Creating a good candidate experience is vital to recruiting—and eventually hiring—great candidates. But just because a candidate accepts a job offer doesn’t mean your efforts stop. On the contrary, the time between when a candidate is hired and their first day is when candidate experience matters most.
According to CareerBuilder’s 2017 Candidate Experience Study, as many as 75 percent of candidates say that their candidate experience and onboarding experiences with a company are the first parts of their broader employee experience with that company.
Once the hiring process is in the post-acceptance and onboarding stage, new hires expect your process to be seamless and frustration-free. Achieving this goal—and turning the candidate you’ve selected into an engaged employee—requires a commitment to ongoing communication.
Unfortunately, only 47 percent of employers say they have a formal process in place for communications and interactions between the time of hire and the start date. And candidates have noticed: 40 percent say they have experienced a lack of communication in the past between when they have accepted a job and their first day of work.
Technology can help ensure that you don’t make the same mistakes. Today’s HR software market offers a variety of products, but the best solutions offer a consistent and personalized experience across recruiting, onboarding, benefit administration and enrollment, and wellness program management.
Consider technology solutions with the following features to help create a compelling end-to-end candidate experience:
Automation. Onboarding software allows you to do most of the administrative duties (read: paperwork) and scheduling of onboarding automatically, which allows new hires to focus on succeeding in their new role.
Personalized dashboards. Personalized employee dashboards allow employees to familiarize themselves with your company’s culture, background and expectations. Many companies choose to include welcome videos or other messages to make new hires feel included from the start.
Integration. You want technology solutions that talk to one another. For example, having an onboarding solution that shares information with your benefits portal will help prevent clerical errors on your end and save new hires the time of having to input the same information over and over again.
Reports and analytics. Many of today’s solutions allow you to track onboarding tasks in real-time. This gives you the ability to generate reports, verify form completion and collect new hire data, all of which will help you better understand your employees’ needs so you can better meet them.
Learn more about how HCM technology creates a great candidate experience.
