The Ultimate Candidate Experience Guidebook

Talemetry GuidebookTalemetry | [email protected] | www.talemetry.com | @talemetry

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The Ultimate Candidate Experience GuidebookHow to Improve Recruiting Results by Creating an Exceptional Candidate Experience


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Table of Contents

The Current State of the Candidate Experience

Candidates Today Expect a Personalized Experience

The Emergence of Recruitment Marketing to Address Increasing Candidate Expectations

What Makes an Exceptional Candidate Experience?

The Foundation for an Exceptional Candidate Experience

The Candidate-Consumer Connection

Implications of the Candidate Experience on Recruiting

Recruiting Investments Don’t Always Translate to Improved Experiences

Strategy 1: Focusing on the Employer Brand and the Candidate Experience

The Influence of the Employer Brand on the Candidate Experience

Strategy 2: Applying the Importance of Audiences to the Candidate Experience

Prioritizing Audiences Across the Candidate Experience

The Foundation for a Personalized Candidate Experience

Developing Key Audience Personas

Strategy 3: Incorporating AI & Automation During the Candidate Experience

Showing Candidates You Value Them with Personalized Career Site Experiences

Incorporating Predictive AI to Personalize Job Recommendations

Providing Personalized, Tailored Recruitment Content

Taking What You Know From Your Career Site to the Next Level of Candidate Engagement

Modernizing Candidate Engagement Through Chatbot Functionality

Strategy 4: Leveraging Modern Engagement Tools for the Candidate Experience

Engaging Candidates Through SMS/Text Messaging

Strategy 5: Emphasizing Candidate Conversion in the Candidate Experience

Shifting Focus to Candidate Conversion

Where Does Candidate Conversion Go Wrong?

Improving Candidate Conversion Across Eight Key Areas

Strategy 6: Improving Candidate Engagement

Building Long-Term Candidate Engagement

Strategy 7: Leveraging Analytics and the Candidate Experience

Analyzing the Effectiveness of the Candidate Experience

Results. Simplified.

Organizations That See Tremendous Success with Talemetry

Start Delivering Exceptional Candidate Experiences

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The Current State of the Candidate Experience

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One that mirrors what they experience in their everyday lives as consumers. But

many organizations are stuck in an old-world recruiting mindset. One that does not

put candidates first. In fact, the old world of recruiting uses an employer-centric

approach that typically does not value candidates or treat them as individuals. The

old world makes it difficult for candidates to find and apply for relevant jobs, does

not provide intelligent, personalized experiences or content, requires multiple hoops

to jump through for application, limits candidate feedback, and

creates an ATS black hole that leaves candidates in the dark.

Conversely, the new world of recruiting means

offering a new candidate-centric experience

that provides each individual candidate

with a white-glove approach. Candidates

want relevant jobs and content delivered

instantly and seamlessly. They want an

easy application process. And they want

to be valued as individuals. This means

modernizing engagement, developing

genuine relationships from a single profile,

delivering engaging experiences across

the talent journey, leveraging the latest

in AI and automation recruitment tools,

providing relevant and recommended job

opportunities, allowing candidates to easily

express their interest, and providing ongoing communication

throughout the talent lifecycle.

Candidates Today Expect a Personalized Experience

What is meant by the phrase candidate experience? The candidate

experience is defined as the quality of collective interactions a potential

candidate has with a prospective employer throughout the entire talent

journey. The candidate experience begins when a candidate considers

your organization as a place to work, interacts with your recruitment

content or views a job opening. It can include anything from your employer

brand, employee value proposition (EVP), job advertisements, career

site content, social content, talent networks, event interactions, recruiter

communications and engagement, application process, and an entire

range of other experiences.

How Do You DefineCandidate Experience?


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The gap between the old and new world of recruiting has led

to the rapid evolution of recruitment marketing over the last

15 to 20 years. This means talent acquisition functions have

seen a steady progression of technological capabilities that

have significantly impacted recruiting in a short period of time.

