of a “Featured Jobs” page on its Careers site, region-specific landing pages on its Careers site, and more.
Respond to applicants more swiftly and empathetically. Based on previous years’ CandE survey results, GuideWell implemented a “No-More-Than-7-Day” rule to respond to and disposition candidates. As part of this effort, the company added automated email touch points for both internal and external applicants via its CRM, along with CRM text campaigns for high-volume roles. In addition, the tone of GuideWell’s responses was changed to deliver greater excitement, compassion, and empathy to candidates who are understandably excited by and anxious about their job searches. The company also created a chatbots management team as well as preloaded chatbot FAQs to provide valuable information to job seekers in real time.
Improve alignment of TA and HR teams with industry trends, best practices, and candidate feedback. BASF’s TA team implemented biweekly Talent Attraction Forum conference calls with its broader HR team to better keep everyone informed about and aligned with recruiting industry data, best practices, and the opinions and feedback of the company’s candidates. Other topics discussed during these calls include candidate care data, open req reports, recruiting metrics, and market analyses.
Relentlessly measure candidate experience through a variety of channels. Foot Locker has embarked on a continuous journey of improving how it measures its candidate experience. The company relies on data and insights from its CandE survey, traditional recruiting metrics (e.g., time-to-fill, time-to-hire, etc.) that are tied to every recruiter’s performance evaluation, and an expanded analysis of time-based recruiting metrics to reveal areas of untapped opportunities for improvement.
Again, these are just a few of the proven strategies and tactics utilized by CandE Award winners. You can access full versions of all of these case studies by downloading our research reports.
And you can benchmark the quality of your own company’s candidate experience by participating in our annual research program. There’s still 3 months left to participate this year. By doing so, you’ll learn how your candidate experience stacks up in terms of candidate perceptions, fairness, efficiency, and the bottom-line impacts to your business.
As always, be safe and well.
