Improving Candidate Pools by Improving Candidates’ Experience
Over the past few years, the recruitment industry seen job shortages, mass lay-offs due to the pandemic, job resurgences, and now, a shift in the job seeker’s favor. This is good for job seekers: they get to be choosy in their conditions and salary negotiations. But this also means that the companies that cannot keep up with current demands are seeing a shortage in applicants. Namely, there are two main problems the recruitment industry is facing today. The first is a shortage of candidates, and the second is the quality of those candidates. Even if you were to simply raise their promised salary on a job posting, this wouldn’t guarantee your chances of hiring the perfect candidate. Improving your candidate pool goes beyond just what you offer to your future employee. It starts with your candidates’ experience.
Once you improve your candidates’ experience, you’ll improve your company’s brand and the likeliness they’ll return for a second chance at working for you. Similarly, even your current employees may be the key to finding more quality candidates. After all, if your own employees like working for you, they might be inclined to offer the same for their family and friends. Let’s start from the beginning of the hiring cycle.
Improve Your Candidate Pool’s Quantity & Quality
The first step in improving your candidate pool is increasing the likelihood of those you’ll be looking for finding you. Start with SEO.
Step up Your SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is simply using the best keywords and formatting practices for search engines to be able to find you. Top Echelon has a great article on SEO for recruiting and staffing that you can find here. It emphasizes the importance of using specific keywords in your job description and title, and using terms that are industry specific. Most importantly, it shows how crucial it is to be aware of what keywords your candidates may be searching. The more specific your job posting title is, the narrower your applicants’ search will be. While this may actually lower your candidate pool, when done correctly, it will increase the number of people who specialize in the area and know what specific keywords to search for when job seeking.
Sift for Potential not Qualifications
One of the most powerful articles from the Harvard Business Review (other than the one that features us, of course) is from the talent management section of the April/May 2021 print issue. In “Reengineering the Recruitment Process,” the HBR team suggests searching beyond expected qualifications to find candidates with potential rather than experience or hard skills. After all, when searching for qualifications instead of suitability, you limit yourself on diverse candidates. As well, filtering your candidates with unbiased processes will also show your candidates you stand for equitable work opportunities. And that can leave a lasting impression that will both improve your company branding and your chances of getting return applicants.
Expand the Company’s Listing Reach
Looking for the right candidate looks very different today than it did even a few years ago. Of course, LinkedIn and other job-related social media sites are good places to look. However, you might find even more candidates on other platforms that specialize in the kind of worker you’re looking for. For example, you might find a perfect candidate on a website that is dedicated to marketers or creatives whose work can be displayed for recruiters and hirers to see. Beyond websites and social media platforms, you can even further expand your candidate pool by joining the Workwolf platform. Here, you’ll find job seekers with their soft and hard skills verified and accessible in real-time.
Improve Your Candidates’ Experience
In addition to expanding your candidate pool, you might need to expand who you may think you need to impress when it comes to finding and keeping talent.
Offer Equitable Opportunity
Diversity is no longer a benefit, but rather, a must. However, many companies still to this day do not practice what they preach. Certainly, a company could promise equitable opportunity on their job posting, and still their company could be predominantly white. Perhaps with the best of intentions, a company could even simply hire someone to meet a diversity quota set by corporate standards. The best solution, then, comes down to equitable and unbiased filtration. This means measuring for soft skills and doing so blindly.
Revisit Those Worth Revisiting
Maintaining ties with previously considered candidates is a great way to keep your options open. Whether you do so on LinkedIn, on the Workwolf network, or even just by keeping their resume on file, as long as you let them know you’ll be keeping them in mind, they might be willing to come back in for another interview. The Workwolf platform is great for revisiting those candidates who left a lasting impression but maybe were not quite the right fit for the position they had applied for previously. Then, when a position that might better suit them comes along, they may be more likely to accept an offer from you.
Impress by Improving Candidates’ Experience
Unfortunately, increasing candidate pools often implies a decrease in the value of each applicant. That is, some companies are implementing unique programs into their hiring cycle to allow for a larger intake of applications. Goldman Sachs, for example, has implemented an asynchronous video interview process to do this. And sure, this allows candidates to take interviews on their own time and do so from the comfort of their home. But the process becomes automatic for many, and without a personal connection, their application may lose meaning entirely. This doesn’t mean you have to have long, meaningful discussions with every single applicant. It just means that making processes as simple and personable as possible will leave a lasting impression on the candidate.
At the same time, don’t forget that some of the best candidates may come from a referral from one of your current employees. As such, it’s important to implement an employee referral program that makes their efforts worth-while. That also means impressing and maintaining respect from your current employees. After all, the more they like working for you, the more likely they are to recommend someone else do the same!
How Packfinder Can Improve Candidates’ Experience
Packfinder is our complimentary soft skills assessment that measures a candidate’s potential to succeed by examining their soft skills, rather than their merits based on privilege or their lack thereof. It considers a candidate’s suitability in various environments and even measures their likelihood to succeed in 60 specific job functions. Packfinder thus improves candidate pool quality by filtering out those who are technically qualified but would not be a good fit behaviorally. More importantly, it offers job seekers career advice and a valuable self-assessment worth hundreds of dollars free of charge. So even if you do turn one candidate down for a better suited one, they still leave with value. This shows them that you value their time and efforts. And who knows? Maybe they will be the perfect fit for your next job opening!
