Phenom recently released their State of Candidate Experience 2022 Report, which evaluated the current state of the candidate experience across the Fortune 500 and European 100 companies.
The report illuminates current trends in how employers are treating job seekers and the opportunities for recruitment marketers to differentiate their employer brands in today’s competitive talent market.
If you haven’t had a chance to read through it yet, don’t worry! We pulled out 8 top insights worth considering and implementing into your talent acquisition strategy.
While you’re definitely going to want to read through the entire report, the takeaways below are a great jumping-off point for more effectively attracting, engaging and converting today’s and tomorrow’s talent.
Let’s jump in!
1. Streamline your application process
Only 10% of career sites had an intuitive job search and apply process, requiring less than three clicks to apply.
Incorporating this into your strategy
In a world where everyone’s competing for the same talent, making the application process any harder than it needs to be is a big risk. Knowing that there are so many options, candidates are more likely to click off cumbersome or long applications in favor of easier, quicker ones.
To avoid this happening, comb over your application process to see what friction points (i.e. take-home assignments or long-winded questions) can be removed. For example, for hard-to-fill position, try asking for just first name, last name, email address, mobile number and resume. For easier-to-fill roles, first name, last name, email address, mobile number and three qualifying questions — that’s it! You can then quickly get to an interview and further qualify there.
Rally note: For help finding that balance between candidate quantity and quality, watch our webinar on demand, How to increase top quality candidates by 50%.
2. Help candidates with their job searches
78% of career sites’ search functionality only showed results for what was typed — not similar suggestions.
Incorporating this into your strategy
Oftentimes, candidates know more about the type of job they’re looking for rather than the specific roles themselves. This is why it can be a problem to only show them results that are related exactly to what they search — you might still offer what they’re looking for but it might be worded differently and not show up.
To fix this, experiment with being more generous in the tagging of your open roles on your careers site. For example, rather than make a software engineering role only discoverable through the search “software engineer”, make it also discoverable through tags like “programming”, “programmer” and “tech”. Opening up your tagging can also help candidates find roles they didn’t know exist but are nonetheless interested in.
3. Design your careers site for conversion and consistency
45% of career sites were not optimized to start the job search “above the fold”, and only 14% of career sites had branding on each page to indicate to the candidate that they were still on the same career site.
Incorporating this into your strategy
The second that candidates land on your careers site, you want it to be obvious that they’ve landed in the right place so that they don’t click off. You also want to make sure that it’s clear where they can go to find what they’re interested in, whether that’s jobs, employer brand content or something else.
To do this, you want to have branding visible on every page (particularly in the header and footer), as well as a clear job search bar or “Explore Careers” section as close to the top of the page as possible.
Rally note: Need help designing a careers site that is optimized to encourage candidates to apply to jobs and explore your content? Grab our free Careers Site Template!
4. Add more tracking and measurement
99% of the Fortune 500 used UTM tracking inconsistently on 3rd-party job posting sites, or didn’t use them at all.
Incorporating this into your strategy
UTMs, or Urchin Tracking Modules, are a form of link tracking and allow you to append additional information to URLs to better be able to track and measure your Recruitment Marketing efforts.
The problem with UTMs is they don’t provide enough information to be especially useful to your Recruitment Marketing strategy. Plus, as evidenced by the stat above, they can be difficult to implement correctly and require the use of an even more complicated tool, Google Analytics, to be able to extract useful data from.
For an easier link tracking solution that tracks, measures, reports and benchmarks data across your social media and digital channels, sign up for a free account of Rally Inside.
5. Embed more social media content
3% of the Fortune 500 had curated social media content embedded within the career site.
Incorporating this into your strategy
Authenticity is what candidates are looking for on your careers site; they want to know what it’s like to work for you by getting an inside look at your culture, initiatives and people.
One easy way to convey this authenticity is with social media content. Embedding your social media content throughout your careers site avoids any of the inauthenticity that comes with the use of stock images and it’s usually fairly low cost. You can even find website builders or plugins for your existing builders that allow you to automatically update galleries of social media posts, making sure that you’re always showing the newest look into your company without any manual input required.
6. Listen to and incorporate candidate feedback
12% of the Fortune 500 sent applicants a satisfaction survey.
Incorporating this into your strategy
At the end of the day, candidates (over even team members and leaders) have final say over what makes a good candidate experience. If you’re not actively listening to their feedback, you’re missing out on all kinds of areas for potential improvement.
Whether through an automated survey, follow-up email or some other means, try making following up with candidates (both hired and otherwise) a priority to see what they liked and what they didn’t while interacting with you and what areas they would like to see done better.
7. Personalize your candidate experience through a chatbot
Only 13% of companies had a chatbot on their career site.
Incorporating this into your strategy
In an ideal world, you would have the time to offer a concierge service to every candidate who visits your careers site. You could ask them what they’re looking for, direct them to wherever content makes the most sense and stand by to offer further support. But the reality is that most Recruitment Marketing teams have too much to do to be able to offer anywhere near this level of 1-on-1 support.
Enter chatbots! Chatbot services have evolved to the point where they can be used to proactively answer questions, guide candidates towards jobs and handle all kinds of other tedious tasks. With products like PandoLogic, not only does this free up time for recruiters to take care of more important tasks but also allows you to provide a much more personalized candidate experience.
8. Keep candidates in the loop after they apply
Only 1% of the Fortune 500 communicated application status to the candidate after the initial email confirming submission.
Incorporating this into your strategy
The most common problem candidates cite for having a negative candidate experience is poor communication. To avoid this happening to your candidates, communicating and nurturing them through their entire candidate experience is a must.
Sending updates after initially receiving a candidate’s application as you further view and consider their application doesn’t take a lot of work to implement, can be automated with the right technology and goes a long way in reinforcing a positive candidate experience.
Rally note: To learn more about better communicating with candidates and upgrading your talent database into a talent community, read our How To Guide, 3 Steps to Turn Your Talent Database into a Talent Community.
—————
For more insights to help inform your future Recruitment Marketing and talent attraction strategy, read Phenom’s full State of Candidate Experience 2022 Report.
