Make Recruitment Accessible, Fast & Easy, Engaging, and Personal. Best Practices for Employers: Developing an Outstanding Candidate Experience

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1 Make Recruitment Accessible, Fast & Easy, Engaging, and Personal Best Practices for Employers: Developing an Outstanding Candidate Experience

2 In such a competitive recruiting environment, an outstanding employment brand is key to attract the best and brightest. Here s what you need to know: 46% of candidates rate their candidate experience applying for jobs as poor to very poor. And worse, 64% said that they share information about their candidate experience via social media. Companies who are serious about creating a positive candidate experience need to include this as a priority within their talent acquisition and branding strategy. Based on icims proprietary candidate surveys, we have determined that a great candidate experience is one that is accessible, fast & easy, engaging, and personal. Fortunately, it is very simple for organizations to make major improvements quickly in order to provide candidates with the best possible experience. Accessible: I know someone who decided to apply to a company on a whim, and because she had key skills and experience needed for the role was immediately called in for an interview and hired. The trick to hiring the best talent is to eliminate any barriers that might make it difficult for these highly qualified candidates to apply. First and foremost is getting your job post in front of the right eyes in the first place. This includes leveraging career microsites to improve your SEO performance, niche and major job boards to get your name and jobs out there, and utilizing the power of social media to improve employee referral programs and find key talent within your employees existing networks. Secondly, mobile accessibility is key. To reduce candidate drop off, make it easy for applicants to complete the full application process on their phone or ipad. Candidates also need to be able to upload a resume from Google Drive, DropBox, or social media sites (in addition to simply uploading from their device) so that anyone who doesn t store his or her resume on his or her phone may still easily submit an application. Fast & Easy: I had a summer retail job for several summers in a row during college. Each year, I was asked to re complete a 100 question questionnaire to prove my suitability to work for the company. To state the obvious: this exercise took a decent amount of my personal time and could easily have turned off a lessinterested applicant.

3 A job application should take no longer than 15 minutes for a candidate to complete! Make sure your applicant s time is used wisely by providing them with tools to easily upload a resume or apply with a social media profile. Further, choose an applicant tracking software that automatically parses a candidate s uploaded resume to reduce data entry so that candidates need not re complete already provided information. Engaging: On a scale of 1 to 10, candidates rated how important the professionalism, look, and feel of a company s career portal is to their decision to apply for a job. 78% of candidates reported that the professionalism of a company s career portal is moderately to highly important to their decision to apply. This means that having a well designed, appealing career portal is imperative. Further, incorporating the latest technology, such as video, into your hiring process engages candidates. Use videos to entertain and engage candidates in a way that makes your employment brand memorable and desirable. Highlight video interviews with current employees to give the candidate a sneak peek into your corporate culture. Let candidates set themselves apart by creating video cover letters as well!

4 Finally, keep your new hires engaged in the final steps of the process through a welcoming, personalized onboarding experience that lets them hit the ground running when they start at your company. Utilize a personalized onboarding portal to introduce them to your company and their team members to increase their engagement with their new job. Personal I remember it like it was yesterday: early on in my career search as a young graduate, I applied for a fair number of jobs. One organization never responded to me until a year later, when I received an impersonal automatic notification that, per record retention policies, my resume would no longer be held in their system. All employers interested in providing a stellar candidate experience must be aware that applicants notice and remember when their applications disappear into a resume black hole. At an absolute minimum, organizations should make sure that every job seeker receives a response when they apply to a position (to confirm that materials were received) and when a final decision regarding their candidacy has been made. Fortunately, applicant tracking systems offer the capability to autoschedule responses with the ability to personalize these messages based upon information from the candidate s own profile. This idea of personalization carries past the candidate selection process and into new hire onboarding. Create a personalized task list and onboarding highlights for each department, job, or business unit, so your new hires feel empowered to make meaningful contributions, not like they are just another cog in the machine. How icims Can Help The icims Talent Platform provides organizations with the tools to succeed in offering a candidate experience second to none. icims offers accessibility through career microsites to improve your SEO as well as the ability to post to niche and major job boards. Further, icims social recruitment features allow you to post open positions on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well as mobile Portals and a full mobile application experience to capture candidates on the go. icims can support a fast and easy application experience, with clients choosing how much information to require and at what stages during the application process in order to create the best possible experience for the applicant. Clients may also create an engaging experience leveraging branded Career Portals or personalized New Hire Portals that can easily support embedded social media widgets for Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 technologies. For a personal touch, icims offers templates with variables that will pull directly from the candidate profile as well as the ability to fully personalize the new hire onboarding experience for the new hire s specific role, title, and/or business unit.

5 With robust candidate management tools, icims offers a holistic approach to talent acquisition and enables organizations to tie their key business objectives with their human capital acquisition processes. In addition to this superior Talent Platform, icims clients benefit from an unparalleled customer experience and award winning customer support teams. To learn more about icims suite of talent acquisition solutions, call (800) or take a look at an online virtual tour of the icims Talent Platform: