3 Common Mistakes That Can Disrupt the Candidate Experience

When it comes to recruiting top talent, some things are unlikely to change. Ensuring a positive experience for talent interested in your company is a constant for attracting the right candidates. But the strategy for how you deliver a great candidate experience shouldn’t stay the same – it needs to change with the times. 

The future of the candidate experience is based on hiring in an increasingly virtual world, where candidates want flexibility from the moment they read your job posting to the interview and onboarding process. When optimising your candidate experience to account for this new world, auditing the steps in your hiring journey is a great place to start. 

We’ve identified three common mistakes to watch out for, along with simple yet impactful solutions designed to support you throughout the entire hiring journey.

1. Getting too involved with the screening process 

Many recruiters use a phone screen to ‘weed out’ job seekers who don’t meet the basic criteria for a role or to get to know a candidate on a deeper level. However, a screening call isn’t the most efficient way to narrow down a high volume of applicants. 

An applicant’s resume doesn’t always paint a full picture of their skills and experience, either, so relying on that for screening isn’t the most comprehensive method. Not only do these approaches create more work for you, they can negatively impact the experience for a job seeker looking to move quickly. 

However, by adding screening questions to the application process, you can ensure that your candidate pool is filled with job seekers who have the basic skills and experience required, while also providing information that goes beyond the resume. It’s a simple, efficient way to find the quality candidates you need without the extra hassle.

2. Spending too much time on basic tasks

Recruiting is often a slow, expensive process: almost a third of Australian businesses (31%) are having difficulty finding suitable staff, and so a tremendous amount of resources are required to attract, source and engage candidates. Even once you’ve moved past screening, there are still many basic tasks – such as coordinating schedules and lengthy back-and-forth communications with candidates – that require your attention. 

Whether you’re hiring at volume or finding the right fit for a complex role, those little tasks can add up fast, taking precious time and effort that could be spent building a better candidate experience. Not to mention, an overly long and arduous hiring process can negatively affect your employer brand.

You can dramatically reduce your average time to hire by automating tedious administrative tasks, which can enable you to find the right person for a role in days instead of weeks. Beyond that, automation tools free you to focus on building the real, human connections at the core of every hiring journey.

3. Juggling too many different tools

Recruiting has come a long way over the years with the help of technology. And while there are plenty of tools out there designed to help you complete individual steps in the hiring journey – like sourcing candidates or scheduling interviews, – at what point does it become too much of a good thing?

The inefficiency of constantly switching between multiple spreadsheets, emails, video conferencing platforms and other tools for every hire wastes time and creates opportunities for error. When your goal is to create the most seamless experience for the candidate, neither is particularly affordable.

Moving away from multiple single-purpose platforms can help you tighten up your hiring process and prevent top talent from slipping through the cracks. Today there is agile, integrated technology that allows you to complete more tasks from a single interface and be more productive.

Work smarter, not harder, to improve your candidate experience

A few small changes to your routine can have a big impact when it comes to delivering a five-star candidate experience, and automation is the name of the game.

Whether your priority is to reduce time and cost per hire, tackle high-volume hiring more efficiently, provide candidates with more flexibility or a combination of all of the above, automation solutions can help simplify your hiring process. And not only can you work more efficiently, it allows you to make those human connections needed for hiring – faster.

With the right technology in place, you can get back to doing what you do best: finding the right people and ensuring they have a great experience along the way.