Everyone is talking about candidate experience, yet companies are still struggling to create great experiences. While employers try to better serve candidates, according to the Talent Board, a non-profit research organization, more than 35 percent of candidates do not receive an acknowledgment for an application. And 81 percent of professionals believe their organization’s recruitment processes are standard or below standards states the 2019 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends Report. 

Here are three big ideas and a link to the industry’s first-ever candidate-centric model to help you shift your thinking and start improving.

1. Listen to what’s inside their hearts and minds. There are a lot of broad strokes trends and generalizations about what Talent Acquisition teams should and should not to attract, engage, and retain talent. (Fix this, buy that, do this, but don’t do that.) It’s hard to cut through the clutter and know what will truly work. For example “the best way to attract and retain millennials is to offer free snacks and yoga classes at work.” Or, “everyone should recruit today’s talent using TikTok and SnapChat.”
   
   Just because these approaches work in some workplaces, doesn’t mean it’ll work in yours. Creating safe spaces for real conversations with your employees is incredibly insightful. Doing so can help you uncover the real sources of influence in a job search, understand the unmet needs of your employees, prioritize initiatives, and/or rethink your candidate and people strategies.
   
   Your employees may not care about free snacks, though they yearn for more professional development opportunities. Your employees may not use TikTok, SnapChat, or even LinkedIn or Glassdoor, but they do still read the newspaper. You don’t fix attraction, engagement, and retention with free snacks; but you can start to understand what matters when you listen to your people.  And, listening starts when you’re brave enough to ask.
   
   
2. Write like a person is reading it. So often the writing and content coming out of HR, such as job postings, career site content, offer letters, and benefits communications, are chocked full of jargon and overly-scripted corporate speak. There’s the ATS disclaimer to dissuade communication: “This is an automated message. Please do not respond to this email.”
   
   Through our words—written and spoken—we have an opportunity to authentic build connections, positively influence perceptions, and engage people in a real way. The words we choose help to communicate what we want people to know about our organization.
   
   
3. Be relentlessly candidate focused. What if 2020 is the year we stopped referring to what we do in Talent Acquisition as processes—hiring process, recruitment process, interview process? Instead, let’s reframe our thinking with the candidate at the center and design experiences we want them to have with our brand. Attracting and hiring is not about moving a person through a process like chocolates moving on a conveyor belt. It’s an immersive experience we can create to elicit emotions, respect and value people, and make a difference in people’s lives. 

Every organization should have a true understanding of the candidate experience journey from the candidate's perspective, and a strategic plan to bring the best experience to life. Build a better experience with the industry’s new Candidate Experience Model. Download this open-source model (no cost and no form to fill out!) and take a disciplined approach to assess your current experience and define the future one. 

Some of the best conversations happen offline. Schedule a 30-minute call with Shannon, exaqueo’s senior strategist and candidate experience advisor, for a #CandEx model review and learn how we can help you use this model for your organization.