Meet & Engage

Candidate Experience: The New Battleground

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The start of 2018 will have been a frenetic time for most graduate recruiters – and may still be for those whose closing dates are still not over the line.

Schedules will now be packed with assessment and selection activities. But arguably it’s now that the hard work really starts.

In a fiercely competitive market, how do you ensure your chosen candidates stay with you in the months between offer and day one?

Confident, encouraged and informed candidates perform better, stay in engaged and become ready for the workplace

At WCN’s Emerging Talent seminar, organisations from across the corporate, public and third sectors heard research presented that confirmed what we already knew deep down was a priority: candidate experience. That’s the new battleground.

How do you ensure that all the hard work, time and resource you’ve ploughed into your employer brand, attraction campaigns, campus presence, not to mention selection process, doesn’t get undermined by reneges post-offer, no-shows or a lack of work readiness on day one?

Confident, encouraged and informed candidates perform better, stay in engaged and become ready for the workplace; But what do these candidates want to hear and see?

From what we’ve observed from our clients’ activity and Net Promoter Scores, candidates want to ask questions and share insight with their future employer and peer group.

They want to feel prepared stepping into the world of work and so hearing about the induction they’ll be going through, speaking with last year’s intake and other ways of really understanding the impact of their role when they join all provide the best value.

Candidate experience is the real differentiator when it comes to ensuring you deliver on your emerging talent hiring objectives“

Getting the blend right will help drive engagement, which reduces renege rates and increases a positive candidate experience.

Here’s how some of our clients have boosted candidate experience and driven down renege rates:

  • A consulting firm runs weekly drop in Q&A sessions for offered candidates. They also run ad-hoc engagement sessions that help candidates to understand more about the inclusive culture so they are ‘work ready’ when they begin. This events programme also includes an online debate about what inclusivity means and sessions hosted by female leaders
  • A global graduate recruiter runs location and/or professional specific sessions (e.g. meet your new colleagues in London, meet some of the tax team etc). They also run sessions with their professional qualifications team, to help new apprentice and graduate starters to understand more about the professional qualifications and support they’ll receive when they arrive
  • A Fin-tech business hold simple ‘Keep in touch’ sessions every Friday, hosted by the recruitment team (who manage onboarding) where offered candidates can say hi and ask any questions
  • Clients with small resourcing teams have groups of graduate ambassadors who run sessions on a rotating basis. This is more about keeping in touch and engaged then answering specific questions about paperwork.

Candidate experience is the real differentiator when it comes to ensuring you deliver on your emerging talent hiring objectives.

Our candidate engagement technology powered by live chat and personalised content can help you give this support efficiently on a volume scale throughout the process.

Using our candidate engagement technology, clients have found they’ve dramatically reduced their renege rates – in one case from 21% to 6% in one year.

2018 is the year to concentrate your efforts on your candidate journey and so looking at the trialled and proven ways of seeing a vast improvement should be an essential first step.

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Regularly reviewing processes and user experience data can yield simple solutions that have huge effects on efficiency and candidate experience.

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