Sometimes Tinseltown, for all its fictitious kitch, can end up capturing the essential, existential truth behind the dreaded life event that is the job interview.

Job interviews make for good narrative tension, tapping our collective anxiety, our cloying self-doubt barely veneered by any semblance of professionalism. All too often the whole sordid enterprise results in some serious cringe-core for both interviewer and interviewee. As a counterpoint to advice on conducting effective interviews, the following serves as a textbook list of how not to act during an interview—regardless of what side of the table you’re sitting.

9. Monty Python

Ask any recruiter and chances are they have at least one horror story, but it’s less common we hear about recruiters fumbling through questions. Monty Python takes aim at this very scenario with their witty skit “Silly Job Interview”. In this bit from from the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, interviewer John Cleese takes detailed notes about candidate Graham Chapman’s responses and reactions to the interviewer’s absurd behavior. While it’s hard to imagine any candidate passing such an outrageous interview, Chapman manages to impress the interviewer with a well-timed retort—but will he get the job?

8. The Wedding Singer

Shifting careers can be daunting, and for Adam Sandler’s character Robbie—a washed-up wedding singer—most of his skills as an entertainer don’t translate into other industries, especially finance. That doesn’t stop Robbie from interviewing at his local bank, where his response when asked about his lack of relevant experience is amusingly on-point (even if it doesn’t impress the bank’s hiring manager).

7. Seinfeld

In “The Opposite”, the always impulsive and neurotic George Costanza decides to do the opposite of what his gut tells him in every situation. This behavior sends George on a winning streak, and eventually lands him a job interview with the New York Yankees. Determined to act against his better instincts, George unleashes a fury of honesty at the Yankee executives over his disappointment with the team’s management. Once again, George’s contrapuntal instincts pay off, and the Yankees offer him a job on the spot. While this strategy may have worked for George, most recruiters and hiring managers respond better to enthusiasm than insults.

6. Step Brothers

Actors John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell perfectly embody the antics of two middle-aged manboys who never grew up in Step Brothers. As such, they see nothing wrong with wearing full tuxedos to their first (team) interview. Their attempts are doomed from the start, and if their inappropriate attire weren’t enough to make interviewers a bit suspicious, the second they open their mouths things fall apart. Quickly.

5. The Internship

Brain-puzzling interview questions are a hallmark of tech juggernauts like Google (though many report that this questioning has since fallen out of practice), and in The Internship Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn must answer a classic brain-teaser. Their response is a tangential rant that leaves both of the interviewers puzzled with disbelief. By and large, answering common interview questions with succinct and relevant responses that showcase your critical thinking and understanding will do much more to impress interviewers than imaginative ramblings.

4. The Company Men

Ben Affleck’s character, struggles to reenter the workforce after losing his six-figure salary job and begins interviewing at new companies. He shows little compassion for the overworked recruiter when she informs him that he isn’t being interviewed for the VP of Sales position he applied for but a more junior role. Unable to contain himself after this disappointing realization, he lobs a stinging insult right onto the recruiter’s desk that effectively ends the interview and burns all bridges with the company.

3. The Devil Wears Prada

Hollywood often depicts the fashion industry as cutthroat, where image and attitude reign supreme, and for Andy (Anne Hathaway), her first encounter with Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) in The Devil Wears Prada is a candidate’s worst nightmare come true. Streep verbally dismantles Hathaway’s character for not having the requisite passion or haute-couture attire, and dismisses her without more than a glance at her resume. Feeling insulted, Alex snaps back with an equally sharp remark that eventually wins over Streep, proving that while she lacks experience, she has comparable skills that make her a candidate worth considering.

2. The Big Bang Theory

Fans of The Big Bang Theory admire Penny for being the plucky waitress who frequently delivers well-timed comedic jabs. Unfortunately, Penny’s experience in the service industry didn’t teach her the finer points of professionalism during an interview, which soon gets her into hot water with the hiring manager at a pharmaceutical sales company. Luckily for her, both Penny and the interviewer bond over their shared fear of their mutual acquaintance, Bernadette, and her bullish attitude. Saving face, even during an interview gone wrong, demonstrates a level of professionalism most recruiters and hiring managers will recognize and appreciate.

1. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Mac (Rob McElhenney) and Charlie (Charlie Day) of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are a rather dim duo, with their bloated egos and lack of formal education making them less-than-ideal candidates for most entry-level jobs. Undeterred, Mac and Charlie use their negotiation skills to convince the interviewer to split the position (and the salary) between them. Unwittingly, Mac and Charlie seal the deal by negotiating their salary down even further to minimum wage, earning them both a job offer at a fraction of the cost to the company. As a candidate, the art of the salary negotiation can be daunting, but it certainly doesn’t have to be—and you shouldn’t sell yourself short.

As the “candidate experience” buzzword reaches a peak, what is the design team doing to weave its value into the product process at SmartRecruiters?

The design team at SmartRecruiters loves making hiring teams happy, but if bad candidate experience means bad news for good companies fighting to find great talent, how exactly can we design software for recruiting team productivity–but also for the job-seeking humans on the other side?

A good candidate experience is much more than candidate interaction – it goes beyond tools and dives deeper into company values and employer branding. Candidate experience involves the entire hiring team. If everyone works well together, it shows. Great collaboration results in better hiring process and hence better experience for your candidates.

Tools have a big role to play in enhancing your candidate experience. Here are some ways the design team at SmartRecruiters stays mindful of candidate experience when building our product:

1. Create Empathy with Candidate Personas

We’ve had conversations with job-seekers across the world to understand where the typical application and interview process fails to engage them. When the application process is the first line of communication with potential team members, it’s crucial to get every interaction right.

People who submit online applications come from all walks of life. It is important to understand the unique contexts that bring metal workers to click “Submit” on an application just as much as it is important to realize a software engineer’s thought process. But what all job-seekers have in common is the desire for a smooth, predictable, and personal process.

This means giving job-seekers a space to feel a sense of partial control in this often helpless-feeling process. We continue to build this into candidate-facing pieces like the Candidate Portal, whose UX was recently called out by a happy job-seeker:

But it also means the recruiter’s’ toolkit, in this case, needs to facilitate more consistent communication between recruiting teams and their candidates. The tools need to give all parties a foundation for a predictable process, as well as time and flexibility to set the right tone and relationship, for multiple (sometimes hundreds and thousands) of applicants.

2. Create Empathy via User Researching Recruiting Teams

On the other side of the relationship management coin, we can’t forget to empathize with the teams making the hiring decisions. The relentless interviews and usability tests we conduct with our customers (thank you!) help us find snags in how their hiring tools serve them, where in the process they struggle to keep it personal with the candidates, and how we can improve the structure and design to make everyone happy.

A big challenge is Dunbar’s number— the suggested cognitive limit to how many people a person can maintain stable social relationships (in which someone can relate to each person on an individual level). The million dollar question is, how do you scale Dunbar’s number? Recruiters are people, too, and they only have so much bandwidth to give candidates what they need to make a favorable decision about the company. The tool needs to be designed to take away some of that cognitive load so that recruiting teams can instead focus on being humans with their candidates.

3. Design Is a Party and You’re Invited

Now, what do we designers do with these gold mines of information about candidates and recruiter usability?

There are specific things we do to get the process started–creative things that designers are traditionally known for like design sprints, sketching, mind maps, or straight up diving into our preferred prototyping software with headphones on.

But if you will come down another level of recruitment-ception with me: at the highest level, our own teams at SmartRecruiters—just like yours—need to 100% believe and live our “You Are Who You Hire” philosophy. This means creating a dynamic environment where product managers, designers, engineers customer success and even sales can feel comfortable and willing to be a part of the problem-solving process. What I love about working at SmartRecruiters is that everyone is happy to constantly question, review, and iterate on our own practices with strong opinions, weakly held. After all, one usability test or research session can prove us wrong at any time.

It is very empowering to be able to adapt and share new information together, across all parts of the company. Whether we are engaging our colleagues in a design sprint, building user journeys or just having a casual conversation about how to make hiring better–design always starts at empathy: with job-seekers, recruiting teams, and finally, by making space in our own process to make sure our teams are at full capacity to think creatively with us.

