the ultimate candidate experience guidebook
TRANSCRIPT
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The Ultimate Candidate Experience GuidebookHow to Improve Recruiting Results by Creating an Exceptional Candidate Experience
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Table of Contents
The Current State of the Candidate Experience
Candidates Today Expect a Personalized Experience
The Emergence of Recruitment Marketing to Address Increasing Candidate Expectations
What Makes an Exceptional Candidate Experience?
The Foundation for an Exceptional Candidate Experience
The Candidate-Consumer Connection
Implications of the Candidate Experience on Recruiting
Recruiting Investments Don’t Always Translate to Improved Experiences
Strategy 1: Focusing on the Employer Brand and the Candidate Experience
The Influence of the Employer Brand on the Candidate Experience
Strategy 2: Applying the Importance of Audiences to the Candidate Experience
Prioritizing Audiences Across the Candidate Experience
The Foundation for a Personalized Candidate Experience
Developing Key Audience Personas
Strategy 3: Incorporating AI & Automation During the Candidate Experience
Showing Candidates You Value Them with Personalized Career Site Experiences
Incorporating Predictive AI to Personalize Job Recommendations
Providing Personalized, Tailored Recruitment Content
Taking What You Know From Your Career Site to the Next Level of Candidate Engagement
Modernizing Candidate Engagement Through Chatbot Functionality
Strategy 4: Leveraging Modern Engagement Tools for the Candidate Experience
Engaging Candidates Through SMS/Text Messaging
Strategy 5: Emphasizing Candidate Conversion in the Candidate Experience
Shifting Focus to Candidate Conversion
Where Does Candidate Conversion Go Wrong?
Improving Candidate Conversion Across Eight Key Areas
Strategy 6: Improving Candidate Engagement
Building Long-Term Candidate Engagement
Strategy 7: Leveraging Analytics and the Candidate Experience
Analyzing the Effectiveness of the Candidate Experience
Results. Simplified.
Organizations That See Tremendous Success with Talemetry
Start Delivering Exceptional Candidate Experiences
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The Current State of the Candidate Experience
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One that mirrors what they experience in their everyday lives as consumers. But
many organizations are stuck in an old-world recruiting mindset. One that does not
put candidates first. In fact, the old world of recruiting uses an employer-centric
approach that typically does not value candidates or treat them as individuals. The
old world makes it difficult for candidates to find and apply for relevant jobs, does
not provide intelligent, personalized experiences or content, requires multiple hoops
to jump through for application, limits candidate feedback, and
creates an ATS black hole that leaves candidates in the dark.
Conversely, the new world of recruiting means
offering a new candidate-centric experience
that provides each individual candidate
with a white-glove approach. Candidates
want relevant jobs and content delivered
instantly and seamlessly. They want an
easy application process. And they want
to be valued as individuals. This means
modernizing engagement, developing
genuine relationships from a single profile,
delivering engaging experiences across
the talent journey, leveraging the latest
in AI and automation recruitment tools,
providing relevant and recommended job
opportunities, allowing candidates to easily
express their interest, and providing ongoing communication
throughout the talent lifecycle.
Candidates Today Expect a Personalized Experience
What is meant by the phrase candidate experience? The candidate
experience is defined as the quality of collective interactions a potential
candidate has with a prospective employer throughout the entire talent
journey. The candidate experience begins when a candidate considers
your organization as a place to work, interacts with your recruitment
content or views a job opening. It can include anything from your employer
brand, employee value proposition (EVP), job advertisements, career
site content, social content, talent networks, event interactions, recruiter
communications and engagement, application process, and an entire
range of other experiences.
How Do You DefineCandidate Experience?
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The gap between the old and new world of recruiting has led
to the rapid evolution of recruitment marketing over the last
15 to 20 years. This means talent acquisition functions have
seen a steady progression of technological capabilities that
have significantly impacted recruiting in a short period of time.
Within just two decades, organizations have seen integration
to the Internet, the emergence of early online recruiting
technologies, advancing technologies through early social and
mobile functionalities, HCM transformation that identified the
gap between the applicant tracking system functionality and
an optimized candidate experience, and the emergence of
recruitment marketing as the solution to that gap. The current
environment has revealed that this is the era of opportunity
for recruitment marketing optimization, if organizations can
overcome the disconnect that has occurred in such a rapidly
changing landscape.
