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As an employer, you need to pay attention to the candidate experience in the virtual recruitment process. If a candidate doesn’t like the experience, they will share the news with other candidates. You’ll end up with a bad reputation. The result? You can no longer compete with other companies for the best talent.
That’s why candidate feedback is essential. When you let candidates have a say in your recruitment process, you help ensure your recruitment efforts are on the right track.
Candidate feedback is catching on within the industry - 68% of HR and recruitment professionals surveyed at TGTHR reported that they have incorporated candidate feedback into their hiring process.
Keep reading to learn the reasons you should incorporate candidate feedback in virtual recruitment.
1. It Helps Identify Patterns through Recurring Problems
Candidate feedback helps you identify patterns through recurring problems. Once you identify patterns through candidate feedback, you can make the necessary adjustments to improve your processes.
Let’s say you ask a candidate for feedback on your hiring process, and that candidate tells you the video interview is too long. You can easily dismiss that as an individual’s opinion.
If, however, three or more candidates tell you the same thing, you can consider that as a pattern. That means it should be a cause for alarm, which means you need to make adjustments. In our example, instead of asking too many questions, you ask only the important interview questions to reduce the time spent on the video interview.
The length of the interview process is just one potential issue. You may have been doing other things unintentionally that are driving prospective candidates away. For instance, your email templates on job requirements may not be clear enough that candidates are having a hard time understanding what exactly you want them to submit to be considered for the position. Here are other potential issues:
Source: Built In
Candidates are the best people to uncover recurring issues in your virtual recruitment process you need to address. That’s because they’re the ones who experience these issues firsthand.
2. It Helps You Understand the Candidate Experience
Thanks to candidate feedback, you can better understand the candidate experience. When you understand that, you can ensure the next candidates have a good experience all throughout the hiring process. That’s very important. According to Career Builder, nearly four in five candidates or 78% believe the overall candidate experience reflects how a company actually values its employees.
In other words, if you pay attention to your candidate experience, you can earn plus points as a potential employer and attract more talent.
But how exactly can you use candidate feedback to help you understand the candidate experience and improve it? Let’s look at a few examples.
If candidates, for instance, tell you they sent applications for job vacancy announcements on the “Careers” page of your website but never received a response, you can assign a team to reply to those applicants. You might also check the page yourself and find that management already filled the positions but never removed the announcements. So, you remove them to ensure no one else submits an application for nothing.
You might also learn that candidates find it hard to submit their applications using their mobile phones. To ensure the best candidate experience, you optimize your website for mobile. You make your website less text-heavy. You also make the remaining text a bit bigger so people using their mobile devices can read that without any difficulty.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking to hire someone to manage your eCommerce store, your brick-and-mortar store, or both. You need to ask for candidate feedback in virtual recruitment to determine where candidates get frustrated during the hiring process. So, you can close those gaps and ensure a better candidate experience the next time around.
3. It Builds Your Reputation as an Empathetic Employer
When you ask for feedback from candidates, you show your concern for them. That’s a good thing because candidates prefer employers who listen and value their opinions. According to Businessolver’s State of Workplace Empathy study, 99% of employees are more likely to stay with a company that empathizes with their needs. When the time comes, the applicants have to choose an employer, they are likely to choose you.
Asking for candidate feedback in virtual recruitment also helps ensure you keep your good employer image in the job market. That’s because those candidates you asked for feedback will spread the good word about you, too. According to Super Office, a whopping 72% will share a positive experience with six or more people.
In other words, empathy does take you a long way. Complement word-of-mouth marketing with good digital marketing and you’ll have all the talent you need lining up at your door.
Besides, in general, empathy is a good trait (and skill) to have. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes all the time is the trademark of a good person.
4. It Improves Your Overall Hiring Process
Candidate feedback allows you to make adjustments in parts of your virtual recruitment process that need improvement. As a result, you improve your hiring process as a whole.
For example, if your virtual recruitment process lasted two long months, you can now cut it down to the recommended two weeks, which job seekers expect. That’s all because your video interviews are now shorter based on candidate feedback. Or because you now tailored the virtual recruitment process to each job vacancy you want to fill.
Source: AP Recruiters
When your virtual recruitment process improves as a whole, you increase your chances of getting the best talent for your company, too.
5. It Gives Information about the New Technologies Used During the Hiring Process
You need to rely on technology for your virtual recruitment. That means you need to make sure all the tools you will be using--video interview software, applicant tracking systems, among others--actually perform their function during the hiring process. If you decide to switch tools, you need to make sure those work, too.
You can't, however, just rely on your opinion about these technologies. Even if you think they work perfectly, candidates may think differently. For example, they might say your video interview software has a steep learning curve. They might also say there were technical issues from their end. That’s something you would not have been able to see from yours.
Thanks to candidate feedback in virtual recruitment, you can determine what those technology-related issues are. If needed then, you can make changes to your arsenal of tools to ensure a seamless recruitment process.
For example, a recruitment proposal is beneficial to both the company looking for new workers and the potential employees. Companies can use them when they need to attract top talent, retain employees, create a culture of inclusion, and potential candidates will be excited by this prospect since it means less competition from other companies.
Whatever tools you choose in the end, make sure, though, that you also give your candidates ample time to get used to them. This is so they no longer have a difficult time using them during their interaction with you.
The Bottom Line
Always remember that you’re not the only one looking for the best talent in the job market. That means you need to find ways to stand out as a potential employer. One of the ways to stand out is to improve your virtual hiring process.
That is where candidate feedback can help you. With candidate feedback, you can identify your weak points and work on them. You can build your reputation as an empathetic employer and determine the best tools to use during the recruitment process.
Candidate feedback helps you improve your overall hiring process. Complement a great hiring process with email marketing to boost your employer brand, too. So the next time you’re looking to fill a position, all the best talent will come knocking at your door.
