Understandably, the current job market is complicated. Unemployment is high. Many companies are struggling or, at the very least, have frozen hiring. Meanwhile, others — like warehouse workers for Amazon or Instacart shoppers — are on hiring sprees. The shifting landscape doesn’t stop there, either. Candidates have an ever-expanding set of mobile technologies, making it easier than ever for them to instantly connect with the jobs and employers out there, including your competitors.
Why the Candidate Journey Matters
You already know that your brand affects the attraction of candidates. Your candidates know your brand by name and, more importantly, they experience your brand through their own journey with you.
A disjointed or friction-filled candidate journey can be confusing, frustrating and time-consuming. It can even significantly harm your brand and reputation. On the other hand, ensuring candidates experience a highly tuned journey is the best way to protect your brand, attract new talent, and increase retention across your talent pool.
Attraction. It’s likely that job seekers know something about you via word of mouth before you’ve established a direct relationship with them. If you’re doing a great job, you’re probably getting referrals based on the positive experiences you’ve created with current and previous hires. If your referrals could use a boost, you need to eliminate the noise when your brand is referenced to others.
Put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. They need work, and they need it soon. Remember, there are alternatives for your candidates that are sometimes only a click or doorstep away. Even the smallest delays and frictions will force them to look for other options.
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Hiring and onboarding. Until your candidate is an employee working their first day, you’re still at a high risk of losing them. Hiring and onboarding is the lengthiest part of the process and a great source of candidate drop-off. If you take longer than four to six hours to screen and onboard a candidate, there’s a good chance you will lose them to a competitor. Plus, in the current climate of high unemployment rates and the excessive fear of Covid-19 in facilities, if you have a goal of placing eight employees, it will take 30 candidate screenings in order to get 20 onboards to reach your goal. That means that only 27% of candidates that you screen make it to the job.
From your candidate’s perspective, it’s overwhelming enough to not know where their next paycheck is going to come from, let alone having to jump through dozens of hoops before a paycheck is secured. Streamlining the process will boost your reputation as a highly organized and efficient place to find jobs.
Retention and redeployment. Even after you’ve successfully converted the candidate into an employee, your brand is still on the line. The goal is to build a talent pool that can be tapped over and over again. Small investments like checking in with the employee to prove you’re in it for the long-haul with them go a long way. They want to know that you’ve got their back when it’s time to negotiate or find new work. Be an advocate for your employees, and they’ll be an advocate for your brand.
Where to Start
If you want to get people talking about your brand, provide them with a quick and well-planned path to becoming an employee. Begin by mapping out your entire candidate journey and thinking about the following areas to improve your candidate experiences. Prioritize the most challenging or time-consuming areas for the biggest boost.
- Eliminate redundant questions, tasks, or steps in the application or onboarding process. If you’ve requested info once from your candidate, you should never have to ask them again.
- Condense all your candidate tasks, resources, documents, and training into a single location so that you don’t require multiple sites, logins, or passwords that are hard to manage and recall.
- Question whether your candidates need to visit in-person or if they can apply and onboard from wherever they choose.
- Review manual processes that might cause delays and find technology partners with automation solutions.
- Automate and personalize communication so that your recruiters can better scale themselves, and candidates aren’t left in the dark about the next steps.
The Platform for the Job
Every employee should have a great first day that’s not burdened by hours of paperwork or processes. In developing Able, our ultimate goal has been to arm employers you with a streamlined, mobile-first candidate experience, integrated with the best technology partners in staffing for a single, elegant solution. We welcome you to give it a try.