If you’re on a recruiting team and are eager to be involved in our design process, you can be a part of the conversation, too. Join the SmartRecruiters’ Design Lab! Sign up here to participate in our ongoing feedback sessions. We are always testing something new!

In this recent Forbes article, Lian Shao, a lecturer at the University of Washington says that companies that don’t focus on improving their candidate experience can “end up harming their employer brand.”

Harm their employer brand? No question about it.

But the damage can be far more catastrophic. A poor candidate experience hurts an organization’s entire brand. After all, candidates are customers too. They won’t be shy about telling their friends and family about how they’re treated, maybe even spreading the word across social media.

What’s the potential damage? What are candidates saying today? Where can you pinpoint spots for measurable improvement? Join us July 20 for our webinar, “Candidate Experience: What the Evidence is Telling Us”

Don’t miss this exceptional SmartRecruiters webinar where we’ll be joined by Gerry Crispin, an expert on the topic from the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals, CareerXroads, and TalentBoard.

Turn anxiety into opportunity

Sometimes it seems as if recruiters have lost touch with how uncertainty in making career decisions leaves us all vulnerable to stress and anxiety.

This is a reminder that the candidate experience isn’t about you. It’s about the candidate. If I’m the candidate, it’s all about me.

Still, too many candidates report poor experiences, causing them to speak negatively about you. That hurts your chances of making excellent hires especially in a climate where the unemployment rate hovers near 16-year lows. During our webinar, we’ll show you just how damaging this can be.

The good news is that so many candidate experience issues are easily solved, so you can reduce all that anxiety and gain an advantage over your competition in hiring top talent — an enormous untapped opportunity at many companies.

See the data for yourself

I won’t reveal everything we’ll be discussing, but consider a few facts from recent studies:

• Roughly 4 out of 10 job seekers who give their candidate experience a one-star rating will definitely take their alliances, product purchases, and relationships elsewhere. It’s impossible to know how much that loss of goodwill represents in lost opportunities
• About 60 percent of candidate finalists report never being invited to provide feedback about their experience. Just listening can be so useful. Think about it. Would a company never consider asking customers for feedback? It’s just as important to ask candidates.
• Approximately 57 percent of candidates who were informed that they were no longer being considered received that news in an email from a “do not reply” address. Whatever happened to common courtesy? That’s just plain common sense.

We’ll be presenting plenty of additional data and insights on where you can make improvements.

Benchmark your performance

During the webinar, you’ll learn about the TalentBoard’s latest benchmark study, which clearly shows how delivering an excellent candidate experience brings significant benefits.

You end up hiring only a tiny fraction of applicants. So give the vast majority of candidates who won’t be working for you (at least not immediately) a positive experience. Believe me, they’ll tell others about it, which really pays off over the long term.

There are certainly high costs associated with making poor hires — lost time, additional recruiting costs, and loss of goodwill. But the lost opportunities of not being able to attract top talent can be even more costly – yet so preventable.

Don’t miss this webinar July 20. We look forward to helping you see where to find significant opportunities to improve your candidate experience.

Just “the tip of the iceberg.” That’s how Ray Tenenbaum describes several fundamental complaints about the candidate experience in a recent article.

As I talk to candidates, I hear similar complaints and know full well that each one represents similar views held by many more. And you know what they say about icebergs — you only see the top 10 percent or so.

The common thread that weaves these complaints together boils down to poor communication throughout the entire hiring process — from initial discovery of opportunities through accepting an offer. Fortunately, recruiting software makes it a lot easier to communicate far more effectively.

So here are a few of the top complaints:

“Your career site isn’t mobile friendly.”

I might have viewed this as a rather mediocre “less than ideal” practice only a few years ago, but today it’s absolutely inexcusable. According to a Glassdoor survey, 45% of job seekers say they use their mobile device specifically to search for jobs at least once a day. Why would a top candidate even think about working for a company that can’t provide a decent mobile experience, let alone an excellent one?

Not only does SmartRecruiters automate delivering a delightful mobile experience to candidates, we do the same for recruiters and hiring managers as they collaborate on making hiring decisions.

“Your application is too long.”

How much information do you need? Only enough for an initial screen. There will be plenty of opportunities to ask for additional information later.

