What is candidate experience?
Candidate experience refers to how job seekers perceive and interact with your organisation throughout the recruitment journey, from discovering your employer brand and visiting your careers website, through to applying and communicating with recruiters.
A seamless candidate experience helps organisations attract stronger talent, increase application completion rates, and build long-term employer brand trust.
What do candidates want?
In the current job landscape, candidates are looking for more than a recruitment website with some job vacancies. They’re looking for a streamlined candidate experience. A website that feels approachable, intuitive, and meets their own personal requirements.
A seamless candidate journey
One of the ways in which you can create a frictionless candidate experience is through human-centred design. In this case, employing human-centred design methods allows you to form a deeper understanding of your users, their pain-points, and how you can create tailored experiences for them.
So, how can you use these human-centred principles in your website to create a candidate experience that stands out?
Build empathy for your candidates
Your website is often the first touchpoint between a candidate and your business, so the key here is to design around their needs. Whilst you may want to consider running surveys or even creating candidate personas, a key way to understand these needs is through mapping out these journeys.
Whether this is through detailed sitemaps or user flow diagrams, your goal is to make the entire process as frictionless as possible.
Mapping these journeys not only allows you to visualise user behaviours, but it can also help you identify any possible holes in your existing candidate experience.
Design intuitive website journeys
As you start to understand the candidate experience more, it will enable you to craft smoother journeys and more importantly, a human-centric web journey.
To achieve this, you’ll want to create a clear and consistent navigation throughout your website that offers as much flexibility to the candidate experience as possible. Think about the many places in which a user could land on your website. Consider how easy it is for them to navigate to the information they need in as few clicks as possible.
You should also consider the importance of optimising the candidate experience for mobile. Over 65% of job applications are submitted via mobile devices, so make sure you have a website that is intuitive and accessible across all devices.
Don’t treat accessibility as an afterthought
It is reported that 71% of users with accessibility needs will leave a website that is difficult to use or doesn’t support their own accessibility requirements.
Consider making key accessibility improvements to the candidate experience, like ensuring your call-to-action buttons have sufficient colour contrast ratios, creating forms with clear and simple labels, and ensuring images have alt-text.
Communicate with transparency and warmth
Human-centred design can also guide the tone and content of your website, so communicate with honesty and simplicity.
Detailed explanations of hiring processes in the forms of timelines or infographic-based content can help provide clarity to the candidate experience.
Supporting this with employee advocacy content, like employee stories, for example, will help in showcasing your business in a way that connects with candidates on a human level.
Conclusion
In its true form, recruitment is very much a human experience.
When you consider this in the context of human-centred design and develop your website around your empathy for your candidate, you will create a transparent and supportive candidate experience that resonates.
Check out our Web Design services or drop us a line if you want some help optimising your candidate experience for maximum impact.