Within just two decades, organizations have seen integration

to the Internet, the emergence of early online recruiting

technologies, advancing technologies through early social and

mobile functionalities, HCM transformation that identified the

gap between the applicant tracking system functionality and

an optimized candidate experience, and the emergence of

recruitment marketing as the solution to that gap. The current

environment has revealed that this is the era of opportunity

for recruitment marketing optimization, if organizations can

overcome the disconnect that has occurred in such a rapidly

changing landscape.

The Emergence ofRecruitment Marketing to Address Increasing Candidate Expectations

FIGURE 1: The Rapid Transformation Within Recruitment Marketing to Address Candidate Expectations

What Makes an Exceptional Candidate Experience?

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The Foundation for an Exceptional Candidate Experience

Giving candidates experiences they want and deserve requires four

key elements. A strong employer brand, a genuine EVP and recruitment

messaging, a smart, engaging talent journey leveraging enterprise recruitment

marketing technology, and AI powered candidate experiences to modernize

candidate engagement. Without all four, you won’t deliver the types of

consumer-quality experiences that candidates expect. You need each one

working together in lockstep to attract high quality candidates and convert

them at each step of the talent journey.

The Candidate-Consumer Connection

Strong Employer

Brand

Personalized Recruitment

Content + + Engaging

TalentJourney

+ AI PoweredCandidate

Engagement

As top recruiting organizations know, finding great talent means treating

customers as potential candidates.

Those individuals who interact with and experience your company every

day. If you deliver a poor candidate experience, there will likely be negative

consequences for your business. In fact, according to a new study from Future

Workplace, ‘64 percent of candidates are less likely to purchase goods and

services from a company that delivered a poor candidate experience.’ This

means you have to address the candidate-consumer impact so the candidate

experience has a positive outcome on consumer perceptions.

Because customers are potential candidates, and typically are considered

trusted advisors for friends, family and their social networks, they can have

a tremendous impact on their spheres of influence. According to a Software

Advice survey, 83 percent of candidates who have bad experiences are more

likely to never apply again and 59 percent are likely to tell others not to apply.

The cost of a bad candidate experience is high, and it’s not limited to just those

who apply for your jobs. It includes every person who may have considered

applying, but did not complete an application, and those people who are

willing to relay their negative experiences to their contacts.

FIGURE 2: Likelihood to Take Actions After a Negative Candidate Experience


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Implications of the Candidate Experience on Recruiting

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Recruiting Investments Don’t Always Translate to Improved Experiences

Globally, the recruiting industry tops more than $200 billion, and in the U.S.

alone, more than $160 billion is spent annually on recruiting, according to

Bersin by Deloitte. Similarly, SHRM reports the average cost per hire is now

more than $4,100 and time-to-fill averages at 42 days. This means there is

tremendous investment annually in recruitment, and with that investment

comes increased visibility and scrutiny on the return that recruiting dollars

deliver.

With all the time and money organizations are investing in recruiting, it would

seem natural or even likely that candidates could and would have fairly

positive experiences with any company they interact with. But that just isn’t

the case. An article from Josh Bersin in Forbes indicates that ‘more than 45

percent of candidates never hear anything back from the employer,’ and

an incredible ‘83 percent of candidates rate their job search experience

poor.’ Clearly, the candidate experience is broken. The question is, how

can organizations start to fix it? In the next sections of this Candidate

Experience Guidebook, we will examine seven specific strategies with key

takeaways that you can use to improve the candidate experience in your

organization.

Strategy 1:

Focusing on the Employer Brand

and the Candidate Experience

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2017/05/26/google-for-jobs-potential-to-disrupt-the-200-billion-recruiting-industry/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2017/05/26/google-for-jobs-potential-to-disrupt-the-200-billion-recruiting-industry/

https://www.shrm.org/about-shrm/press-room/press-releases/pages/human-capital-benchmarking-report.aspx

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2017/05/26/google-for-jobs-potential-to-disrupt-the-200-billion-recruiting-industry/#23a4a4fb4d1f


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The Influence of Employer Brandon the Candidate Experience

Your employer brand is more than just your company vision or

organizational values. It’s the essence of who your organization

is and what it’s really like to work in your company. So leveraging

your employer brand is essential to attract and find talent

who will fit and succeed in your culture to drive your business

performance. For candidates today, company culture, articulated

through employer brand messaging and a clearly defined EVP,

is an essential part of the candidate experience. Candidates

can actively experience your employer brand through your

recruitment content, including your career sites, blogs, employee

spotlights, employee testimonial videos, social and digital content,

review sites and in-person events, and many other channels.

