Strategies For Future Success: Ensuring The Best Match For The Role (Part 2)

Welcome to the second part of our article series ‘Strategies For Future Success: Candidate Experience’. If you missed Part 1 – ‘Strategies For Future Success: Talent Attraction’ you can view it here.

Why the candidate experience matters

The candidate experience is the way your business builds relationships with current and future employees, and it starts long before the interview process. By creating an optimal candidate experience, your company can attract top candidates, strengthen and enforce your brand, and build company advocacy.

Process aides candidate experience & gets the best hire fit

Here are 6 ways you can improve your recruitment process and ensure the right fit for your company and a candidate.

1. Understand how candidate’s aspirations fit with the job

Designing the optimal candidate experience requires addressing the needs and aspirations of your next hire. Our experience tells us that high-quality candidates seek:

• Value alignment with who they are and what they believe in
• Capacity to make a real difference
• Learning and development opportunities
• Challenging projects to grow
• Mentorship and clear progression plan
• Workplace culture
• Collaborative teams
• Remuneration

An essential element of the current job marketplace involves how you foresee the ideal candidate growing in the role you’re hiring for, as well as an understanding of the career objectives of your potential hire. Establishing a sense of both aspects will help you determine whether or not there is alignment between your preferred candidate and the company’s goals.

2. Standardize the interview process

According to The British Psychological Society, structured interviews are twice as effective at predicting job performance than unstructured ones. Standardized interviews foster a system for sharing information, feedback, and internal communications (resulting in consistent alignment). It avoids confusion, and gives candidates a more consistent and positive experience.

Some basic ways to standardize an interview include:

• Having a clear agenda with structured interview questions 
• Developing specific, core competency focused questions
• Utilizing a standardized rating scale

Additionally, asking each candidate the same questions ensures consistency, giving interviewers a frame of reference to compare candidates fairly, hence reducing hiring biases.

Read more about the best recruitment practices including tips for a successful hiring campaign, here.

3. Think about incorporating behavioural assessment into the recruitment process

Consider evaluation strategies beyond the face-to-face interview. Behavioural assessment is particularly useful to assess a candidate’s suitability for a role based on the required behavioural characteristics, aptitude, and personality. When used correctly, behavioural assessment increases the chances of better hiring decisions, team cohesion, and employee retention. Since a bad hire is often estimated to cost three-times the employee’s salary, it pays to invest in that extra level of understanding!

At ABN Resource, we utilise the award-winning “HireInsight” candidate delivery platform, which incorporates competency, behavioural and video assessment. In this way, we connect our clients with the best global talent, delivering reliable and consistent information to make the right hiring decisions.

4. Sell your workplace culture

More and more frequently, workplace culture places as the #1 driver for accepting a new job, outweighing the more traditionally attractive benefits like pay and bonuses. Workplace culture is clearly important, so should be used as a tool in your hiring process to attract great talent. Asking around current employees to find out what they think the best aspects of your workplace culture are, or better still, conducting an internal survey can arm you with data to showcase to your potential new employees.

5. Keep up the momentum

Over the years, we have seen hundreds of candidates move successfully through the hiring process and accept job offer we make on behalf of our clients. In some cases, though, a lack of momentum has led candidates to back out before the client made the final decision. 

How to avoid losing high-quality candidates?

• Be transparent about each step of the hiring process and its timeline, and keep candidates updated along the way
• Give enough time for candidates to complete  additional assessments as it is a significant request involving their time commitment
• Provide directions and clear instructions, making yourself available to answer any questions they may have
• Ensure consistent communication
• Deliver honest feedback and results within agreed timescales as candidates appreciate specific information about their applications

While the hiring process should never be rushed, it should always maintain its momentum. By ensuring the best candidate experience possible, you are able to avoid letting the dream candidate slip through your fingers. 

6. Plan ahead

Ensure you have a pool of talent outside of your organisation. Having a well-structured talent strategy remains critical in eliminating the risk of the ‘unknown’.

Finding & Retaining Top Talent

ABN Resource helps organisations like yours find and retain employees that can take your business to the next level. In Part 3 – we share talent management strategies for retaining high-performing employees.

Let us know how you are handling your hiring process by sharing this article on LinkedIn or Twitter and adding a note about your experience, or reach out to us directly to discuss how we can support your efforts to attract top talent to your organisation.