This article is a guest post.

For fast-growing companies, setting up an efficient, effective recruitment process is more vital than ever. As business growth gathers momentum, companies need to scale up their workforces quickly. And that calls for high-volume, highspeed hiring campaigns. A misstep or delay at any step in the recruitment process can cause a company to lose out on the talent it needs to stay competitive. Needless to say, the right recruitment process enables companies to attract the talent that’s best for them. So, how can businesses develop a winning candidate experience?

Put candidates, not your company, at the centre of the recruitment process

One way to meet the recruitment imperative is to put candidates at the centre of the talent acquisition process. This means ensuring that candidates’ experiences are as engaging, personalised, and meaningful as possible at each step. An employer must determine how it will enhance the candidate experience before it even recognises it needs to fill a position. Hiring managers and HR practitioners must generate answers to questions such as:

• How will we make the recruitment process as fast and effective as possible?
• How will we engage candidates at the right time (before a need becomes critical) and in the right way to ensure that each candidate is a proper fit for the role and for the organisation?
• How will we engage candidates where they are; for example, on their mobile device?

Employers must excel on two fronts to provide the highest-quality candidate experience while also capturing the benefits afforded by automation:

• Preparation—to infuse unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness into their recruitment process
• Transparency—throughout the recruitment process, so job seekers always know where they stand

See also: ‘Human Touch’ Remains Essential to Candidate Experience: Study

Preparation: Setting the Stage for an Efficient, Effective Recruitment Process

When a company prepares carefully for high-volume recruitment campaigns, it instills confidence in job candidates that the employer is organised and credible. It also tells job seekers that the company understands who they are, what they have to offer, and what they want from a job and an employer. Preparation thus boosts the quality of the candidate experience, including personalising it, and it helps companies infuse efficiency into the recruitment process while avoiding all-too-common mistakes. Several best practices can help:

1. Use a single source of information to help recruiters accelerate the process. Companies need to combine historical hiring data, post-hire employee effectiveness data, internal skill and competency data and external market data. By sharing all such data on its recruitment system, an employer can build requisitions that will later become job descriptions.
2. Get smart about candidates’ unique characteristics. Companies must deepen their understanding of job seekers’ needs, goals, preferences and expectations regarding a range of issues. These include compensation, the kind of organisation job seekers want to work for (including employers’ values and organisational culture), development and career opportunities that interest candidates most and ways in which they approach the job-search process. Armed with this understanding, a hiring organisation can more easily tailor every communication with job seekers to those characteristics.
3. Communicate a consistent employer brand at every candidate touchpoint. Savvy companies make certain that their website content, social media content, and recruitment marketing materials communicate a clear, consistent, and compelling employer brand, and that candidates can easily find information of interest to them.
4. Take advantage of technology to set up an efficient, scalable interview process. With most recruitment platforms, companies have to recreate interview questions from scratch for each candidate. With the right platform, they only have to set up an interview team once for a recruiting drive for a particular role. This enables companies to move more candidates swiftly through the interview process, easily consolidate interview results in one place, and add interviewers as needed. It also helps ensure fairness, compliance, and consistency across interviews.
5. Craft recruitment strategies tailored to candidates’ unique characteristics. For example, companies can offer a non-intrusive, progressive web app to give candidates the right information (such as push notifications) at the right time and access to that information through the right device. Through such means, an employer makes itself available to job seekers at precisely the time and place they need it to be available. And candidates don’t have to click through a multitude of sites or web pages to find the information they require.

See also: How can Employers Avoid the Cost of a Bad Candidate Experience?

Transparency: Making It Easy for Candidates to Know Where They Stand

Transparency in the recruitment process is providing candidates with information to help them make the best possible decisions. This includes updates on their status in the hiring process, easy access to all aspects of the process (including interview information, upcoming tasks and documents that need completion), and tools for quickly communicating with the hiring team. When companies establish such transparency, they gain a number of important benefits. For starters, they attract higher-quality candidates and hold their interest. They also decrease drop-off rates and accelerate time to hire.

In today’s fast-changing talent landscape, organisations can no longer afford to rely on traditional approaches to recruitment. Rather than putting themselves at the centre of that process, they need to put the candidate there. By tailoring the candidate experience to job seekers’ requirements, preferences, and job-search behaviours, employers can sweeten the odds of attracting and winning the talent they need to stay competitive.

Read also: Why & How To Improve Your Candidate Experience

Author Bio

By Rhys Hughes is Regional Vice President APAC at SumTotal Systems. As a leader, he diligently works with CEOs, HR teams and IT leaders to deliver the most configurable and innovative learning and talent development solutions on the market.

Connect with him on LinkedIn.

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