Remember, your employer brand matters more now than ever

before. According to a study by Korn Ferry, cited in a recent

SHRM article, the top reason that candidates choose a specific

job over another is based on company culture. And Millennials,

in particular, who will continue to make a larger proportion of

the workforce, are seeking to relate to their employer and find

meaning in their work. In fact, Forbes reports that 68 percent of

Millennials surveyed in a recent study ‘want to make a positive difference

in the world,’ 81 percent believe that a successful business needs to have

a genuine purpose, and 78 percent think ‘the values of their employer

should match their own.’ Finally, the business case for building an authentic

employer brand that will positively influence the candidate experience

is clear. And according to recent LinkedIn research, employers with a

strong employer brand have 50 percent lower cost-per-hire and enjoy

28 percent lower turnover. So make sure you invest in articulating an

authentic employer brand that attracts candidates and empowers them to

understand your organizational culture.

How Can You Showcase YourEmployer Brand?

Providing a window into your culture requires you to

clearly define what it’s like to work in your company.

Develop an EVP that candidates can easily understand

and identify with. Feature stories of current employees

on your career site and social channels. Explain potential

career paths and walk through what a typical day is like

in your company. Use multiple channels, like your career

sites, social, video, review sites and in-person events to

showcase and reinforce your employer brand. The goal

is ultimately creating a company culture that will attract

talent and make your employer brand work for you.

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/candidates-choose-jobs-company-culture.aspx

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/candidates-choose-jobs-company-culture.aspx

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2017/12/11/millennials-want-companies-mixing-mission-and-money/#539e1c65bf2c


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Strategy 2:Applying the Importance of Audiences to the Candidate Experience !

Understanding which audiences are most important to your business

performance is one of the most important steps you can take to create an

exceptional experience for your candidates. With limited time and resources,

it’s easy to overlook the importance of prioritizing key audiences. But there are

three different audience types you should consider through the lens of your

candidate experience. So where do you start? The EVOLVE Maturity & Efficiency

Framework is the award-winning, technology agnostic recruitment marketing

methodology that ensures world-class delivery for guaranteed recruitment

marketing success. Within this Framework, the three audience types include Key

Talent Audiences, Strategic Audiences and Relationship Audiences.

Prioritizing Audiences Across the Candidate Experience

Key Talent Audiences Strategic Audiences Relationship Audiences

https://www.talemetry.com/evolve-framework



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The EVOLVESM Recruitment Marketing Maturity & Efficiency Framework

from Talemetry guides talent acquisition professionals to put into action

the strategies and technology that will enable them to make decisions

today to optimize recruitment marketing, deliver efficiencies across their

enterprise, and prioritize ongoing recruitment marketing investments. The

EVOLVE Framework is the only methodology available in the recruiting

industry today that simplifies the complexity of recruiting by bringing

together the six core process areas of recruitment marketing.

What is the EVOLVE Maturity & Efficiency Framework?

The Foundation for Personalized Candidate Experiences

Once you have prioritized your key audiences, it’s time to get to know

them. Conduct interviews with candidates, recruiters and hiring managers,

and validate with external secondary research. Creating a personalized

candidate experience with targeted, relevant content means you know

who you are messaging to. Recognize your desired candidates and their

motivations. What are their demographics, background, job preferences

and behaviors? Where are they in their candidate journey? Understand

their likes, dislikes, their emotional triggers. Empathize with their pain points

and challenges. When you talk to your audiences, you’ll be surprised how

many insights they will give you to use. That way, when candidates visit your

career site and consume your recruitment content, they feel as if you truly

understand and are speaking directly to them as a person and candidate.

As you prioritize your audiences and start to develop your key personas,

don’t overlook the importance of creating an exceptional candidate

experience for your internal employees. Retain your best employees

with an internal talent mobility solution that allows your employees to see

which jobs they are a good fit for. Enable them to easily express interest

for specific roles, notifying recruiters and hiring managers for a seamless

candidate experience.

