High-volume recruitment efforts are more about than just onboarding individuals to fill roles quickly. It’s also about refining the candidate experience to enhance a company’s employer brand, which will improve future hiring campaigns. Refining communication channels, providing timely feedback, and streamlining the application process will enhance the candidate experience and make potential applicants more willing to stay engaged with the application process.
About 26% of candidates in a 2023 ERE Media survey said that they had a great candidate experience when applying for a new job. Another 61% stated that they had a neutral or pretty good candidate experience. The last 13% of survey takers had a negative candidate experience. These statistics show that companies need to improve their candidate experience in high-volume hiring for more individuals to have a great rather than a pretty good encounter when applying for a requisition.
Streamline the Application Process To Increase Candidate Engagement
Evaluate your company’s application length for each potential role. Streamline the application questions accordingly as one way to reduce candidate drop-off rates because a lengthy process can cause disinterest in candidates to the point they will look elsewhere for other employment opportunities.
A user-friendly platform like Cadient’s applicant tracking system can help your candidates seamlessly navigate the application process, access communications from recruiters, and utilize all the features this portal has to offer! Revise your roles’ job descriptions every so often to ensure that language is easy to understand for everyone interested in applying. Hence, there should not be any industry-related technical jargon in the job descriptions, so that individuals transitioning from another industry can understand the responsibilities and tasks of the requisition.
Provide Timely and Transparent Communications
Improving the candidate experience in high-volume recruiting involves providing timely and transparent communications. You can improve candidate communications in mass recruitment by:
- Instant acknowledgment of application submission and receipt.
- Automated messages for application updates.
- A personalized message as an interview follow-up to report whether or not the candidate is officially hired.
- Detailed feedback messages after an interview.
- Follow-up surveys to ask applicants about their candidate experience.
Use Technology To Improve Candidate Feedback for Hiring
Speaking of follow-up surveys about the candidate experience, high-volume recruiting should always include collecting candidate feedback at the end of the campaign.
Utilizing a survey platform such as Survey Monkey can help you collect data on how each applicant’s candidate experience went for them. Every survey should have the same questions so that collected data is streamlined accordingly. Send the survey to candidates whether they are onboarded as official new hires or not. This will help the recruitment team gain insight into what’s working for the current hiring process and what procedures need to be adjusted.
Automate Tasks, But Know When To Personalize
Automating messaging to candidates can be an effective way to expedite the hiring process. However, the candidate experience can be enhanced with personalized messaging from time to time. A candidate may expect an automated message when they send in their application as a confirmation of submission.
However, it’s better to send a personalized message when doing a follow-up after an interview. For example, you may note something special that you learned about the candidate during the interview when you send this follow-up message.
Keep Candidates Informed About the Hiring Timeline
Speaking of follow-up messages after interviews, it’s best to keep candidates informed about the hiring timeline as the onboarding process goes on. For example, if there are more interviews after the initial one, note this in a follow-up email or text message to the candidate. Let the candidate know about which recruiter will be reaching out to them for a second interview or third interview.
Maybe there was only one interview for your company’s hiring process. This makes more sense in a high-volume hiring scenario. In this case, you should send a message thanking the candidate for their time interviewing with you and then provide a timeline on when a final decision will be made. Try to have your final hiring decision made within 7 to 10 business days of interviewing the top applicants to reinforce candidate engagement in high-volume recruitment.
Make Feedback Actionable and Constructive
For applicants who are not onboarded with the company during the recruitment process, it is best to give them actionable and constructive feedback on how they can improve for their next interview. Depending on the scope of your high-volume recruitment efforts, it may be impossible to give detailed feedback to every applicant who does not make it as an official new hire. However, take the time to give at least one piece of feedback that the candidate can take with them in their future career development endeavors.
This piece of feedback could be how an applicant can improve their interviewing skills or suggestions for enhancing their experience for the role in which they applied. For example, you can point candidates lacking specific qualifications for the open role to resources that can advance their education, expertise, and technical skills required to be successful in that role in the future.
There is a response acronym to behavior-based interview questions called the STAR method which stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. By taking the time to explain each element in this list, interviewers will feel that responses answered with this method will be more thorough and qualitative when selecting the top candidates to consider for an open requisition.
Leverage Data for Continuous Improvement
Leveraging candidate experience metrics can help your company continuously improve its high-volume recruitment efforts. Track important key performance indicators such as candidate drop-off rates, time-to-hire, time-to-fill, and candidate engagement levels. Note any disparities happening for these current metrics and integrate improvement strategies to refine them going forward.
