How Candidate Experience Shapes Your Hiring Pool

Interviews are often nerve-wracking affairs for candidates. Not only do they have a limited amount of time to convey their skills and experience, but they must do so with poise. Sadly, not everyone makes a strong first impression. What’s more, many individuals with the greatest amount of potential slip through the cracks.

Unfortunately, many interviews feel like interrogations, which creates an extremely tense environment for the interviewee. In an atmosphere like this, candidates act unnaturally. Often, interviewers will ask questions from a script and hardly deviate from a premeditated narrative. As a result, the process lacks a conversational tone, and won’t provide insight into an individual’s personality.

With that being said, even the best interview may not convey the full scope of a candidate’s potential. For one thing, first impressions are deceiving; people prepare for interviews and try to sell themselves to their prospective employer. As such, employers must find creative and effective recruitment solutions.

Candidate Experience

It may seem paradoxical, but the candidate experience is just as important as the employer’s impression. In fact, this experience may dictate whether the strongest individuals decide to pursue an available role. For one, highly skilled candidates will likely have options, and they’ll take a variety of factors into consideration. Of course, benefits, salary, and company culture will
all impact whether they decide to accept an offer; however, the hiring process has a sizeable impact on that choice, too. For one thing, a laborious or difficult recruitment process may deter people from even applying.

Nowadays, HR software makes the application process much less painless for candidates. If a company isn’t implementing these hiring tools, they’ll stand out from their peers, and not in a good way. For instance, an applicant tracking system allows employers to market their available roles to hundreds of job boards from one place. The streamlined process also allows candidates to easily apply, which means they won’t be turned off by the process.

Using A Job Fit Assessment

Upon receiving an application, a company may decide to pursue an interview or call a candidate’s references. Of course, the interview may not show an individual in their best light, or it may give an overly optimistic view of their workplace aptitude. Similarly, references are often unreliable, as they may over-exaggerate someone’s capabilities.

Performing pre-employment testing, on the other hand, prevents these biases from interfering with the recruitment process. These tests focus on an individual’s unique mental and behavioural capabilities, and how well they suit a given role. For example, a career personality test provides an objective assessment of how well a person will fare in a role after an extended period of time. As a result, employers are able to use an assessment benchmark to remove bias from their hiring process. Not only will this reduce employee turnover, but it is much less difficult for the candidate. Instead of enduring an interrogative interview, or a series of them, they simply complete the assessment.