As you streamline and improve each of these areas of your business, you should see increased efficiency and lowered costs. This will in turn improve the return on investment (ROI) on all the resources you put money into to run your various hiring processes.
In order to hire top talent, you have to be able to not only attract but retain that talent throughout the hiring process. Especially when you consider that, typically, great candidates go off the market just ten days after becoming available.
How can you lock in the best candidates for the length of time you need to evaluate them and make sure they’re the right person for the job? With a great candidate experience that keeps them informed and engaged. A strong candidate experience enables your talent pool to not only grow but become higher quality.
Remember that for every candidate you hire for a role, there are several that you will have to turn down. If you're doing it right, these people will fill your candidate pipeline.
A candidate pipeline is a group of people who have shown interest in your company and whom recruiters try to keep in touch with to fill job openings more quickly. The best way to feed this pipeline and keep it healthy is to provide a candidate experience that creates a lasting, positive impression — even when you must reject some applications.
When a candidate gets to the offer stage and chooses not to accept their offer, that’s more than just a bad sign for the candidate experience — it’s a drain on the resources you’ve put into interviewing, background checking, etc.
It’s easy to see the connection between the candidate experience and the offer acceptance rate. Why would anyone choose to work with an organization that provided a less-than-stellar experience — especially when there are plenty other options out there in this market?
In fact, a 2021 report found that almost 60% of job seekers walked away from a job offer due to a bad candidate experience.
In addition to a great candidate journey, a quick one is also pivotal in getting job offers accepted. When a candidate gets an offer within a week of their last interview, they’ve been shown to be 62% more interested in working at your company.
Referred employees save businesses money on sourcing and productivity, tend to generate a higher ROI, and stay with companies longer when compared to recruited employees.
Want to gain some of these benefits? Then you’ll want to focus on generating referrals from past and current employees, and even candidates.
How? By providing a candidate experience that’s worth remembering and talking to others about. Happiness spreads. When employees and candidates are happy with their experiences, they’re more likely to share a positive referral with their networks.
If that last section sounds like what your business has been going through lately, don’t worry — here are some tips on how to improve candidate experience.
Hiring pros agree — really, we asked them — that job descriptions are pivotal to creating a hiring experience in which companies and candidates are both happy.
Clear and concise job descriptions set reasonable expectations, allow poor fits to self-select out of the application process while enabling good fits to self-select in, and condense some of the many steps that live between posting a job and filling the role.
Learn more about writing job descriptions from the people who do it as part of their jobs.
You probably won’t be shocked to learn that a CareerBuilder poll found that the vast majority of candidates prefer a one-step application process to a lengthy, detailed one.
Exasperation with the standard application process is fueled by way too many bad experiences — workflows that ask for the same information over and over again, poorly-built tech that doesn’t accept reasonable resume formats, and companies that put candidates through all that trouble just to never respond anyway.
You as an employer have the power to create a better experience — which should increase ROI on the application process, grow your pool of qualified applicants, and build a great employer brand.
First, fix any feature that may be broken or just acting in a way that’s limiting applicants. Then, go through the entire process yourself. Any repetitive questions? Eliminate or implement autofill technology to populate information everywhere it’s needed (names and dates are good candidates for this practice). Any super detailed questions that would be better answered in person? Save those for interviews. And of course, create a system, preferably automated, that keeps candidates in the loop on their place in the process. 
Here we’re going to hearken back to a grade school favorite, the “golden rule” — which reminds us to treat others the same way we hope to be treated.
If you don’t like to be left in the dark waiting on important news, then don’t leave your own job applicants in the dark!
For many candidates, applying for a new role is taxing. It takes emotional energy as well as physical energy away from their lives and their current job. The least you can do is set up automation within your application system that acknowledges this by thanking them for their application.
And if you can set up that automation, you can set up more. We recommend creating automations throughout the process that notifies applicants about where they are in the journey. This is especially important when applications are removed from consideration, as it sets the stage for a happy and engaged candidate pipeline.
Aside from it being the kind and respectful thing to do, communication is downright necessary to holding the attention of capable candidates. If they don’t hear back about an application in about two weeks, almost 70% of candidates start shifting their focus to other opportunities.
As we mentioned, the employee experience is a critical piece of the overall employee lifecycle. That means, for those who are hired, it goes beyond the application process and extends into onboarding.
Your onboarding experience is your first impression as a brand. Sure, you may still be assessing new hires, but they’re also assessing you.
The main reason candidates end up saying no to job offers? Negative interview experiences.
The problem is that the interview process is often the first to degrade when trying to streamline the candidate experience, because it is often one of the more expensive and time consuming elements.
Which is a shame, because interviews are one of the best tools for building a strong candidate journey that attracts and secures top talent.
This is exactly the reason we created Hume.
Hume is a modern talent intelligence platform that implements artificial intelligence to help interviewers record, transcribe, and summarize interviews.
With Hume, there are no sacrifices required when it comes to interviews. On the contrary, our platform makes it possible to unlock the valuable candidate data generated during the interview process.
How? With Hume in the background, interviewees can focus solely on candidates — not on taking fast, often incomplete notes. And, after the interview is over, this recording can be rewatched, tagged, turned into highlight reels, and shared across your organization.
The benefit of this functionality is many-fold.
First, Hume makes it so that everyone involved in the hiring process has access to the highlights of every interview, so they can compare different candidates based on their answers to the same questions. In this way, Humes brings speed to the decision making process, which can get quite long and complex with remote and hybrid teams.
And, usable interview recordings make it possible to rely on replay, not recall. This is how Hume sets the stage for more accurate candidate reviews, eliminating any possible interview bias.
In addition, Hume can even be used as a coaching platform for talent leaders to operationalize interviewing best practices no matter how far flung your hiring pros are. Just create a playlist of sharable teaching and example videos to shape your team into skilled interview practitioners.
In today’s job market, your candidate experience has the power to become a competitive differentiator.
To create a candidate experience that’s worth showing off, it’s time to start writing thoughtful job descriptions, streamlining the application process, implementing a communication strategy, committing to employee onboarding, and last but not least building a fast yet high-quality interviewing workflow.
To make that last one achievable, use Hume to add automation into the critical interviewing process.
For early access to Hume’s platform, sign up for the waiting list on our homepage. In the meantime, follow Hume on LinkedIn for news and updates.Should Conservatives Give Up on Narrative Filmmaking?
In a pivotal scene in the film Free State of Jones, three white men are chasing the recently freed slave Moses down a dirt road in immediate post-Civil War Mississippi. What is notably missing from Moses’s hands is a gun, a symbolic feature embedded so thoroughly in the narrative of the film that it could be considered a pivotal supporting player. The next scene shows Moses’s feet dangling in mid-air after he has been lynched for his “crime” of registering free blacks to vote.
From my vantage point in the movie theater, this sequence dramatically showed the civil rights foundation for the Second Amendment, or at least an artistic validation of the main theme behind books such as Stephen Halbrook’s Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Right to Bear Arms. This is all the more remarkable because, from what I can tell, nothing in the background of the actors, producers, director, or screenwriters suggests they are vocal Second Amendment advocates (although I could be wrong and invite readers to shed any light they may have on this). From the director’s point of view, I am sure these sequence are intended to show the human consequences of the terrorism unleashed upon African-Americans as whites established American apartheid in the South after emancipation through Jim Crow laws.
The scene contrasts stylistically and artistically with another movie now playing in theaters: AmeriGeddon. The film, directed