The Emergence ofRecruitment Marketing to Address Increasing Candidate Expectations
FIGURE 1: The Rapid Transformation Within Recruitment Marketing to Address Candidate Expectations
What Makes an Exceptional Candidate Experience?
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The Foundation for an Exceptional Candidate Experience
Giving candidates experiences they want and deserve requires four
key elements. A strong employer brand, a genuine EVP and recruitment
messaging, a smart, engaging talent journey leveraging enterprise recruitment
marketing technology, and AI powered candidate experiences to modernize
candidate engagement. Without all four, you won’t deliver the types of
consumer-quality experiences that candidates expect. You need each one
working together in lockstep to attract high quality candidates and convert
them at each step of the talent journey.
The Candidate-Consumer Connection
Strong Employer
Brand
Personalized Recruitment
Content + + Engaging
TalentJourney
+ AI PoweredCandidate
Engagement
As top recruiting organizations know, finding great talent means treating
customers as potential candidates.
Those individuals who interact with and experience your company every
day. If you deliver a poor candidate experience, there will likely be negative
consequences for your business. In fact, according to a new study from Future
Workplace, ‘64 percent of candidates are less likely to purchase goods and
services from a company that delivered a poor candidate experience.’ This
means you have to address the candidate-consumer impact so the candidate
experience has a positive outcome on consumer perceptions.
Because customers are potential candidates, and typically are considered
trusted advisors for friends, family and their social networks, they can have
a tremendous impact on their spheres of influence. According to a Software
Advice survey, 83 percent of candidates who have bad experiences are more
likely to never apply again and 59 percent are likely to tell others not to apply.
The cost of a bad candidate experience is high, and it’s not limited to just those
who apply for your jobs. It includes every person who may have considered
applying, but did not complete an application, and those people who are
willing to relay their negative experiences to their contacts.
FIGURE 2: Likelihood to Take Actions After a Negative Candidate Experience
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Implications of the Candidate Experience on Recruiting
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Recruiting Investments Don’t Always Translate to Improved Experiences
Globally, the recruiting industry tops more than $200 billion, and in the U.S.
alone, more than $160 billion is spent annually on recruiting, according to
Bersin by Deloitte. Similarly, SHRM reports the average cost per hire is now
more than $4,100 and time-to-fill averages at 42 days. This means there is
tremendous investment annually in recruitment, and with that investment
comes increased visibility and scrutiny on the return that recruiting dollars
deliver.
With all the time and money organizations are investing in recruiting, it would
seem natural or even likely that candidates could and would have fairly
positive experiences with any company they interact with. But that just isn’t
the case. An article from Josh Bersin in Forbes indicates that ‘more than 45
percent of candidates never hear anything back from the employer,’ and
an incredible ‘83 percent of candidates rate their job search experience
poor.’ Clearly, the candidate experience is broken. The question is, how
can organizations start to fix it? In the next sections of this Candidate
Experience Guidebook, we will examine seven specific strategies with key
takeaways that you can use to improve the candidate experience in your
organization.
Strategy 1:
Focusing on the Employer Brand
and the Candidate Experience
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The Influence of Employer Brandon the Candidate Experience
Your employer brand is more than just your company vision or
organizational values. It’s the essence of who your organization
is and what it’s really like to work in your company. So leveraging
your employer brand is essential to attract and find talent
who will fit and succeed in your culture to drive your business
performance. For candidates today, company culture, articulated
through employer brand messaging and a clearly defined EVP,
is an essential part of the candidate experience. Candidates
can actively experience your employer brand through your
recruitment content, including your career sites, blogs, employee
spotlights, employee testimonial videos, social and digital content,
review sites and in-person events, and many other channels.
