Applicant Experience – A Game Changer for your Brand

By Amit Singh

Improving applicant experience is the key in winning the battle for talent. The contemporary job market is candidate-driven, which means companies no longer get to choose an employee. Companies are chosen by talent. As a result, it is imperative for your company to begin upgrading applicant experiences now.

Human resources and recruiting have seen extraordinary upheaval in the last few years. As workplace innovations become more prominent, the HR department is being scrutinized to see how they can use technology improvements to enhance results and add value to the company. The attention naturally moves to applicant experience in this situation.

Creating pleasant applicant experiences has been an organizational priority for a long time, particularly considering growing attrition. If the recruitment process becomes overly lengthy, it is possible to lose strong prospects and alienate potential talent recruits.

What is Applicant experience?
The recruitment process is a multi-step process that involves sourcing, screening, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding. Every interaction which a candidate has with the recruiter impacts the overall applicant experience. It is imperative that the applicant has an exceptional experience during the whole recruitment process to reflect an organization’s brand image.

In other words, the total opinion of your company’s recruitment process by current, past, and prospective future candidates is referred to as “Applicant experience”. It’s the culmination of candidates’ emotions, actions and attitude across the whole recruitment process.

How can companies measure applicant experience?
A good place to start is by measuring and evaluating your existing applicant experiences. Companies need to obtain feedback from their candidates to figure out which aspects of their recruitment journey were positive and which needs to be improved.

Distributing a survey questionnaire to all the candidates who have completed the recruiting process, regardless of whether they have been denied, opted out, or employed will provide insights about various experiences. The survey can offer both closed-ended and open-ended questions.

In addition, social media can act like a double-edged sword and can help in monitoring an applicant’s experience via relevant feedback and comments.

How can a company improve its applicant experiences?
Brands are achieving great success by realizing the value of the job seeker’s journey and customizing the recruitment process to treat them with the same attention as a client.

In the overall recruitment process, using the right technology, improvising background verification processes with the help of trusted companies, advanced technology and enhanced user experience products can help to ease down the recruitment process.

Technology and Background verification together are enhancing applicant experiences.
A Talent Acquisition department’s major job is to find and hire qualified and dependable employees for the organization. Background checks have been fundamentally transformed by modern technology, making the process less labor-intensive. If a recruiter begins evaluating multiple applications and continues to verify the given information, it may quickly become a tedious and time-consuming process, causing them to overlook a suitable candidate. So, by incorporating cutting-edge technology into the recruiting process, a firm may not only improve its efficiency but also save a significant amount of time.

(The author is Head- Commercial, First Advantage India, a leading employee background verification firm headquartered in the US)