The Candidate Experience: Covid 19
It was only a few weeks ago that I wrote a blog on ‘The Candidate Experience,’ which was posted at the beginning of the COVID19 stir over here in Aus. With the blink of an eye, a global pandemic is well underway. The world has been shaken and entire organisations have been sent to work from home. We’ve all had to adjust to the new climate, almost overnight.
In times like these, considerations must be made to enhance the candidate experience:
Safety First
Everyone across the world is nervous about their health and the wellbeing of their loved ones. We must ensure we’re following the right procedures to make candidate safety a priority. If you’re lucky enough to be recruiting, consider your local government safety precautions, and ensure that you’re sticking to them. Don’t put people at risk for the sake of recruitment. Instead, adopt a virtual candidate experience, from phone and video interviews to virtual skills tests, there’s plenty we can do in this digital era.
Human Touch
When it comes to hiring new talent, many businesses already handle many parts of the recruitment process online. However, one challenge that may arise moving to a completely online hiring process is the lack of ‘human touch.’
LinkedIn Editors recently shared some overwhelming statistics, that 68% of current job seekers worry that recruiters won’t get back to them due to an increase in applications. As always, even before COVID19, we need to make sure that every single application gets a response. Whether that be with next steps or to inform that the application was unsuccessful.
Time To Refine
Let’s face it; you’ll never have this much time on your hands again. If there’s one good thing about the world being on lockdown, it’s that we have a lot more time to get things done. This means there’s never been a better time to refine your candidate experience.
Put yourself in their shoes and walk their journey. Review your entire recruitment process. Does your current website take too long to load? Does it look outdated? How fast is your response rate?
Spend some time making the recruitment process as user-friendly as possible. You’ll be grateful when the market picks up again and you’re ahead of the game.