<p>Often, a job application is a candidate’s first introduction to the company. Does your current candidate experience give the best impression for future employees and potentially your future CEO?</p>
<p>Candidate experience has been thrust into the focus of hiring managers everywhere in recent years. Not only because a positive candidate experience leaves applicants feeling warm and fuzzy, but because it actually has an impact on your company’s bottom line, brand perception and the quality of your talent pool.</p>
<h2>Candidate Experience News Travels Fast</h2>
<p>Have you heard the old adage, ‘good news travels fast’? Well, bad news travels even faster, meaning if applicants don’t have a good experience when they interact with your company, then your employer brand suffers.</p>
<p>Employer branding should be at the forefront of hiring decisions. Regardless of how much effort you put into your consumer brand, if your employer brand isn’t up to par then your overall brand perception will suffer.</p>
<p>Plus, a bad experience means that applicants won’t re-apply for roles in the future and they certainly won’t refer their peers to your company. Looks like you just made your talent pool a lot smaller…</p>
<h2>Protecting Your Revenue</h2>
<p>The findings and statistics which highlight the impact that a negative candidate experience can have on your brand are staggering. It’s important to remember that those job applicants could also be your current or future customers or may know/interact with your customers and clients. A bad experience during the job application process will, of course, affect brand loyalty and purchasing behaviour. Many companies have made these mistakes and have paid the price, with the most well-known of these cases resulting in <a href="https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/candidate-experience/2017/bad-candidate-experience-cost-virgin-media-5m-annually-and-how-they-turned-that-around" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Virgin Media losing $5 million dollars</a> in one year.</p>
<p>Generally, <a href="https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/trends-and-research/2018/5-insights-on-how-to-improve-your-candidate-experience" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">almost half of candidates</a> who have had a poor experience with a company, state that they won’t purchase or use that company’s services again. Depending on the size and nature of each business, the results of a poor candidate experience have the potential to be financially disastrous.</p>
<p>This doesn’t mean that you have to hire each and every applicant. Positive candidate experience doesn’t always mean that each person who is happy with the experience was a successful hire. Instead, ensure that your hiring processes are efficient, timely and outline the hiring process and timeframes to candidates. This means that even if they aren’t successful in the application process, they know about it and are informed as to why so that their future career endeavours can be fruitful.</p>
<h2>Making the Right Hires</h2>
<p>Positive candidate experience will enable job applicants to connect with your company ethos and culture, helping to drive this forward in their own roles if they are successfully hired. That said, we know that making the right hire and choosing the right person is really tough, and oftentimes you aren’t certain they are the right choice until they are in the job.</p>
<p>For this reason, HR technology now exists to allow hiring managers to streamline processes so that they can focus on the people. That’s exactly why TrueProfile.io was developed. We know how expensive hiring can be, and <a href="https://businessblog.trueprofile.io/cost-of-making-a-bad-hire/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">making the wrong hire is even more costly</a>. If you’re interested in knowing how you can improve the candidate experience by reducing time-to-hire while ensuring the best, qualified candidates are selected then please visit our dedicated <a href="https://www.trueprofile.io/businesspartner" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Business Partner’s</a> area. </p>