What happens if you ignore your candidate experience?

That is a question the recently released 2017 North American Candidate Experience research report sheds some light on. At a high level, ignoring your candidate experience (or creating a negative experience) will create a ripple effect that will impact your organization’s ability to find and hire qualified talent. Period.  (< Click to tweet!)

According to the report, 60 percent of candidates will share their negative experiences with others, thereby influencing other people’s perceptions and decisions. Candidates with an overall poor experience are less likely to refer others to work for your organization. And, 46 percent of candidates with a poor experience say they will “sever the business relationship.” If you are an organization that relies on consumers to make money imagine the impact this can have on your bottom line.

At exaqueo, we have a candidate experience model that includes:

• Awareness: when a candidate first becomes aware of a brand
• Consideration: when a candidate considers working for that brand
• Application: when a candidate applies for a job
• Interview: when the candidate interviews for a job
• Offer: when the candidate receives a formal offer.

Along this spectrum there are numerous candidate touchpoints you can control (e.g. your offer experience) and others you cannot (e.g. a candidate’s interview review on a public review site). In the areas where you can control or heavily influence the experience, we see that most employers are just satisfying candidates basic needs.

We want you to think differently about your candidates and move beyond Satisfy, to Engage and — even more elevated — Captivate. (< Click to tweet!)

Satisfy Your Candidates

This is the level where most organizations sit. At this level, you are living the candidate experience status quo. Your organization’s candidate experience is vanilla, stuck in neutral, and most likely very similar to most of your talent competitors. As in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, think of this as you’re meeting the ‘basic requirements’ of the interview.

Engage Your Candidates

Once you level up to engage your candidates, your experience becomes more humanized and the process become easier for the candidate. Easing the process is an impactful way to improve your candidate experience. Here, you move from satisfying basic needs to building a relationship with your candidates.

Captivate Your Candidates

Reaching the ultimate goal to captivate your candidates now means you’re proactively anticipating your candidates’ needs and personalizing the process. Here, it is really important you have the time and commitment because captivating your candidates takes effort and resources.

From Current State to Goal State

How can you take your experience from satisfying candidates to truly captivating them? Grab some water and a snack, and watch this 30-minute webinar. It’s chocked full of recent candidate experience data, models to challenge the status quo, as well as ideas and real-life examples to reshape how you think about your candidate experience.

Watch and Listen Now