“Relationships before Recruitment” is our mission at Sauced, and at the top of the tree (first tiny Christmas reference) is candidate experience, there is no doubt that as a start-up or scale-up tech company if you get this right, it can have a huge impact on your ability to attract talent both now and in the future.
So below are our 11 tips to improve candidate experience.
- Make candidate experience a priority from day one of hiring. The exponential impact of positive or negative interactions reaches more people than you realise.
- Have a user-friendly, mobile-responsive career site that makes it easy to find open positions and apply, link this to your ATS (see below). Have a career site from day one, and keep it updated with live roles, lastly, make it really represent your brand.
- Have an ATS in place straight away, by tracking every application including the source, you can avoid a lot of candidate issues in the future, there is every chance that some of the people who apply today are right, just not right now. So, if you do all of the below, and then reach out when you do have something, how good will that experience be?
- Set candidates’ expectations upfront about the hiring stages and timeline. Communicate these and provide updates.
- Use clear, simple job descriptions focused on must-have skills. Avoid long lists of every possible desired capability, and again bring these to life, make them stand out by showing you made some effort, not just 3 paragraphs on a Google doc.
- Allow candidates to showcase skills with a relevant assignment, work sample test or structured interview.
- Respond promptly to candidates when contacted and provide timely application status updates. This isn’t always easy, but consistent regular communication from you says so much about you personally and how you treat people, and the wider business you represent.
- Ensure the interview process makes sense, and is a relevant number of stages aligned to the level of complexity of the role. Try not to add stages to the process once you’ve started.
- Maintain two-way dialogue enabling candidates to ask questions, not just one-way Q&A.
- Have hiring team members provide helpful, supportive interactions with applicants. Meeting some of the team is something you should do every single time you run a process, where possible this should really be face to face too.
- Give respectful rejections with constructive feedback to help candidates improve when applicable. These need to be done in a timely fashion, keeping someone waiting for days/weeks before giving feedback is never going to be considered a great experience.
Hopefully this gives you some useful tips in how you can easily improve your candidate experience when hiring, and how you can also ensure that your future hiring is easier because of this.
If you’re interested in understanding how Sauced uses a Tech and Data led approach to achieving great Candidate Experience then please get in contact, and if you’re just here to read and maybe learn something then that’s cool too!
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