With branding and the customer experience being at the forefront of most companies’ minds, the candidate experience can often be overlooked when recruiting. It is vital that you assess your recruitment process and the candidate journey, after all, recruitment impacts on your brand too.
In many cases companies put a great deal of emphasis on a positive customer experience, but can the same be said for your internal recruitment process?
Even the best brands can sometimes have the most complicated processes. Whilst finding exceptional talent is all important, making sure you don’t lose any talent throughout the process is fundamental as well. Here are our 5 points to assessing and streamlining your recruitment process.
Analyse
Encourage candidates to input their information and carry out some form of self-summary. If they are happy to complete the online application, you will quickly whittle out the few that can’t be bothered, allowing you an insight into basic grammar, spelling and accuracy in their application. Utilise the online system to showcase your brand and company, providing as much information as possible about the role, the organisation, its values and culture and give an insight of what it is like to work in your business. A day in the life or case studies work well at this stage too. Make sure the job description and title reflects the role and is not generic to ensure you get the right candidates applying, this also allows candidates to deselect themselves if they are not right, saving you a lot more work.
Online assessments
Online assessments can take many forms and can depend on the position you are recruiting for, general benchmarking is fine but if the tests are more specific, make sure it fits with the role and you can justify asking the candidate to spend time completing it.
We would suggest that the recruiter or at least current employees in those same roles take the test to benchmark the data and make sure it is the right level for the candidates you are after. Pre-screening or benchmarking particularly in high volume recruitment can be helpful in shortlisting and will help free up resources for the other stages of the recruitment process. If the assessment method appears too rigorous or even irrelevant to the role in the online process, it can cause candidates to deselect themselves too early.
The candidate experience
Put yourself in their shoes, how does the candidate feel throughout the process? What impression are they getting of your brand at each stage they enter into? As research shows, news of a bad customer experience reaches more than twice as many ears as praise for a good service experience which could result in the loss of potential business and new recruits as well. Map out the candidate experience from end to end, thinking about what the ideal responses should be at each stage, and then manage the candidates experience against this. This will pre-empt the time consuming communications through to HR when applicants get frustrated not knowing where they are in the process. Provide feedback at each stage of the application process unsuccessful or otherwise and personalise the notification, the feedback will help them in the future and the experience will be show positively against your brand and company values.
Online testing
Whilst gamification is becoming popular in technology industry assessment methods, there are a variety of off-the-shelf online tests available, from numerical/ verbal reasoning to bespoke psychometric profiles, giving insights to behaviours within the workplace. Look at what is the best fit for your organisation and how they can enhance your testing or be combined to make it more engaging for the candidate. Use the data and analytics within your business to assess what skills, characteristics and behaviours makes up your top performers and harness that to source your online assessments and help identify your new recruits.
Review regularly
Having researched and implemented your online testing, as with any process it is important to monitor and review the performance and through statistics ensure it is effective in the recruitment process. Getting feedback from the candidates themselves will give you a good idea of how it is viewed externally so you can see what is working and what can be improved upon next time.
At Bond Williams we are happy to help at any stage of the recruitment process, call us on 01202 233777 for further advice.
