Why is candidate experience a crucial part of recruitment?

Good candidate experience helps you become more attractive to high-quality candidates and enhances how your brand is perceived. Many people can feel discouraged to accept an offer, or will drop off during the application stage, if the process is not seamless or if they have heard negative things about the employer’s brand. Did you know 67% of recruiters state that candidate experience is their number 1 priority?

Good candidate experience also improves your brand reputation. According to a survey conducted by Glassdoor, after a bad experience with a brand, 72% of job seekers would share their thoughts about it online, which can tarnish a brand's reputation. It can also reduce your chances of suitable talent finding you through word of mouth and referrals, which tend to bring in high-quality candidates.

What challenges make it difficult to consistently provide great candidate experience?

In-house teams across a variety of industries face several pressing challenges when it comes to enabling candidate experience, such as:

1. Lack of engagement with candidates Complicated onboarding
2. Inability to advertise salaries
3. Non-informative job descriptions
4. Limitations related to Hybrid/Flexible working
5. Inability to review all applications
6. Poor perception of employer brand
7. Non-accessible recruitment process
8. Biased and non-inclusive recruitment

How can recruitment tech enable a great candidate experience?

Implementing an Applicant Tracking System can help you solve the challenges mentioned above. By using an ATS recruiters can better engage with candidates through the recruitment process, provide a seamless and easy onboarding experience and review a high volume of applications in a timely manner. Utilising an ATS can also improve the diversity and inclusion practices in your recruitment process, through anonymising information that can create unintentional bias in the decision-making.

Applicant Tracking Systems help free up the time of recruitment teams by automating and digitising lengthy manual processes. The time could be better spent on value-add activity such as creating detailed job descriptions, which provide relevant insights about the role, setting expectations about hybrid/flexible working arrangements, as well as following best SEO practices for better discoverability by candidates.

Recruitment technology that builds candidate engagement

Candidate self-service helps to provide complete control over a candidates’ profile, access to refined job searches, and ability to access important information about their application with you in one place.

Those companies who require a candidate to follow a registration process (either before or during the application) report significantly higher numbers of candidates and increased quality. One reason may be that having created an account, it is easy for candidates to apply for other jobs - one account, multiple applications. Source: UK 2024 Candidate Attraction Report.

Trusted Partner

Accessibility is a crucial part of the recruitment process. It helps businesses ensure they attract and retain top talent by providing a great candidate experience to all applicants.

Eploy work closely with the Digital Accessibility Centre, which assesses and advises on accessibility best practices. Eploy candidate portals are certified WCAG2.1 AA by DAC.

Eploy’s ATS won an IHR Award for enabling the best candidate experience within the in-house recruitment industry. The IHR Judges scored us on such factors as:

• A clear link between industry challenges and Eploy’s ATS
• Inclusiveness and accessibility
• A positive impact on the recruitment process
• Client happiness and satisfaction
• Technological ease of use and flexibility of Eploy’s ATS

Team Eploy always works hard to ensure that the online candidate experience delivered through Eploy’s ATS is best-of-breed and accessible for all. Eploy’s commitment to candidate experience extends beyond functionality; we prioritise accessibility, inclusivity, and client satisfaction, aligning our solutions with evolving industry challenges.

Why not review if your careers site provides a good candidate experience from these real-life examples here.

Or book some time with one of our team members, who will walk you through ways Eploy’s ATS can enhance recruitment for all stakeholders and enable the very best candidate experience.