Talent Rover Blog On The Desk: How Improving the Candidate Experience Impacts Your Bottom Line

Talent Rover 'On The Desk' is a recurring feature on our blog that highlights the insight and perspective of Talent Rover leaders with experience in the staffing and recruitment industry.Making it easy for candidates to apply for jobs, complete onboarding, track their time, and get paid is critical for maintaining a healthy candidate pipeline. When it comes to your bottom line, a qualified pool of candidates is a critical factor in keeping existing customers and winning over new ones. Conversely, neglecting this experience can lead to widespread problems that manifest quickly and have a lasting negative impact.Allison Holmberg works in product marketing at Talent Rover and has experienced how a streamlined candidate experience can accelerate revenue growth, while a frustrating one can bring placement efforts to a screeching halt.In this month's "On The Desk," we asked Allison a few questions about how firms can leverage their candidate experience to make more placements and boost their bottom line.What does it mean to provide a great candidate experience and why should recruitment firms make it a priority?"It all comes back to ease of use - is this a process a candidate can quickly and easily complete? If not, they simply won't do it and they'll go find a company that makes it easier for them. Candidates have come to expect a certain level of simplicity because they get it from all of the other websites or technologies they use on a daily basis. They expect things to be easy.I think candidates also get an underlying message here about how much they're valued as a candidate based on their experience. Making it easy to apply for jobs on a mobile device or streamlining the onboarding process makes candidates feel like they're more than just a resume. It's so important that they feel like a they're working with a firm that actually cares about helping them progress in their career or, at the very least, understands their need to get on the job quickly. When you make things easy it provides that personal touch."How does creating an optimal candidate experience help firms build and maintain relationships with clients?"I think in any business, and especially recruiting, positive word of mouth is a huge factor. There is such a high level of trust between candidates and firms and a positive experience ensures your best candidates will stay loyal and encourage other job seekers they know to work with you. Clients notice things like that. If you have a wealth of candidates that have a great experience with you, it speaks volumes about how advocate for candidates."What part of the recruitment and hiring process do you think has the biggest opportunity to impact a candidate's experience?"I worked extensively in recruitment before I came to Talent Rover and quickly learned that if one part of the process is disjointed or requires too much manual effort it typically makes the entire experience difficult. I think recruiters understand this - it's a very symbiotic process where every piece impacts all the rest."What happens when a candidate experience is cumbersome or poor?"For starters, you'll be dealing with a team of really frustrated recruiters. A high turnover rate for certain positions is often a symptom of this problem. I've also seen how confusing or lengthy processes can cause your candidate pool to dry up - people will just stop coming into your branches to apply for jobs or those who do complete the process won't ever come back again. I think the ultimate consequence for any business, where it really hurts, is that placements go unfilled. Firms are literally turning away revenue because it's so difficult to make placements.On the flip side, we've seen how investing in the candidate experience has actually transformed the entire recruitment workflow. It improves everything from internal morale issues to fill percentage."There's a lot of tech out there claiming to focus on enhancing the candidate experience. What should staffing and recruitment firms be looking for?"I think one of the biggest things to look for is a platform that addresses all candidate touch points throughout the process. There are a lot of single-function tools out there that work for one part of the process or a few parts of the process. Sometimes it's helpful for our clients to map out what that ideal candidate experience looks like from end-to-end and make sure that they invest in solutions that accommodate and enhance the entire experience.I also think onboarding is a huge pain point for a lot of companies - lots of paperwork, lack of automation, no easy way to manage credentialing, etc. Your technology should make it easy to do things like send a training instructions, receive text message notifications, and electronically sign and submit legal documents."What's one unique thing about Talent Rover that helps recruitment firms enhance their candidate experience?"Only one!? I really love how our clients have been able to utilize our Communities feature - essentially a self-service candidate portal that transfers some of the power back to candidates and allows them to take control of their experience. This type of product is really expanding the value we can add. It opens up a recruiter's ability to offer the personal touch that makes candidates fans of a company for life."Allison Holmberg is part of the Talent Rover product team and has an extensive background in the recruiting industry. She collaborates across teams to market, build, and deliver the Talent Rover platform to best-in-class staffing and recruitment firms. Tags: Allison Holmberg, Candidate experience