But more importantly, why not let candidates apply in just a few seconds, by uploading their resume or sending you their LinkedIn profile with just a click or a tap? Any modern talent acquisition suite such as SmartRecruiters includes this functionality – more important than ever as candidates grow weary of typing, cutting, and pasting the same information over and over and over again.

“Did you get my application?”

C’mon. Really? There are companies that don’t even acknowledge receiving an application?

Do these same companies fail to acknowledge customer inquiries? Believe me, it’s not hard to automate notifications like these. No SmartRecruiters client would ever knowingly fail to acknowledge a candidate’s application because those processes are fully integrated.

“When will you let me know about your decision? Is the job filled?”

Each job may call for different evaluation processes, a variety of interviews, assessments, tests, etc. While you know what that process looks like, candidates don’t. Be transparent so you can set reasonable expectations and follow through with timely status communications.

“How long will it take to get me the offer, because I need to give an answer to another company?”

Think about how candidates feel as they’re being considered for a job. Changing jobs can be a major life event. Choosing between taking an offer that’s been made by another company or waiting for an offer from you isn’t easy. The more time you take, the less likely it is that you’ll close an excellent candidate.

Melt the iceberg: Automate processes and gain valuable insights from recruiting analytics

These complaints about the candidate experience seem far too common. That’s frustrating because I know they’re mostly avoidable. Not only can tools within SmartRecruiters easily address all these complaints, you can also access recruiting analytics that show how your performance against benchmarks is improving.

I know that recruiters are only human, but as Ray explains, both people and processes need to be in alignment.

When candidates are happier, that iceberg of complaints will melt away and you’ll be building an even bigger pool of highly qualified talent interested in working for you.

It was Mark Twain who said, “Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation”

Sure, both recruiters and candidates need to communicate about opportunities — discussing experience, skills, culture to see if there seems be a great fit. But I know that I build more trust as a recruiter when I switch from “interview mode” to just plain conversation.

I was reminded of what Mark Twain said when I read Keenan Steiner’s post on establishing trust to make interviews more effective.

How do you have a conversation? It seems simple enough. People just talk, right? Somehow, however, recruiters make interviewing way more complicated in a way that seems untrustworthy to candidates.

Trust is, after all, a recruiter’s most valuable asset. Lose trust, and you’ll find it far more difficult to find key talent. As Keenan’s post points out, establishing rapport with candidates makes it easier to build trust — so I’m considered a candidate’s ally, not someone trying to sell a job.

As for me, I want candidates to not only see me as a human being who cares about their career goals and aspirations, not just some name on a resume. That’s why I’m always honest about both the benefits of an opportunity, and it’s potential pitfalls.

Conversation in a pleasant setting. Keeping it casual

As Keenan explains, a standard “Q and A” interview does not resemble a conversation between two genuine human beings, but can be seen by promising applicants as a very stressful experience.

He quotes Brad Stultz, HR coordinator at the web retailer Totally Promotional, who meets with candidates not in a conference room or office, but “in a quiet corner of the building on two sofas.” That’s a setting he says lends itself to putting a candidate at ease to build rapport which establishes trust.

To engage in conversation, avoid asking questions that seem like you’re grilling someone. Avoid the tough challenging questions. You’ll have time to go into more detail later. At the initial interview, keeping it casual leaves candidates with a much more favorable impression.

No hiding: Transparency above all else

If you’re going to build trust, you need to be upfront about the job opportunity, the evaluation process, expectations for each stage in the process, and your schedule, among other issues.

When candidates think you’re hiding something – or don’t provide straightforward answers – you can’t establish that trust and rapport so essential to recruiting.

But being honest and straightforward, while admirable, is merely meeting expectations.  Exceptional recruiters actually help candidates prepare for later interviews by giving them information on who will be on the interview panel and what types of questions they can expect.

Do you care? Show it.

Of course you care about candidates. If you don’t you’re in the wrong business. The problem is that all too few recruiters show it — making it clear that a candidate’s success benefits everyone.

So when you meet candidates for the first time, think of it as more as a conversation and less as an interview so that you can build trust.

And be transparent because as Mark Twain also said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

He’s right – and that makes your job a lot easier.

