In a low-volume hiring situation, talent acquisition managers can create a fantastic candidate experience by manually rolling out the red carpet for every candidate. You know the drill: plenty of communication such as emailed status updates, friendly phone calls, helpful feedback and useful advice as individuals move through the hiring pipeline. 

But this hands-on approach tends to fall apart as organisations scale up their hiring. Talent teams simply cannot keep up with the effort required to create a great candidate experience, leading to communication gaps and a clunky process. Impacts include poor hiring outcomes as top candidates leave your pipeline and potential damage to your carefully-nurtured employer brand. 

The answer – you guessed it – lies with technology. But recruitment tech must be implemented with care to avoid the risk of making the candidate experience worse. Below, we discuss three ways technology can improve the candidate experience: process automation, hyper-personalisation and self-service. But first, we need to examine what the candidate experience means and why it's so important to the hiring process. 

The costs of a poor candidate experience

There are several reasons why candidate experience matters. Firstly, candidates today are more likely to share their negative experiences online or by word of mouth. This damages your employer brand and may discourage quality candidates from applying in the future. It’s easy to forget that candidates are customers too, and a poor experience may cause people to sever their relationship with a company altogether. 

A more immediate risk is having candidates drop out, particularly towards the top of the funnel. SHRM found that 60% of jobseekers quit an application due to its length or complexity. At the other end of the process, 49% of candidates have declined a job offer due to a poor experience; the logic being that if this is how the company treats its candidates, they probably treat their employees badly, too.  

Then there’s the engagement factor. In a perfect world, new hires will begin their employment feeling enthusiastic, energised and engaged. But a sub-par hiring experience will cause engagement to fall way earlier than it otherwise would and may even contribute to higher rates of employee attrition. 

Three ways to elevate the candidate experience through technology

Used intelligently, recruitment technology has the potential to create a highly efficient, seamless and pleasant candidate journey. There are countless tech solutions available across the $3 billion global recruitment software market, but let’s explore the big three: process automation, hyper-personalisation and self-service. 

1. Process automation

Recruitment process automation enables organisations to dramatically scale up their hiring volumes and free up the talent acquisition team’s time to focus on strategic and value-adding activities. From job postings to skills assessments, technology and automation can support an almost endless range of hiring functions. 

But just because technology is evolving doesn’t mean every company should seek a 100% automated process. It’s no secret that candidates have negative perceptions of “robotic” hiring process when it becomes apparent that their application was rejected without ever being seen by a human. A Randstand study found that 82% of job seekers are frustrated by an “overly automated recruitment experience”, with 87% saying that automation has made looking for a job more impersonal. 

Put human interaction first, automation second: Randstand found that “the ideal interaction with a company is one where innovative technologies are used behind the scenes and come second to personal, human interaction”.

Consider which elements of your recruitment process would benefit from automation. You may do this by automating the tasks that currently require the most manual work, or choose to automate the top parts of your funnel (right up to the interview stage) while leaving the bottom of the funnel “human”. 

Automate communication with care. Set up automated workflows to thank candidates at every step of the journey and keep them informed. Messaging should be frequent, personalised, empathic (particularly when rejecting candidates) and engaging. Importantly, the language used should be on-brand and comparable with the tone employed in your organisation’s wider marketing material. 

2. Hyper-personalisation

Talent acquisition teams can learn much from the great leap forward in personalisation in retail customer experience. Deloitte describes hyper-personalisation as “the most advanced way brands can tailor their marketing to individual customers.” Hyper-personalisation in recruitment means using captured data to provide each candidate with a highly-tailored journey. Data capture and technological enablement provides the opportunity to customise automation. The key point at which to collect candidate data is the application process, but organisations need to strike the right balance between collecting useful data, respecting data privacy, and not bloating the candidate experience with a lengthy or complex application. 

Examples of hyper-personalisation exist along the entire recruitment funnel. For example:

  • Targeted job placements to catch the right people, in the right moment, with the right message.
  • Personalising automated outreach to passive candidates by including what is known about the candidate in an email. For example: “With your expertise in procurement and five years’ experience at [your current company], we believe you would be a great fit for [opportunity].”
  • Communicating with candidates via their preferred channel, whether it’s email, social media, text or instant messaging. 
  • Sending emails tailored to the candidates’ data, e.g. their location, experience, occupation or interests. 
  • Offering personalised benefits or personalised learning and development packages. 
  • Sending tailored job opportunities to unsuccessful candidates. 

Getting automated hyper-personalisation right will create the opposite of a one-size-fits-all candidate experience and make every individual feel special without adding to the human workload.  

3. Self-service portals

Even in a highly automated environment, the fact remains that candidates have to play a passive role in waiting for status updates and other information from potential employers. Waiting for information can be frustrating; the digital equivalent of sitting by the letterbox waiting for the post. 

Self-service portals empower candidates with a round-the-clock opportunity to “fetch” the information they are looking for rather than having to wait for the talent acquisition team to contact them. 

Portals also provide an online home for candidates to manage their data and get their questions answered faster while improving visibility and enhancing the candidate experience. Linked to your ATS, the portal is a place to upload CVs and other data (which can be used to drive personalisation). 

Other benefits of a portal include:

  • A knowledge hub with information about the company along with interview tips and other advice. 
  • Slashing the number of email and phone enquiries, freeing up the talent acquisition team’s time. 
  • Driving engagement and building the employer brand. 
  • Other efficiency benefits such as interview scheduling. 
  • FAQ section or the chatbot-based equivalent. 
  • A place to manage administrative tasks such as background checks and digitised job offers. 
  • Escalation options in case the candidate wants to speak to a human. 

Unsuccessful candidates may choose to leave their portal open for future opportunities, or have the option to control their privacy by deleting their data when it is no longer required. For successful candidates, the same portal could potentially be used to launch the onboarding experience.  

Planning for the business case and implementation

Start building your business case for investment in recruitment technology by defining the issue in terms that will resonate with the decision-making team. For example, your CFO may not be as receptive to improving the candidate experience but will be interested in cost of hire, quality of hire, efficiency and productivity improvements. Link the business case to overall company goals, such as growth and risk mitigation. 

Gather relevant data points across various recruitment metrics to support your business case. Capture candidate satisfaction through feedback forms and keep an eye on important data points such as application drop-out rates. 

Then, estimate the financial and non-financial benefits that you expect from the investment, while detailing the risks of inaction. 

Don’t try to do everything at once when implementing new technologies. Take an iterative approach by automating one process at a time, continually gathering candidate feedback to track improvements. As with any technological transformation, start by ensuring that you are gathering all the data you will need to support automation, personalisation and self-service portals. Whether you choose a single end-to-end solution or prefer to build a best-in-class technology stack, ensure that the candidate experience is given top priority.