Remember, your employer brand matters more now than ever
before. According to a study by Korn Ferry, cited in a recent
SHRM article, the top reason that candidates choose a specific
job over another is based on company culture. And Millennials,
in particular, who will continue to make a larger proportion of
the workforce, are seeking to relate to their employer and find
meaning in their work. In fact, Forbes reports that 68 percent of
Millennials surveyed in a recent study ‘want to make a positive difference
in the world,’ 81 percent believe that a successful business needs to have
a genuine purpose, and 78 percent think ‘the values of their employer
should match their own.’ Finally, the business case for building an authentic
employer brand that will positively influence the candidate experience
is clear. And according to recent LinkedIn research, employers with a
strong employer brand have 50 percent lower cost-per-hire and enjoy
28 percent lower turnover. So make sure you invest in articulating an
authentic employer brand that attracts candidates and empowers them to
understand your organizational culture.
How Can You Showcase YourEmployer Brand?
Providing a window into your culture requires you to
clearly define what it’s like to work in your company.
Develop an EVP that candidates can easily understand
and identify with. Feature stories of current employees
on your career site and social channels. Explain potential
career paths and walk through what a typical day is like
in your company. Use multiple channels, like your career
sites, social, video, review sites and in-person events to
showcase and reinforce your employer brand. The goal
is ultimately creating a company culture that will attract
talent and make your employer brand work for you.
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Strategy 2:Applying the Importance of Audiences to the Candidate Experience !
Understanding which audiences are most important to your business
performance is one of the most important steps you can take to create an
exceptional experience for your candidates. With limited time and resources,
it’s easy to overlook the importance of prioritizing key audiences. But there are
three different audience types you should consider through the lens of your
candidate experience. So where do you start? The EVOLVE Maturity & Efficiency
Framework is the award-winning, technology agnostic recruitment marketing
methodology that ensures world-class delivery for guaranteed recruitment
marketing success. Within this Framework, the three audience types include Key
Talent Audiences, Strategic Audiences and Relationship Audiences.
Prioritizing Audiences Across the Candidate Experience
Key Talent Audiences Strategic Audiences Relationship Audiences
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The EVOLVESM Recruitment Marketing Maturity & Efficiency Framework
from Talemetry guides talent acquisition professionals to put into action
the strategies and technology that will enable them to make decisions
today to optimize recruitment marketing, deliver efficiencies across their
enterprise, and prioritize ongoing recruitment marketing investments. The
EVOLVE Framework is the only methodology available in the recruiting
industry today that simplifies the complexity of recruiting by bringing
together the six core process areas of recruitment marketing.
What is the EVOLVE Maturity & Efficiency Framework?
The Foundation for Personalized Candidate Experiences
Once you have prioritized your key audiences, it’s time to get to know
them. Conduct interviews with candidates, recruiters and hiring managers,
and validate with external secondary research. Creating a personalized
candidate experience with targeted, relevant content means you know
who you are messaging to. Recognize your desired candidates and their
motivations. What are their demographics, background, job preferences
and behaviors? Where are they in their candidate journey? Understand
their likes, dislikes, their emotional triggers. Empathize with their pain points
and challenges. When you talk to your audiences, you’ll be surprised how
many insights they will give you to use. That way, when candidates visit your
career site and consume your recruitment content, they feel as if you truly
understand and are speaking directly to them as a person and candidate.
As you prioritize your audiences and start to develop your key personas,
don’t overlook the importance of creating an exceptional candidate
experience for your internal employees. Retain your best employees
with an internal talent mobility solution that allows your employees to see
which jobs they are a good fit for. Enable them to easily express interest
for specific roles, notifying recruiters and hiring managers for a seamless
candidate experience.
By prioritizing internal employees and empowering a positive candidate
experience for internal mobility, you will improve career pathing
opportunities for your existing employees, build higher quality candidate
pipelines, and help recruiting teams quickly find and connect with internal
talent, faster.
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Once you have a firm understanding of your key audiences, develop
key audience personas that represent the candidates you are talking
to. For example, if you are targeting registered nurses as a key talent
audience, develop a name and likeness for the key characteristics of this
nurse. Her work-life balance. Her short and long-term goals. What is her
story? What is she likely to say she is passionate about and what are her
biggest challenges? When is she most empowered and engaged on the
job and what is most rewarding for her? This will serve as the foundation
for creating a personalized candidate experience and generating
targeted recruitment content that you build for this persona and for
your prioritized talent audiences. Building detailed personas helps you
think differently about how candidates experience your content and
your recruitment messages. And they enable you to define what kind
of content your candidates will likely respond to, the best channels to
attract them, and the drivers that motivate them.