Two seemingly unrelated ideas came to mind as I read Noel Cocca’s article at Recruiting Daily, “5 Tips to Manage the Human Candidate Experience.” In fact, they may even be polar opposites — automation and humanity.

At SmartRecruiters, we take pride in delivering a talent acquisition suite that automates processes to save time. But make no mistake. We are not creating automated tools to eliminate the human touch. Quite the opposite, in fact. Our goals are to help organizations augment and enhance experiences so they become more human.

As Noel says, “We need to focus on building and growing respect from not just our candidates but our clients as well. Recruiting is and always will be about the human element.”

Noels’ five tips emphasize humanity in delivering an exceptional candidate experience. Yes, automation is useful, but only to the extent that it gives recruiters more time to engage in more genuine dialogue with candidates, plus help hiring teams collaborate to make the interviewing experience more appealing and efficient.

Look, no robot can ever duplicate the kindness and compassion humans can offer. Organizations are run by real live human beings who must interact with others with empathy and compassion.

Have a heart: Recruiting is not just about processes and procedures.

How to be more human? Noel says that just being genuine, being yourself is a good start. It’s so easy to use jargon and talk about “sourcing” and the number of candidates in a “pipeline.” That’s okay as long as every so often we all take the time to see things from another perspective. Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. Would you want to be perceived as some entity in a pipeline to be tracked?

Respect goes a long way to building strong relationships. Yes, you need to ask tough questions. Yes, you do need to make sure candidates have what it takes to do the job, but even if you know a candidate might not be the best fit now, there could easily be an opportunity to engage with that person later to discuss another role.

Demonstrating empathy, taking time to help candidates understand how their goals and experience may or may not match the role you need to fill, even helping candidates by referring them to other organizations, makes an enormous difference. In today’s increasingly automated world, that’s the level of respect that’s going to be long remembered and pay off in ways you may never expect.

A great candidate experience is person to person, not business to person

Out of Noel’s five tips, I’d say the fifth one strikes me as a strategy that delivers excellent results. She says, “Use your company’s STARS. Nothing shows your human culture more than a genuine and heart-warming message from a Senior Executive.”

That’s a great suggestion. It’s your team that represents your company. Companies don’t talk to people. People do. The more personal you can be in demonstrating why your company is an excellent fit and what your organization cares about goes a long way to enhancing the human aspect of recruiting.

Remember, the candidate experience is really a human experience

Yes, use all the automated tools and processes you can to be more efficient, but use the efficiencies you gain to spend time being more personal in your communications and more human in your interaction with candidates and colleagues.

Hiring success is a lot like striking gold — enriching your business as you bring top talent onto your team.

There are some organizations, however, that will never strike gold because they don’t give candidates the respect they deserve. One recruiting expert who’s been on the other side of the table recently wrote about his own candidate experience. Like me, he’s astonished that so many companies don’t even understand the basics of simple common courtesy.

It’s not hard. It’s not complex. It’s not difficult. Treat candidates as you’d want to be treated – not just in a recruiting context — but as a real live human being.

Just follow the Golden Rule. And if necessary make it a company rule so everyone complies.

John Hollon, an award-winning writer and noted authority on recruiting describes his candidate experience in his article, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Candidate Experience” at Recruiting Daily.

He points out the “good” in jobs that he was all but offered, plus the “bad” of promising job opportunities that seemed to evaporate for no reason.

But the “ugly” was truly obnoxious. As John says, some organizations that seemed to want to hire him, “suddenly went incommunicado and treated me as if I had Ebola. I couldn’t get them to respond to save my life.”

Silence speaks volumes: Far worse than “no”

As we pointed out in our own post, nearly half of candidates in 2016 reported receiving no reply at all two months after applying. John considers this one of his “biggest gripes,” explaining that “the worst answer in life isn’t no; the worst answer in life is no answer at all and to be left spinning your wheels.”

He’s right. If you’re not planning to hire someone who took the trouble to apply, the least you can do is let them know. Isn’t that how you’d want to be treated? That is, after all, the “Golden Rule” of life. Not following it hurts your employer brand and reputation as an organization.

Make the Golden Rule a rule

Like John, I find it so strange that many companies treat people as if they don’t even exist. Perhaps they don’t intend to present themselves in such a way, but intent doesn’t matter. Processes need to be put in place so that every candidate is treated with respect — even those that don’t even come close to meeting your needs.

