Elevate your employer brand by improving the candidate experience

Imagine this: you have found an interesting company on LinkedIn. You click yourself to their website and lo and behold! There is a role open that is just right for you. You open the job ad and are directed to a somewhat impersonal page where the text layout looks kind of weird. Never mind, you still decide to apply for the job.

In the application form you need to tell this and that about your education, work experience and wishes for the future. And all this despite already adding your CV and cover letter to your application. You power through the long application form and finally get to press send. After a nerve wracking wait you get a confirmation message in your email - phew. And then, weeks of silence.

Honestly, would you have finished the application process? And if you had, how would it feel like to be completely ignored after applying?

And what would your candidate experience have been like?

Building blocks of candidate experience

In all its simplicity, candidate experience is the feeling that the candidate is left with after interacting with your company. It has a clear link to the employer brand you are hopping to build. These interactions include for example:

searching for information about the company.
reading a job ad.
applying for a job.
all communications whether it is done by email or face to face.

Candidate experience affects the tone of voice that your company is talked about. In a best case scenario, a person with a good experience can, even despite getting a no thank you message, give praise to the company. This will certainly not be the case with people with a bad experience. Emotions awakened by experiences are easily remembered - and the negative ones tend to outshine the positive.

The example in the beginning can feel exaggerated but at least one of these examples happens in quite a few recruitments. This is also shown in Duunitori’s and Taloustutkimus’ Jobseeker survey of 2022:

"49 percent of the respondents feel that filling out unclear and hefty forms is the most annoying and frustrating thing in job search."

“14 percent of respondents do not apply for an open position because applying seems difficult.”

“56 percent of job seekers would like to receive more information about the progress of the search. Only 10 percent of the respondents consider the employer's communication to be sufficient.”

Frankly, these statistics are unacceptable. The good news is that candidate experience can be affected and it does not take too much.

Steps to improving your candidate experience

By making sure that the basics of your recruitment process are in order, you are already building a better candidate experience.

Lyyti can help you with:

Having your brand visualised in the application form, job ad and all communication creates a cohesive and professional feeling. Your brand is meant to be seen.
With the Event website functionality you can build a stylish job ad. You can set your own background on the site plus add images and videos to liven up the text. In addition, you can make the job ad more easy to read by dividing the content between tabs or by having different language versions of the same ad. Remember to preview how the job ad site looks from the applicant's point of view after every change.
Application forms are entirely customisable. You can decide for yourself what information you want to collect from the applicants - as little or as much as you want. You can add both multiple choice fields and open text fields to the application form. In any case, I recommend keeping the application form as short as possible and asking only those things that are really relevant to the job.
Effective communication is one of the cornerstones of recruitment and a good applicant experience. When applying, a confirmation message is automatically sent from Lyyti. Other applicant communications can be handled in real time or messages can be scheduled to be sent out at a chosen time. You can also send text messages from Lyyti. For example, how would it feel as an applicant to receive a message with arrival instructions and a welcome message an hour before the job interview? And you can of course schedule sending them from Lyyti.
More and more applicants browse job ads and even fill out applications on a mobile device. Remember to make sure that the job ad looks good on any device. That way, at least for this reason, you won't lose an interested applicant.

So why would you leave your applicant in a state of disappointment or frustration, when candidate experience can be easily influenced? For example with the help of Lyyti.

Want to see how recruitment done in Lyyti looks like? Go check out our open application.

You can also contact me directly if you wish to spar about the topic or send me a LinkedIn request.