What is candidate experience?
Candidate experience comprises the whole journey of a candidate from awareness about a company, specific roles that she/he is suitable for, the application process, and the communication with the recruiter, hiring manager during the interview process (telephonic, video and in-person) to the offer letter and joining and onboarding. Each of the touchpoints where a candidate comes into contact with the prospective employer is a “moment of truth” to build a great candidate experience.
To illustrate the fact let’s take come conservative numbers, suppose an organization hires 100 people in a year. And it gets 50 applications per role it advertises on job portals and professional networking sites.
That means 5000 people come into contact with the company at an annual basis – of which 4900 don’t get hired.
The experience these 4900 people have during the recruiting process can either make or break the brand of the company. Handled well they can either be neutral to having positive impression of the organization. Handled badly, though, they can become detractors and in the age of social media can negatively influence the reputation of the organization.
So from our earlier example let’s say 20% candidates had a very bad experience during the recruitment process. That’s 980 people. Let’s assume that each of these people have an active network of 150 people (Dunbar’s number) but bear in mind they probably have much more than that, on various social media platforms. Of these 980, assuming 10% post scathing reviews of their experience on sites like Glassdoor, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, that’s 98×150 or 14,700 people would know about it. And if it gets further shared that number can quickly go in a geometrical progression to impact your brand image in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands
(Read the full post on the VBeyond Blog)