So if necessary, make the Golden Rule an actual rule. Set up an SLA within your recruiting and hiring process to assure that every candidate receives an appropriate response within a specified time period. What type of response and how much time? That may differ in various organizations, but it’s important that an SLA be put in place to assure consistency.

Once again, this is just common courtesy. If you need to make business case for such a rule, consider that candidates are likely to assume that you treat your customers exactly as they are being treated. So you could lose a lot of revenue for years to come. And they’re likely to tell others about their candidate experience, maybe even online. Who knows how many talented candidates you’ll lose out on because you’ve treated others so poorly?

Fortunately, SmartRecruiters’ recruiting software makes it easy to automate these processes — so you can communicate in a timely way and deliver a candidate experience that’s not ugly at all, but as good as gold.

If you weren’t at our #WeAreHiring MeetUp in March, you missed a great meeting about candidate experience – but a frustrating one because it’s an issue that at first glance seems way too confusing.

As a panel member, I enjoyed our frank discussion, but it boggles my mind seeing so much dismal data on how candidates view their experience, yet little progress made — especially when turning this big liability into a huge asset isn’t all that complex.

All you have to do is answer one simple question: Why does the candidate experience fall apart? That answer becomes clear if you strip away all the intricate analysis and buzzwords and get back to basics.

It’s really just a matter of changing your perspective. Yes, our technology makes it a whole lot easier to deliver a more impressive candidate experience, which we all know is rapidly becoming essential to hiring an A-list team.

But although technology solves problems, it’s useless until you can specifically define your problem. Everyone talks about candidate experience, but nobody really seems to know what it actually means. Here are some clues.

Focus more on “candidate” and less on “experience.”

Think about the customer experience in a retail environment. When issues surface, who do you ask for feedback? Customers, of course.

But I see too many recruitment organizations that don’t seem to consider needs from the candidate’s perspective. Meeting those needs is not only expected but greatly appreciated.

We received an email here at SmartRecruiters from a candidate we rejected, yet thanked us profusely for the great experience throughout the application and evaluation process. If you’re not getting feedback like this at least occasionally, your candidate experience is lousy — even worse if you’re seeing one and two-star reviews on sites like Glassdoor.

Just put yourself in the candidate’s shoes? What do they want? What do they need?

The stakes are enormous. Nearly half of candidates rate their experience as average at best and about 3 in 10 say they’d never reapply at a company that delivers such an experience. These are companies that are shooting themselves in the foot by making it nearly impossible to hire superstars.

Why?

What’s really frustrating is that candidates aren’t all that demanding. They just want common courtesy, acknowledgment, recognition, and help in deciding if they’ll be a good fit in your organization.

Yet nearly half of candidates receive no reply at all two months after applying. What kind of experience is that? For crying out loud, any application should be acknowledged within two minutes, not two months!

Start getting thanked for rejections

Look, I know that recruiters are under a lot of pressure and that most don’t want to create a poor experience – but just a slight change in perspective, seeing things from the candidate’s perspective, and using automated tools such as SmartRecruiters makes an enormous difference.

How will you see the difference? You’ll start getting thank you notes from candidates you reject. Until you do, you’ve still got some improvements to make.

I recently hosted our first #WeAreHiring Meetup of the year on Candidate Experience. We had a great turnout of 60+ attendees, a diverse panel of speakers, and we even celebrated International Women’s Day!

Candidate experience has traditionally been a black hole for both sides:

• The question for hiring teams remains “What can I do to improve candidate experience?”
• The question for candidates remains “What happens after I submit my resume?”  

Candidate experience is actually how I first learned about SmartRecruiters. I was in the application process with an awesome major tech company and was impressed by their communication and transparency. I dug a little deeper thinking it was a homegrown product only to discover the candidate portal and the name SmartRecruiters. I was floored to see the status of each of my job applications as well as all related communication. I immediately looked to see if SmartRecruiters had any Product openings and the rest is history.

Our panel shared surprising data and practical recommendations on how companies can use technology to improve candidate experience.

