Featured Research: 16 Ways Your ATS Can Improve the Candidate Experience
Crafting a great candidate experience requires the successful coordination of people, process and technology
Posted on 10-19-2018, Read Time: Min
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A great candidate experience makes recruiting a lot easier… but a 2018 HR.com survey of 500 professionals found that 50% felt their ATS delivered a poor candidate experience.
As a former recruiter who spent the past 15 years building recruiting technology, I found this troubling. Crafting and consistently delivering a great candidate experience is worthwhile, but hard. It requires the successful co-ordination of people, process and technology.
ATSes unquestionably shoulder some of the blame for poor candidate experiences, but that’s not the entire story. At JobScore we’ve seen recruiting teams dramatically improve the candidate experience using basic features available in virtually every ATS.
The missing piece seems to be knowing what to do and mustering the organizational will to prioritize what’s needed. Here are a few ways you can reduce friction and deliver a remarkable candidate experience:
Look great: Branding
Everyone wants to look fabulous, right? Most modern ATSes have the features to makeover your candidate experience, it’ll just take some time, effort and a little talent.
Job Description Editor: The centerpiece of any candidate experience is the job description. Put more effort into writing about what candidates care about: what they’ll get to do and why the job is a great opportunity… not the skills you want them to have. A few lines of great copy can go a long way.
Media Library: You may have a careers site that tells your company story perfectly. Guess what? Most people don’t see it. You know what everyone does see? Your jobs. Add pictures and videos to your ATS and embed them in your jobs.
| Pro tip: Consider taking some quick snaps and short videos that showcase what it’s like to work for your company. They don’t need to be professionally produced… in fact, the more authentic they are, the better. Letting people see your team and environment early in the process helps everyone. |
LinkedIn Profiles: When people choose to work for a company, they are often really choosing to work with specific people. People are the #1 reason candidates accept a job and the main reason they choose to stay at a company. Punch up the LinkedIn profiles of the people in your interview process and share them with candidates as often as possible.
The Thank You Page: Virtually every ATS shows a thank you message after candidates apply. A snazzy message that goes above and beyond a standard “thank you, we’ll be in touch” makes for a memorable candidate experience.
Email Attachments: Try to keep email text simple and to the point - but have fun with email attachments. Ask the marketing department for help. Beautifully formatted files with information about the company can be attached to email templates for everything from interview confirmations to thank you notes and offer letters.
The Newsletter: A nice way to let people down easy is to suggest they subscribe to a newsletter that will inform them about future opportunities at your company.
Theme Editor: If you can, customize the appearance of your careers site to match your brand. You don’t need to be an HTML & CSS wizard to do this - just add your logo, font and a few colors, and the transition from your company website to your ATS will be as smooth as silk.
Be responsive: Workflow
Candidates want information. They want quality information, and they want it fast. Nobody wants to feel like a number in a vast database, but your “out of the box” ATS configuration will likely cause exactly that.
Delivering a fast, personalized candidate experience should be virtually effortless for your team as they work. Here are a few ways you can configure your ATS to make that easier:
Job Application Forms: Simple: Make them shorter. Delight candidates with shorter forms with simple questions that make it crystal clear what you are looking for … you can always ask for more information later if they ace your knockout questions.
Email Templates: Most ATSes have powerful email templating functionality, but only include a few email templates out-of-the-box. Shoot for having 20+ awesome templates. When you choose from a menu of great messages that are customized for each stage of the process, candidates can sense you are catering the experience to them - and appreciate it. One size truly does not fit all.
Email Scheduling: When a candidate applies for a job, they’re excited. If they get a “thanks, but no thanks” email a few minutes later … that’s not awesome. Consider setting up your decline emails to go out a few hours in the future, even if you do make quick decisions.
Interview Templates: Ever been asked the same question over and over in an interview? Not good. One of the best ways to improve the candidate experience is to script the interview process and establish who-asks-what-when using interview templates.
| Pro tip: Candidates notice when you have a very clear understanding of what you are looking for and do a good job assessing for it. Structured interviews reduce stress for all parties. Consider adjusting your recruiting intake process to make authoring structured interview templates and putting them in your ATS a requirement. |
Workflow Stages: If you have a lot of steps in your workflow, your process is probably too long. The more you can consolidate stages and assessments, the easier it will be to move candidates quickly through the process. Speed matters.
SLAs: Candidates hate to wait. A great way to make your process faster and more transparent is to establish how long a candidate should be in each stage … and have an escalation process if they are in a stage for too long. If everyone knows how long it’s supposed to take to complete each step, it’s easier to avoid having people slip through the cracks.
Reports: Every system has different reports, but two weekly reports are critical for the candidate experience: First, a report that shows if every candidate has been dispositioned and isn’t sitting in the “new” stage with no response. The second helps ensure candidates don’t “age out” and become “overdue” - so it's easy to provide updates to everyone in process at least once a week.
Notifications: Pushing the right information to the right people at the right time makes things easier. A good example, you ask? Pre-interview reminders that ensure your team has the information they need when it’s time to talk to a candidate.
The single source of truth: Recruiting is a complex process that involves lots of people and systems. If everyone agrees to make your ATS the single source of truth where all data resides it helps you keep from getting your wires crossed; make fast (and better) decisions; and get into a cycle of continuous recruiting improvement.
There you have it - 16 ways to improve the candidate experience. When you put the time in to configure and use the core features of your ATS you make it easy for your team to “put on a great show” for candidates that knocks their socks off.
If you need help marshalling the resources to work through this list, check out the first “hack” in our video on practical free tips to create a memorable candidate experience.
Author Bio
| Dan Arkind is CEO & Head of Product at JobScore. Visit www.jobscore.com/candidate-experience Connect Dan Arkind Follow @danarkind |
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