Developing KeyAudience Personas A persona is a fictionalized depiction of a candidate who
represents your prioritized talent audience. A persona reflects the specific demographic and psychographic characteristics based on research, and enables you to quickly know the type of candidates your recruitment content is targeting.
What Are KeyAudience Personas?
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Candidates have the same expectations of your career site as they do
in their interactions with B2C websites. They want intelligent, simple,
personalized and informative experiences that are tailored to their device,
location and preferences. They want relevant jobs and personalized
content delivered instantly and seamlessly. This means you need to
provide the kinds of career site experiences that recognize, recommend
and deliver targeted mobile and social-friendly content to showcase your
employer brand, and engage and convert talent on an individual level.
One key area to focus on is job search. Empower candidates during their
job search with machine learning by enabling natural language processing
to improve job search results and to better match them to jobs they are
seeking. Leverage Google Cloud Talent Solution to understand the intent
of candidates while they search for jobs and to improve search results
for candidates. According to Talent Board, the top source for candidates
to research your company is your career site. And some of the most
desired content on your career site is your jobs. This means job search
should be front and center on all career site pages, and provide intelligent
capabilities, leveraging candidate-centric AI. Career sites that offer
faceted search and tailored career site content targeted directly at the
individual candidate based on known visitor information, browsing history,
experiences or background can provide deeper levels of personalization
that candidates want.
Strategy 3:IncorporatingAI & Automation During the Candidate Experience
Showing Candidates You Value Them with Personalized Career Site Experiences
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As candidates interact further with your career site, you can
deliver personalized candidate engagement by leveraging
predictive AI to deliver tailored job recommendations and
relevant jobs to each candidate. For example, if a candidate
views an engineering job during a past session on your career
site, then you should provide other previously unviewed
engineering jobs that may be of interest to him or her. Or say
a visitor has a profile on your site that includes sales-related
job titles. He or she might want to be provided with a list of
suggested sales jobs open at your organization. Anticipating
and providing recommendations using predictive AI for other
open positions lets candidates know you are tailoring their job
search specifically to them.
Incorporating Predictive AI to Personalize Job Recommendations
Getting the Most Out of Google for Jobs
Attract more candidates to your career site with search engine
optimized sites and job listings. Don’t miss an opportunity to ensure
a more engaging journey for your candidates. Google for Jobs
aggregates job listings across multiple job boards and removes
duplicates, featuring listings on the first results page, even before
organic results. Make sure to optimize your job listings on your
own career site to adhere to the published structure data markup
from Google and make simple changes to your sitemap file, in
accordance with Google recommendations. With all the time and
investment you’ve put into your career site, make sure you are
driving traffic to the right place and not splintering opportunities for
candidate conversion.
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Enterprise companies that want to attract high quality talent need to
understand how to personalize recruitment content at scale on their career
site. What does this entail? Just like Amazon and Netflix in the consumer
world, you should recognize candidates immediately when they visit your
career site. Go beyond providing only recommended jobs, and think about
the individual interests and needs of each job seeker.
When a visitor comes to your career site, his or her background and past
affiliations impact what he or she is interested in viewing. Take for example
a veteran who is viewing content on your site. By adjusting content shown
based on known visitor information, you can show career site content that
features veteran benefits or specific services your company offers directly
to veterans. Further, when candidates visit your career site, they likely have
had interactions with you previously. Their existing level of engagement
should determine how you interact with them. For example, a candidate
may visit your career site from a campaign in a talent network. So you
would definitely not want to re-invite them on your career site to join your
network again. Knowing the existing level of interaction a candidate has
with your company can help you determine how to continue to convert
candidates in their candidate journey and continue to personalize their
experiences.
Providing Personalized, Tailored Recruitment Content
When you know how job seekers and visitors are interacting with content on
your career site, you can start to create targeted or segmented campaigns
from your candidate relationship management (CRM) system that will
further engage them. For example, let’s say you have a microsite for nurses
in a specific city. For all active visitors on this microsite, you could invite each
individual to a meet-and-greet networking event at your hospital. Using
what you know from existing candidate behavior on your microsite, you
can develop and deliver personalized follow-up campaigns to deepen your
relationships with them.