Find them on LinkedIn: Kevin Grossman, Matt Walker, Curtis Smith, Roy Baladi

We were surprised to learn that:

• Almost 50% of candidates who apply to jobs wait at least 2 months to hear back from a company they applied to.
• Facebook is one of the few companies that ranks highest globally with excellent candidate experience.
• MEN (younger than 35) in non-managerial positions typically have a better candidate experience than WOMEN (older than 35) in managerial positions.

The good news is that we have easy-to-apply tips to improve candidate experience throughout your hiring process.

Keep It Real

Talent Attraction is where candidate experience really starts. Company career sites are still the most important factor for candidates as they research companies to apply to. Many companies think just because they have a big brand, they don’t need to get creative or engage, and that the best talent will flock to them no matter what. While this may be true for Google, Apple, and Facebook, it is not the case of the rest of us. Our panel recommends that employers have a welcoming career site that is true to it’s company’s values, brand, and culture. Surfacing relevant jobs and making the search easy for prospective candidates ranks just as high. Here are some career sites we think really nailed it.

Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That

The Application Process has the potential to either WOW or really frustrate your candidates. Here’s an unsolicited note we received from a frustrated-turned-grateful candidate:

Our Panel’s recommendation is simple: it’s time employers invest in a modern ATS that simplifies the application process for candidates while improving the data collected & how it’s served up to hiring teams.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

We ended our discussion with the most emotion-driven part of the process, the Interview Process. Emotions, for both parties, run higher and higher as you get closer to the offer phase. Our panel’s recommendations to employers are really quite simple:

1. Be Prompt (but not too prompt) – whether it’s the initial screen or after the final interview, respect your candidates time and let them know your intentions. If you know you are not going to move forward, don’t keep them hanging. On the other side of the spectrum, if you are using automation, make sure you aren’t sending rejections immediately after a candidate applies. It’s best practice to wait 48-72 hours.
2. Be Transparent – Many automated & generic rejections say “we will keep your application on file and reach out to you if there is a good fit.” If you know it’s not in your company’s recruiting workflow to check past candidates, take that little bit out of your rejection notes. PRO TIP: Some employers take it a step further and provide links to jobs and resources that may help the rejected candidate with their job search.
3. Be Personal – There a few things more annoying than receiving a completely generic rejection email. “Dear candidate, thanks for your application but we’ve decided to move in a different direction.” For starters, include the candidate’s name and the job they applied to so they know a human actually screened them. If the candidate made it through a couple of interview rounds, pick up the phone as soon as you know they are no longer in the running and be open about why things didn’t work out. That will go a long way and there’s still a good chance that candidate will advocate for your company and brand.

Technology can certainly help facilitate a great candidate experience, but the biggest takeaway here is that it takes the thoughtful touch from the Recruiter & Hiring Team that differentiates between a great vs. terrible candidate experience.

Join us for our next #WeAreHiring Meetup and checkout our deck to dive deeper into the facts & figures.

Meetup co-hosts: Natalia Baryshnikova (left), Kelly Fang (middle), Neeti Chokshi (right)

Technical hiring is currently as hard as it’s ever been. There are more open roles in software development than there are qualified people to fill them. This means the average engineer has more options than they can even fathom.

With this in mind, how do you set yourself apart to attract, screen, hire, and retain top talent? There are many aspects in which you can focus, but the most important is candidate experience.

While sourcing and finding top talent is hard, automated programs are getting better and better at this, and will continue to improve dramatically. The experience a person has in finding out about your company, applying for a role, and then going through the interview process is where you can make your biggest influence on new hires.

Having a great candidate experience means that you have a great message, that you have a consistent process, and that you are as transparent as you can be with the applicants and candidates that you are interviewing.

Working with 100’s of startups over the last 4 years has enabled me to see the things that set apart companies that hire great, from the average startup.

The best companies contain many things in their candidate experience, but I think it all starts with a mindset. You have to believe in the company you are building, and really think that it will “change the world” and be the “best idea ever.” But, you also need to have a quiet humbleness that can enable you to realize there are many incredible options for the candidates you are chasing.

Join me at the #WeAreHiring MeetUp on Wednesday, March 8, 2017 and learn how a great candidate experience can show potential hires how great your company really is in the clearest light possible.