Recruitment revolution – the candidate experience comes to the fore

Satisfied staff are more committed and perform better. They are more efficient and target-oriented in their work. However, this commitment tails off significantly in practice and with the daily work routine. Tackling this tendency right from the recruitment process means redefining areas of responsibility, finding the best people for each role and focusing on needs when filling vacancies. The aim is to turn employees into allies. Contrary to the accepted wisdom of the past, it takes more than career prospects and pay to achieve this. Instead, the most effective motivating factors include aspects such as appreciation, self-fulfillment and meaningful activities. It is therefore vital to anchor these criteria in the employer branding process and ensure they flow into the candidate experience.

Unfortunately, HR resources are all too often tied up with administrative tasks, preventing recruiters from taking a personal interest in applicants and working on exactly these aspects. Intelligent HR suites offer one option for freeing up capacity. Automated workflows and smart assistants make it possible to standardize routine processes in particular, at least in part. This speeds up the individual workflows along the entire recruitment process, while at the same time easing the workload of HR staff. As a result, they have more scope for personal interaction with applicants. And this is exactly what is needed to turn the candidate journey into a real, lasting candidate experience. Candidates receive the opportunity to build up a relationship with their potential employer, come to grips with its values and experience the company spirit up close. This produces real, lasting experiences that help create a sense of identification and loyalty. That is precisely what recruiters work toward every day – creating positive experiences. However, this is a time-consuming task. The resources the HR experts need for this can be freed up by deploying intelligent HR systems.

It must be remembered that the process of identifying with the company begins long before initial contact. For example, candidates find employers much more attractive if they make the meaning and purpose of a job clear in the advertisement itself. Transparent and credible communication of the corporate culture is also a decisive aspect. This is where the company’s own career pages, for instance, have a vital role to play. They must:

• Provide a good overview of the vacancies
• Give authentic insight into the real company processes
• Offer straightforward contact options for initial inquiries
• Include a clear “call to action” – that is to say, a motivational call to get in touch with the company and submit application documents quickly and easily with a single click.

After this, companies can impress with quick response times, a transparent selection process and employee-focused communication. Another essential factor is how rejections are handled. On the one hand, negative experiences can quickly go viral and have a long-term impact on the employer image. On the other, in contrast, the number of candidates who still want to maintain a good relationship with the company even after being rejected by or leaving the organization has more than doubled in the last few years. However, decision-making processes can only be made understandable for applicants when it is possible to provide the reasons for the rejection. This is another area where staff management solutions can help. Integrated HR analytics functions enable the responsible recruiters to provide informative feedback at any time. In addition, they also form the basis for creating company-wide talent pools, which are becoming increasingly important for matching future vacancies in the face of the current shortage of specialist staff.

Digital HR systems speed up applicant screening, simplify the recruitment process and improve matching. They also free up valuable resources and thus make it possible for HR experts to accompany future employees through the entire candidate experience, all the way from the first contact to onboarding and beyond, in a very personalized way. This is why eight out of ten top-1000 companies consider the digitalization of HR to be “vital to survival”. It is the only way for recruiters to be able to (re)focus on their core tasks and create unique experiences – for potential candidates, current applicants and future employees.