If you belong to a recruitment organization that’s concerned with candidate experience recruiting metrics, you’re on the right track. Today’s recruiting environment is tough. Most of the best candidates are already employed and not particularly motivated to jump through hoops to engage your recruiters if it means a long and difficult application. Or a non-mobile browsing experience on your career site. Or a complete lack of communication after submitting an application. Or even an outdated online experience that makes your company look like they don’t know what they’re doing.
So being focused on making candidates happy and satisfied any time they interface with your company is a great step in the right direction.
But so many companies don’t go deep enough. Sure, you may bend over backwards to understand and optimize the candidate experience for the candidates you know, but what about the ones you don’t know?
Think about your career site. On average, about 1% of the people who visit your career site ever complete an application. So if you have a great candidate experience for that 1%, then you are absolutely ignoring 99% of your potential candidate pool.
These are important recruitment metrics. Because if you could increase that 1% applicant rate by one half of one percent, you’d increase your candidates per open job by 50%.
I know what you’re saying: “We already have too many unqualified candidates for our open jobs. We don’t need more.” Right. That’s the point. Most organizations’ candidate experience is passively designed to screen out the casual candidates and engage the active candidates. In other words, the worse your candidate experience is, the more it will repel candidates who already have a job and don’t have the motivation to stick with it.
Think about your important job families. Technical, healthcare, operations management, etc. Do you have the luxury of NOT trying to get everyone into the pool?
Whether you’ve ignored your online candidate experience, or invested heavily in employer branding and career site design and content, do you know whether it’s working for your target audience? Could your message be clearer? Your visitor to applicant rate higher? Are you engaging casual candidates or filtering them out?
The answers lie in understanding the “other 99%.”