By leveraging candidate data to personalize and contextualize content
on your career site to individuals, you can integrate this information into
your broader candidate relationship management platform for candidate
outreach. Using this information to directly communicate with and tailor
recruitment messages to individual candidates empowers you to start
personalizing each candidate journey and improve conversion results at the
individual level.
Taking What You Know From Your Career Site to the Next Level of Candidate Engagement
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In addition to personalized, predictive job recommendations and content,
another key way to deliver tailored career site experiences is by enabling
candidate assistant chatbot functionality with intelligent job assistance
to answer candidate questions 24/7. Interacting through a personal job
assistant gives candidates the exact information they are looking for at the
exact moment they are searching for it. And it reinforces your organization’s
commitment that you are interested in each individual candidate as a person.
Further, consider leveraging this functionality for employee referrals and
to conduct candidate experience surveys so you can collect real-time
feedback from candidates.
As you consider integrating chatbot functionality to enhance the candidate
experience, remember that native chatbot within enterprise recruitment
marketing platform technology offers considerable advantage over
standalone or point solutions. Native chatbot functionality enables you
to easily capture candidate interactions, nurture talent, and manage
relationships more easily and effectively than just chatbot functionality
by itself.
Modernizing Candidate Engagement Through Chatbot Functionality
Strategy 4:Leveraging Modern Engagement Tools for the Candidate Experience
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Finding new ways to enhance the candidate experience, improve
candidate engagement and increase recruiting efficiency is a priority
for talent acquisition professionals. So it seems like an obvious fit when
a new candidate engagement tool can do all three. However, the recent
Talemetry 2020 Vision Survey revealed that 43 percent of organizations
admit that they are slow to incorporate emerging technologies like
SMS/text messaging to engage and interact with candidates. But those
organizations that have started using text recruiting solutions are already
realizing greater levels of candidate engagement. In fact, according to
Mobile Marketing Watch, text offers an unbelievable 98 percent open rate,
with average response time taking around just 90 seconds, making it a vital
candidate engagement tactic in your recruiting activities.
Recruiters often experience the limitations that solely using email
or InMail can present in interacting with candidates. These forms of
digital communication are often slower, can be cumbersome and even
feel somewhat impersonal. That’s why it’s essential that recruiting
organizations start incorporating candidate texting to offer a faster,
more direct communication channel that is highly personalized to
each candidate.
Engaging Candidates Through SMS/Text Messaging
Sending and receiving text messages with candidates reflects well on your
employer brand. More than 64 percent of consumers—and prospective
candidates—are likely to have a positive perception of companies that offer
communication through text, according to Harris, while 75 percent of people
like offers sent via text, based on research from Digital Marketing Magazine.
As you consider how and when to start incorporating texting as part of your
candidate outreach, make sure you consider native SMS/text messaging
functionality, and ensure you have a roadmap on how you will incorporate and
capture this data into your candidate relationship management system as well.
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Despite the efforts and investment enterprise organizations are putting into
talent acquisition, they are not attracting and engaging candidates effectively.
And this is a result of failing to convert candidates throughout the talent journey.
According to Talemetry research, enterprise organizations typically see just 20
to 30 percent application conversion rates. That means, on average, between
70 to 80 percent of all prospective talent are choosing to walk away rather
than apply. Measuring candidate conversion should also occur at the audience
level. Since you have prioritized audiences crucial to your business results, you
also need to ensure that you can measure conversion across your key talent
audiences, strategic audiences and relationship audiences. For example, if one
of your strategic audiences focuses on executive hiring, then make sure you
can benchmark conversion for each stage of the hiring process for this high-
touch audience. Conversely, conversion may look very different for high volume
or hourly key talent audiences across the talent journey. Hiring for high volume
positions requires a broader scope of outreach and volume of candidates for
your recruitment marketing efforts. And that impacts your overall conversion
results and recruiting performance.
But candidate conversion is not just for measurement alone. There is serious
money at stake when you think about converting candidates. While more than
$200 billion is spent on recruitment activities annually, nearly 70 percent
of all dollars invested in recruitment marketing fail at the point of candidate
conversion. In essence, companies are throwing their recruitment dollars away.
