Here’s Our Guide on How to Provide a Positive Candidate Experience

Poor candidate experiences can really hinder your ability to attract and hire top talent. 

For instance, more than half of candidates have abandoned a hiring process after a negative hiring experience with the employer. Plus, they’re also 185% less likely to recommend your company to other job seekers.

Even in an employer’s market, candidate experience extends beyond who you hire and into potential customers—a bad employment reputation can easily translate into a bad company reputation. 

To avoid this, prioritize providing a positive candidate experience. But what does a positive candidate experience look like? How can you get it right? These are the questions we’ll answer in this Willo guide.

What Is a Positive Candidate Experience? 

Candidate experience is how someone feels while going through the steps of your recruitment process—from application to interviews and offer.

Candidate experiences can be negative, positive, or neutral. And even though these are all subjective descriptors, there are all kinds of ways to measure, analyze, and improve candidate experience.

Improving candidate experience is our focus today. But before we get to that, why should you bother?

Why Is Creating a Positive Candidate Experience Important? 

Stand out from the competition

Most active job candidates apply for multiple jobs. Even top passive candidates are often targeted by several recruiters at once. 

If a candidate is evaluating multiple opportunities, their experience with the hiring process becomes a very real and very influential differentiator. They can directly compare the speed, simplicity, friendliness, and professionalism of your process with competitors.

Better completion rates 

Poor candidate experiences are the leading cause of candidate drop-off. Studies show that 65% of candidates who have abandoned an application or hiring process have cited a poor candidate experience as the reason.

The job market is competitive. Losing top candidates due to a less-than-stellar hiring process can put your company at a disadvantage, increase recruiting overhead, and ultimately affect the success and growth of your business.

More positive advocacy 

Whether they eventually get hired or not, 60% of candidates with a positive experience will leave a positive review about your hiring process. Plus, as we mentioned earlier, candidates who have a negative experience are 185% less likely to recommend your company to other job seekers.

Positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations can attract even more top talent to apply for your job openings.

5 Tips to Provide a Positive Candidate Experience

1. Eliminate or automate interview scheduling

Many candidates hate scheduling just as much as you do. 

In fact, 62% of them would prefer you implemented a system that automated the scheduling process entirely. They’re tired of email chains and telephone tags and know there are much better tools for scheduling screens, interviews, and assessments.

Our recommendation? Eliminate scheduling when you can using async tools and automate it when that isn’t an option.

How to eliminate scheduling

Async interview tools like Willo are a great way to eliminate the need for scheduling from your screening and interview process.

Here’s how this works:

1. Create the interview. You can choose from all kinds of different response types (video, audio, text, file upload, etc.) when you’re coming up with questions. 
2. Send it out to candidates. Next, you email a link to all the candidates you want to screen or interview. You can do this through Willo or one of our many ATS integrations. Candidates can access the interview on any device with a browser and a camera and complete it whenever they want.
3. Review responses. Finally, review the responses as they roll in. Leave comments on interesting responses, share promising candidates with stakeholders, and keep evaluations consistent with interview scorecards.

This process eliminates scheduling, gives candidates instant access to interviews, and removes stress and bias. Plus, it gives you more time to focus on making confident hiring decisions and building relationships with candidates. All of these help contribute to an excellent candidate experience.

Source: How EDF Fills 400+ Roles Per Recruiting Season

Looking for tools that eliminate scheduling for assessments? Check out this list of our favorite candidate assessment tools.

How to automate scheduling

We’re big believers in the power of async, but we recognize the value of face-to-face interviews for relationship building.

However, many recruiters fail to automate the scheduling process. Studies show that 67% of US candidates aren’t willing to wait longer than 6 days to schedule an interview, and that number rises to 81% when you’re talking about more experienced candidates.

Luckily, the fix is simple. 

Source: Calendly

Find an automated scheduling tool like Calendly or Doodle and integrate it with your ATS. Then, create a workflow that automatically sends a scheduling link to candidates when they reach the live interview stage.

2. Give candidates a human touchpoint 

Our last tips relied on tech to help create a positive experience. But staying empathetic with your candidates’ need for human connection is important.

Research shows that 81% of candidates still think a human touchpoint is important, for example, having a known person or familiar face they can reach out to if they have questions or issues. 

