Candidate Care: Recruitment 101

What the public knows about your organization greatly influences employee morale and satisfaction internally, as well as your draw to external candidates. In retail, it is a proven fact that when someone receives good customer service they’ll share that with 3 connections. However when they receive bad customer service, they’ll share that with 7 connections. The same goes for the recruitment process and candidate care is recruitment’s version of customer service.

When potential candidates that your organization is attempting to recruit have an unpleasant experience, they will share that experience with their networks, impacting your organization’s brand in a negative way. Recruiters play an important role in ensuring that the organization they are representing is viewed in a positive and desirable light through dedicating time throughout the recruitment process to candidate care.

Sometimes it is easy for candidate care to fall through the cracks as you manage your daily responsibilities while recruiting for numerous roles. Screening resumes, meeting with hiring managers and conducting interviews either on the telephone or in person occupies a large portion of recruiters’ time. However, a little bit of extra attention given to candidate care can strongly impact your organization’s candidate satisfaction and recruitment success.

Here are five tips for delivering candidate care, which goes a very long way in the candidate’s mind and creates a positive candidate experience with your organization regardless of whether they are successfully hired or not.

1. Respect. This seems like common sense, but is one of the most frequent offenses recruiters commit. Be on time for your appointments. Put your phone away during the interview and direct your full attention toward the candidate. Little actions like that demonstrate to the candidate that you value their time and are genuinely interested in having them potentially join your organization.
2. Attitude and positivity throughout the interview process. The job interview process is just as much an interview for each candidate to determine a right fit for them, as it is for your organization to determine best fit for the position. Every candidate coming in the door is assessing the role and the organization to see if it is a right fit for them. When you are positive about working for the organization and enthusiastic about the opportunity that you are interviewing for, it will drive candidate passion to genuinely want to work for your organization.
3. Response time, following up when you say you will and committing to timelines. If you are not sure of the hiring timeline or have a number of candidates scheduled for future interviews in the coming weeks, be straightforward and commit to a date of getting back to all candidates. If at that point you do not have any updates or are not ready to move to the next step, contact all candidates and let them know that you will require more time and that you will be back to them in another specified time frame. No one likes to be left hanging and candidates will appreciate knowing when they can expect to hear from you.
4. Ensure the hiring managers you will be working with are trained in the interview process and understand the importance of candidate care. Even if you are going out of your way to make the experience a positive one for the candidate, your interviewing partners/hiring managers can unintentionally impact the interview in a negative way if they are not aware of what candidate care truly means.
5. Informing candidates when you have a final decision via telephone, not email. Even if the candidates are not successful in securing the role they have interviewed for, a telephone call is a nice personal touch and adds to the experience as a whole. Make sure that you tie up all loose ends with hiring managers and any internal and external candidates that you have spoken to about the role and engaged for an interview. This way no one is left hanging and wondering what ever happened to the position they were being considered for.

All of the above actions will go great lengths to solidify the experience candidates go through when moving through the recruitment process with your organization. A strong and positive candidate experience will contribute to the growth of your organization’s brand and increase external candidate’s desire to work for your organization.