Put another way, of that same $200 billion put into recruitment, only $60 billion
is actually making its way into applicant tracking systems (ATS). And this is a
huge missed opportunity.
Shifting Focus toCandidate Conversion
Strategy 5:Emphasizing Candidate Conversion in the Candidate Experience
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One important thing to remember about candidate conversion is that it is
best done incrementally. Think of it as tracking conversion through a series
of small ‘yesses.’ For example, get candidates to first sign up for a job alert,
then encourage them to sign up for your talent network. That way, given what
you know about each candidate, you can start to recommend jobs that would
make sense for them. Remember, conversion rates are not just about how
many candidates are applying, but instead are about tracking and measuring
conversions across the talent lifecycle. Yet despite the best efforts and
intentions, recruitment and talent acquisition professionals often get derailed in
their candidate conversion efforts. And here are five primary ways this happens:
1. Distracting candidates: Career sites may provide too much information
and overwhelm candidates. They may not provide the right information or offer
targeted content. And they may distract candidates and make it difficult to
move forward in their talent journey.
2. Adding unnecessary steps: Sometimes, candidates are not even given
a chance to convert. You may lose them early on by making candidates enter
information multiple times without capturing and storing their data. And that’s a
big fail on the technologies talent acquisition has relied upon for far too long.
Where Does Candidate Conversion Go Wrong?
What isCandidate Conversion?
Capturing information about an individual to
increase what you know about each person, so you
can effectively nurture and move each candidate
along their journey, and eventually, motivate job
application. Remember, candidate conversion, or
candidate opt in, occurs in a number of ways. Not
just completing a job application. Conversion also
includes joining a talent network, signing up for job
alerts, registering for an event or acquiring profiles
from personalization. Candidate conversion should
be a top priority throughout all of your recruitment
marketing activities.
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3. Ignoring important details: By ignoring important details in the
candidate experience, you may not empathize with the candidate
perspective. The irony here is that people are often called a company’s
most important asset. But candidates are not given the same
consideration that B2C companies have toward consumers.
4. Putting the workload on candidates: An ATS is designed to
help organizations, not candidates. And what has resulted is that
candidates now have to do the heavy lifting. Filling out 50 to 100
fields of data. Multiple data entry. Think about candidate conversion
and recruitment marketing as a vehicle to improve the candidate
experience so you can improve the quality of talent brought into your
organization and remove the massive burden candidates face.
5. Unwillingness to change: By growing accustomed to the current
way of doing things, recruiting organizations are often unwilling to adopt
new strategies or processes to improve the candidate experience. And
this unwillingness to change has become a roadblock to improvement.
Why Does CandidateConversion Matter?
Because companies that measure candidate conversion rates
are two times more likely to improve the candidate experience
and three times more likely to improve quality of hire. That’s a
business impact you can take all the way to the boardroom.
Improving Candidate Conversion Across Eight Key Areas
The Talemetry Fortune 500 Candidate Experience Audit examined eight key
areas of candidate conversion and its importance in improving the candidate
experience—from job application and talent networks to job alerts and
event registrations. Here are the eight specific ways you can enhance
your approach to conversion and optimize your strategies, processes and
technologies to drive candidate conversion and improve your candidate
experience.
1. Registration Requirements: More than 90 percent of Fortune 500
companies require registration with a username and password to apply for a
job. Avoid candidate frustration and distraction. Don’t require candidates to
register or ask them for information that discourages them from applying.
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2. Social Profile Apply: 70 percent of the Fortune 500 now enable
candidates to leverage social profiles to apply for a position. Allow
candidates to pull from their social profiles to apply for jobs to streamline
the application process and increase application conversion rates.
3. Cloud Storage Apply: More than 72 percent of companies have no option for
candidates to apply using cloud-based resumes. Demonstrate your modern approach
in the application process to improve the candidate experience. Enable candidates to
use resumes stored in the cloud from services like Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive.
4. Campus and Event Conversion: Neary 34 percent of the Fortune 500 allow
candidates to quickly find relevant internships, jobs or even register for events. But
the remaining 66 percent offer no conversion opportunity, even if they do present
event or campus content. Make sure to display upcoming events with registration
forms that feed into your CRM directly to avoid missing opportunities to convert.
