<aside> 💡 Most companies fail miserably when it comes to candidate experience. This is your chance to set yourself, and your company apart. Candidate experience plays a huge part in future performance & retention. Most of us have been candidates at some point and experienced this personally. If you’re in a hiring position now, commit to changing that now.
Here’s how…
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More information does not necessarily mean more transparency. Bombarding candidates with information is not the answer to improving candidate experience, but generally speaking companies do not do enough here across:
👉 Career Sites 👉 Job Adverts & Descriptions 👉 Handbooks 👉 Interview Prep & Email Comms 👉 Interviews 👉 Onboarding
You have an opportunity across all of the above to provide people with as much info as possible to help them make an informed decision on whether this is the right place for them or not.
<aside> 🧠 Remember: It’s not in your interests to mis-sell this opportunity to someone. You will waste your time and theirs.
And yet, 4 in 10 hiring managers have admitted to lying about culture, expectations & role in interview… which contributes to 30% of hires leaving within the first 90 days of hire (Gallup & Resumebuilder)
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Some minimum things you should look to communicate with extreme clarity in the hiring process…
⌛ Workings Hours - Do you have core hours? Shifts? Flexible? (What does flexible mean?) Be explicit. 🌐 Where you work- Office? Remote? Hybrid? What do these things actually mean in practice. Again be explicit. 💰 Salary & broader compensation (Commission, Bonus, Equity)- Give as much info as you can. Don’t hide it. ⚙️ Culture & Behaviours- Companies don’t do enough here. Values on their own are not an indication of ways of work, and how teams operate and thrive. You need to give as much clarity as you can on things like how feedback, meetings, conflict, decisions, communication, documentation all work. 🤝 Hiring Process - Be clear. It helps to 10x candidate experience.
If you want more areas that you can look at, check out The Open Culture Framework ; 35+ areas including the above that you can consider including in some of the touchpoints mentioned earlier.
If you need more help on how you document & communicate for the purposes of improving candidate experience then Open Org is worth a peek
Communication in the hiring process is generally speaking not done well by most companies, despite so much being in place from a technology POV to help assist here.
From the moment you put out an advert, you have a likely 8-12 week window before someone actually starts in your business (Sometimes longer). Breaking that window down into some of the touchpoints & opportunities you have to communicate, build trust, and create alignment is so important.
Here’s a high level blueprint for you to work to based on that 8-12 week window
<aside> 📋 Communication Opportunity Timeline- Hiring
📅 Week 1-2 | Applications
💭 Think about…
****📅 Week 2-6 | Interviews
💭 Think about…
****📅 Week 6-12 | Offer & Notice Period
💭 Think about…
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Feedback (or lack of!) is one of those things that so many candidates complain about when it comes to hiring. ‘Ghosting’ has become a term that very few companies can genuinely disassociate themselves with, and this can be incredibly telling when it comes to how you handle things like feedback, communication etc internally from a culture POV
Realistically, it can be really hard to provide personalised, contextual feedback to every single applicants. Market conditions fluctuate but right now (2024) an average role might attract 400+ applications. For a lean startup TA team member, or hiring manager, personal feedback is probably impossible. Here’s what you should do as a guiding principle…
IF rejecting after application (no interview) ❌…
👉 Auto-response to reject, without personal feedback if you don’t have the capacity. But offer up the gesture of taking the time to provide some should they wish to ask. Only a very small % will. But it goes a long way with everyone.
FYI- even if it’s not personalised you should still provide some broad context for why it’s a no.. e.g. experience, skills etc
IF rejecting after 1st stage interview or later ❌…
👉 Absolutely you should take time for personalised feedback. Realistically you might speak to anywhere between 5-10 candidates in total out of those 400. You can absolutely find the time to provide in-depth feedback to those 5-10 candidates who have invested time with you.
It’s becoming best practice to offer up option of email or video feedback. (Not everyone prefers phone & video…)
Speed is everything when hiring. That doesn’t mean you should rush and hire as soon as possible, but maintaining momentum is vital to providing a great candidate experience. If you start to fast, and slow down, people worry and lose interest. Similarly if you start too slow and speed up, people start to wonder why.
Hiring processes vary industry to industry, role to role, so offering standardised advice on what ‘good looks like’ is hard, but if you’re a tech startup/scale up, we can tell you this..
💡According to data from peoplemetrics.fyi, as of May 2024 average ‘time to offer’ for companies between Seed > Series B globally was 32 days.
General principles to try and aim for once someone has applied and is in process…
Companies are slowly getting better at designing hiring processes to cater for more diverse needs, but it’s something that is still lacking, and many folks whether disabled, neuro-diverse or otherwise feel left out and unaccommodated here. We can always, all do better.
See ‣ for some guidance here.