One solution here? Hire or train a full-cycle recruiter to act as a consistent touchpoint for candidates throughout the entire process. Your candidates will have a more positive experience, and (as we discuss in our full-cycle recruiting guide) you’ll boost the efficiency of your process.

3. Use AI to streamline the experience

AI can boost your candidate experience in all kinds of exciting, impactful ways.

Honestly, this subject deserves a post of its own—which is why we wrote Hiring Humans. This e-book gives you a research-backed look at how you can implement AI to improve your hiring process for candidates, recruiters, and your business.

But here, we’ll stick to two candidate experience-boosting use cases for AI:

Reducing admin work

One of the main benefits of AI tools is that they’re able to automate (some) low-level admin tasks entirely. 

In recruitment, examples include:

• Personalizing employment contracts
• Drafting outreach messages
• Summarizing transcripts or notes
• Organizing candidate information

How do these mostly internal, time-saving benefits improve the candidate experience? By freeing your team up to focus on the things that AI can’t do—like empathizing with candidates, understanding their emotions, and negotiating.

Source: Hiring Humans

Plus, more efficient internal processes typically translate to quicker communications and hiring timelines.

24/7 support

Employment chatbots are another powerful way to use AI. 

You can easily integrate a chatbot tool with pretty much any knowledge base or database within your company and add it to your careers page to:

• Gather and qualify recruitment leads
• Respond to basic FAQs without eating up recruiter time
• Share targeted, contextual info about your company and culture

The possibilities are truly endless.

4. Eliminate or combine parts of your process 

A bloated recruiting process can be a major turn-off for candidates. A streamlined recruiting process reduces the time and effort candidates need to invest, making it more likely they will remain engaged and complete the process.

To create a positive candidate experience, you need to prioritize efficiency by either combining or eliminating parts of your recruiting process. 

When should you eliminate parts of a recruitment process?

Elimination is all about looking for unnecessary steps in the process.

Here are a few common culprits:

• Repetition: These are parts of the process that don’t generate unique insights into a candidate’s fit for a role. A common example is asking the same basic questions on a phone screen and in subsequent interviews.
• Non-Predictive: These are parts of your hiring process that don’t really generate info that’s valuable. A common example? MBTI personality tests. Around 32% of recruiters use these at some point in their process, but there’s essentially no evidence of any link between personality “type” and any work behaviors recruiters are trying to hire for. Think critically about your process, research the effectiveness of certain steps, and be willing to cut out unnecessary elements.
• Lengthiness: These are parts of the process that are overly long or complex. Assessments often fall into this category if there are too many questions. Instead, look for ways to test the multiple skills in a single assessment or to rigorously remove any additional questions—make sure every single one is truly necessary.

When should you combine parts of a recruitment process?

Combination is all about finding the right balance. 

Combining different parts of a recruitment process can be beneficial when they complement each other and provide a more comprehensive view of a candidate's potential. For example, combining a pre-screening interview with digital identity verification makes sense because both are designed to assess whether a candidate meets your baseline requirements.

5. Stay connected between offer acceptance and onboarding

A candidate’s experience doesn’t end when they accept your job offer. As an employer, it's important to stay connected with your new hires between accepting the offer and starting the job.

So, what’s the solution? Create a starter pack to welcome them to the team. 

Here’s a list of a few must-haves:

• Contact information (for HR, manager, team members)
• General onboarding information (start date, schedule, dress code)
• FAQs
• A “Welcome to the team!” message

Beyond that, it’s up to you. Many distributed companies offer home office stipends. In-person companies can offer welcome lunches, office tours, and more. The goal is to show your new hires that you’re excited for them to join the team.

Also, make sure you explain your company’s perks and benefits. Many new hires struggle to access these, which defeats the entire purpose of offering them.

Prioritize Great Candidate Experiences

A positive candidate experience is something you should prioritize with every recruitment touchpoint if you want to optimize your process and attract top talent. In this guide, we've covered some effective strategies to help you.

Ready to give async interviews a try? Willo is your go-to tool for scalable and effective video interviews. With features like interview scorecards and collaboration tools, we make confident hiring simpler, quicker, and more candidate-centric.

Sign up for a free trial and see the difference for yourself.