5. Opt-In Talent Networks: More than 53 percent of Fortune 500 companies do
not offer a talent network, while 39 percent offer it optionally. Talent networks give
candidates an opportunity to opt in to receive information about your company
and job opportunities. But as best practice, never force candidates to opt in to your
talent network before they complete an application. This creates an unnecessary
hurdle and may deter candidates from applying.
6. Opt-In Job Alerts: Around 61 percent of the Fortune 500 offer a job alert
sign up to attract passive candidates. Make sure you are taking advantage of the
opportunity to build your talent database with passive talent by offering a way to
attract candidates today and in the future with opt-in job alerts.
7. Google for Jobs: More than 46 percent of Fortune 500 companies have
no consistent direct index to their corporate jobs. And that’s a lot of wasted
opportunity. Ensure if you put the investment into your career site that you are
driving traffic to the right place and not splintering your opportunities for conversion.
8. Indeed: Less than five percent of the Fortune 500 takes advantage of one of the
best conversion opportunities to the biggest source of candidate traffic. Remove
additional layers that make the application process complex and leverage new
technologies that streamline the process so candidates can directly feed their
profiles into your applicant tracking system, all without leaving Indeed.
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Strategy 6:Improving Candidate Engagement
Building Long-TermCandidate Engagement
According to Talent Board, more than 95 percent of candidates who
apply for a job never receive any additional communication from
the recruiting organization. And only 48 percent of talent acquisition
professionals view the candidate experience as effective in their
own organization. However you look at it, there is tremendous
work to be done to build long-term candidate engagement and
ensure your organization can compete for talent by delivering a
hyper-personalized candidate experience. Remember, relationship
management and candidate engagement are two core recruitment
marketing process areas according to the EVOLVE Framework. This
means you need to actively build relationships with candidates, and
also continue to provide them with relevant content and ongoing
communication to engage them throughout their talent journey.
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So with the reality that the candidate experience is often negatively
impacting candidate conversion and hiring outcomes, how can
organizations start to improve the candidate experience and build long-
term candidate engagement? According to Brandon Hall Group, the
answer is by creating a candidate experience that values candidates as
individuals, and ensures that organizations:
• Set clear expectations
• Are transparent and fair
• Handle candidates with care
• Uphold diversity & inclusion values
• Keep candidates updated and provide regular feedback
• Respect candidates’ time
Recruitment content should speak to the heart of candidates and
encourage them to feel positive toward your employer brand. The
employee value proposition should be reinforced throughout the entire
experience, and amplified by the right technology and delivery mechanism,
like the leading enterprise recruitment marketing platform from Talemetry
to nurture and engage candidates all the way through job application.
Your employer brand and employee value proposition is what attracts
and appeals to candidates, but it’s your technology that is the delivery
mechanism for getting your message to them. When communicating
with candidates, your content should educate, inform and engage at the
individual level. And it should encourage candidates to quickly convert.
If you lack the right platform for delivering a streamlined and enhanced
candidate experience, then you should consider how you can prioritize
your investment for finding the right recruitment marketing platform that
supports your recruitment and hiring process, and integrates with your
existing systems.
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Strategy 7:Leveraging Analytics and the Candidate Experience
You can’t improve the candidate experience in your organization unless
you measure it. Like all other areas of recruitment marketing, the candidate
experience needs to be understood, analyzed, and refined. So what are some
of the key metrics you can use to measure the effectiveness of your candidate
experience? Here are six that you should consider for your organization:
• Number of quality hires: For many talent acquisition functions, this
is one of the most important metrics to monitor. At its most basic level,
it is a combination of measuring overall new hire fit to the organization,
knowledge, ability, skills and engagement level. Manager satisfaction and
time to productivity thresholds can also help determine quality of hire.
Analyzing the Effectiveness of the Candidate Experience
• Time-to-hire: Measuring time-to-hire allows you to determine the length of time
between when a candidate engages with your open position and when he or she signs
the offer letter. And this information can help you identify bottlenecks in your hiring
process so you can improve, streamline and enhance the candidate experience.
