Candidate experience: The key to recruiter success

Candidate experience is a huge area of weakness for the recruitment industry. It won’t come as a shock to you that recruiters have a bad reputation. One of the reasons for this is a lack of good candidate experience. Whether it’s putting them forward for roles that aren’t relevant to them, or not providing feedback after interviews. I am still waiting for feedback on an application I had with a recruiter over 2 years ago!

Providing a great candidate experience will elevate you and your service offering.

There are lots of consequences to providing a poor candidate experience and all of them will have a big impact on your billings and credibility with candidates and clients. There are a few key moments in the candidate journey that can have a huge influence on the outcome of the process.

CV send to Interview

How often do you talk to your candidate after you have sent their CV to the client?

Every day? Once a week? I only talk to them once I have an interview request. When I say ‘talk to’ I mean on the phone, not over email or text. You can provide a far better experience by actually talking to them.

But there is no update so what do I talk to them about? Put yourself in their shoes. How would you feel if a recruiter had sold you the dream, they found out exactly what you want to do, and pitched a job that hits all of your wants and needs. You are super excited and beg them to send your CV. You eagerly await a call from them saying that you have an interview. A week later, you are still waiting for the call. How would you feel?

I have never had a candidate get annoyed at me for letting them know that there is no update on their application, in fact, it’s quite the opposite. On this call you can also find out if anything has changed since the last call. Have they applied for any other roles? Do they have any interviews? How do they compare to your role?

65% of candidates say that they rarely or never receive an update on their application.

Booking the interview to the interview taking place

This is a key time in the candidate's journey.

The time for the candidate to show off how good they are is getting closer. Are they ready to show off how good they are? Do they know everything they need to know to get the offer?

Interview Preparation can make or break the outcome. Do you do interview preparation calls? What do you talk about? Is the candidate ready? Interview preparation calls should cover a wide variety of areas. Has their situation changed? How are their other applications going? Why do they want this role? What research have they done? Do they know what the client's expectations are? Do they have questions ready?

Making sure you have great interview preparation calls will massively improve your Interview-to-placement ratio. I don’t know about you, but I would like to get more placements with the same amount of interviews.

Ensure you are fully preparing your candidates for interviews

Interview to Offer

This is the most exciting part of the candidate's journey.

You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, the process is nearly over. Will they get the job? Will you get some of that lovely commission?

There are two important conversations that need to happen as soon as the interview is done. Candidate interview feedback and client feedback. These will give you an idea if they are getting an offer or not and if they will accept or not. Are you trial-closing your candidates with hypothetical offers? Do you know if there is anything stopping the client from offering the candidate?

One of the hardest calls a recruiter has to make is letting a candidate know that they didn’t get an offer for the job of their dreams. Because of this, some recruiters avoid making this call. However, this is a must call. The key to making this call a great call for everyone involved is providing feedback.

80% of candidates say they would not consider other relevant jobs if a company doesn’t notify them of their outcome.

So by failing to provide a great candidate experience, you are making your life so much harder later on as candidates will not want to work with you again, which means you are shrinking your already small candidate pool. Having a great candidate journey is something that has made a huge difference to the recruiters I coach.

So step back and look at your candidate journey. Where could you make it better for them?