• Career site engagement: This is determined by metrics like overall
number of career site visitors, sources of visits, career site bounce
rates, pages viewed per session and time spent on your site. Another way
to measure engagement is at the individual level. Leading enterprise
recruitment marketing platforms allow you to measure the types of content
engaged with and the actions taken by candidates at the individual level.
• Candidate drop off rates: This identifies specifically where candidates are
dropping off in the hiring process. In other words, where are you seeing the
greatest decrease of candidates engaging across the talent lifecycle? Is it
on your career site itself? Signing up for job alerts? Maybe it’s in the actual
job application process. Whatever it is, you must be aware of where you are
losing candidates in the hiring process so you can work to improve each area.
• New hire surveys and ongoing candidate feedback: Many organizations
conduct new hire surveys, which are vital for understanding the experiences of
candidates who have been newly hired in your organization. But beyond these
individuals, consider collecting feedback from candidates across all segments, like
those who were interviewed, those who did not get an offer, those who turned down
an offer or even those candidates who did not actually complete an application.
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• No matter what stage of the talent journey, you can collect information
with modern candidate-centric feedback tools, like chatbot, to
get valuable information to improve your candidate experience.
• Application conversion rates: This is a very focused metric
that zeroes in on how effective your applications are at converting
interested candidates into engaged applicants. It is calculated by
dividing the number of completed applications by the number of
started applications. Standard industry application conversion
rates are 20 to 30 percent, but typical Talemetry customer
conversion rates are just the opposite—ranging between 70
and 80 percent completion.
Results. Simplified.
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By improving its candidate experience, enhancing its career site and
personalizing recruitment content, CDW, a Fortune 500 technology solutions
company saw application conversion rates of over 83 percent, far surpassing
the typical 20 to 30 percent industry conversion rate. The organization also
improved the average time spent on its new career site to nearly six minutes
per visitor, and saw 86 percent of career site visitors brand new to the
organization within just a few months of launching its new candidate-centric
career site. By delivering personalized email campaigns, CDW also reached a
72 percent email open rate.
UPMC, a global non-profit health organization, received more than 1,800
applicants within one month and had one million visits to its new career
site within six months of implementation. The healthcare organization also
reached a 54 percent open rate and 18 percent click rates on its targeted
email campaigns in a difficult healthcare talent market. It has also hired more
than 25 new employees through its new chatbot employee referral program.
UPMC now regularly processes more than 3,000 hires per year with 27,000
jobs posted and 750,000 candidates managed seamlessly.
A large national retailer delivered targeted campaigns for its seasonal hiring
initiatives, including email, text and other candidate engagement strategies.
The company received 31,000 applications from personalized emails
and had more than 75,000 applications overall, increasing its historical
application rate by more than three-fold. These campaigns supported the
national hiring event where the company made more than 18,000 job offers
in one day, and far surpassed the program goal of 7,500-10,000 job offers,
with only a 1% fail rate on background checks
A global financial services organization with more than 80,000 employees
streamlined its candidate experience, and was able to reduce external
advertising costs by more than 45 percent, saw overall application
conversion rates increase to 57 percent, with some job categories increasing
to 97 percent. Search traffic increased more than 50 percent and the talent
network grew by 18 percent.
Leveraging Talemetry Candidate Experience Solutions, Enterprise Organizations See Tremendous Success
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Talemetry offers award-winning candidate-first solutions that personalize career
site interactions, modernize engagement with candidate-centric recruiting AI,
develop genuine relationships from a single profile, and deliver engaging experiences
across the talent journey.
Start Delivering Exceptional Candidate Experiences with Talemetry
Take the next step and learn how
Talemetry Candidate Experience
Solutions will amplify your employer
brand and recruitment content to get
more of the right talent at the right
time for your organization.
Ready to Power Your Candidate Experience?
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About Talemetry
Talemetry is Recruitment Marketing Results. Simplified.™ We combine our
enterprise-grade Talemetry® recruitment marketing platform with tools,
training and support to make recruitment organizations and professionals
successful. Talemetry gets the right people to apply for the right jobs by
delivering results-based attraction strategies and extending reach for talent.
Our solutions optimize operations, drive ROI and deliver client success. Finally,
a recruitment marketing platform powerful enough to deliver results, and easy
enough to leverage across enterprise organizations.