By prioritizing internal employees and empowering a positive candidate

experience for internal mobility, you will improve career pathing

opportunities for your existing employees, build higher quality candidate

pipelines, and help recruiting teams quickly find and connect with internal

talent, faster.


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Once you have a firm understanding of your key audiences, develop

key audience personas that represent the candidates you are talking

to. For example, if you are targeting registered nurses as a key talent

audience, develop a name and likeness for the key characteristics of this

nurse. Her work-life balance. Her short and long-term goals. What is her

story? What is she likely to say she is passionate about and what are her

biggest challenges? When is she most empowered and engaged on the

job and what is most rewarding for her? This will serve as the foundation

for creating a personalized candidate experience and generating

targeted recruitment content that you build for this persona and for

your prioritized talent audiences. Building detailed personas helps you

think differently about how candidates experience your content and

your recruitment messages. And they enable you to define what kind

of content your candidates will likely respond to, the best channels to

attract them, and the drivers that motivate them.

Developing KeyAudience Personas A persona is a fictionalized depiction of a candidate who

represents your prioritized talent audience. A persona reflects the specific demographic and psychographic characteristics based on research, and enables you to quickly know the type of candidates your recruitment content is targeting.

What Are KeyAudience Personas?


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Candidates have the same expectations of your career site as they do

in their interactions with B2C websites. They want intelligent, simple,

personalized and informative experiences that are tailored to their device,

location and preferences. They want relevant jobs and personalized

content delivered instantly and seamlessly. This means you need to

provide the kinds of career site experiences that recognize, recommend

and deliver targeted mobile and social-friendly content to showcase your

employer brand, and engage and convert talent on an individual level.

One key area to focus on is job search. Empower candidates during their

job search with machine learning by enabling natural language processing

to improve job search results and to better match them to jobs they are

seeking. Leverage Google Cloud Talent Solution to understand the intent

of candidates while they search for jobs and to improve search results

for candidates. According to Talent Board, the top source for candidates

to research your company is your career site. And some of the most

desired content on your career site is your jobs. This means job search

should be front and center on all career site pages, and provide intelligent

capabilities, leveraging candidate-centric AI. Career sites that offer

faceted search and tailored career site content targeted directly at the

individual candidate based on known visitor information, browsing history,

experiences or background can provide deeper levels of personalization

that candidates want.

Strategy 3:IncorporatingAI & Automation During the Candidate Experience

Showing Candidates You Value Them with Personalized Career Site Experiences

https://blog.talemetry.com/talemetry-integrates-with-google-cloud-talent-solution-to-improve-candidate-conversion


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As candidates interact further with your career site, you can

deliver personalized candidate engagement by leveraging

predictive AI to deliver tailored job recommendations and

relevant jobs to each candidate. For example, if a candidate

views an engineering job during a past session on your career

site, then you should provide other previously unviewed

engineering jobs that may be of interest to him or her. Or say

a visitor has a profile on your site that includes sales-related

job titles. He or she might want to be provided with a list of

suggested sales jobs open at your organization. Anticipating

and providing recommendations using predictive AI for other

open positions lets candidates know you are tailoring their job

search specifically to them.

Incorporating Predictive AI to Personalize Job Recommendations

Getting the Most Out of Google for Jobs

Attract more candidates to your career site with search engine

optimized sites and job listings. Don’t miss an opportunity to ensure

a more engaging journey for your candidates. Google for Jobs

aggregates job listings across multiple job boards and removes

duplicates, featuring listings on the first results page, even before

organic results. Make sure to optimize your job listings on your

own career site to adhere to the published structure data markup

from Google and make simple changes to your sitemap file, in

accordance with Google recommendations. With all the time and

investment you’ve put into your career site, make sure you are

driving traffic to the right place and not splintering opportunities for

candidate conversion.


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Enterprise companies that want to attract high quality talent need to

understand how to personalize recruitment content at scale on their career

site. What does this entail? Just like Amazon and Netflix in the consumer

world, you should recognize candidates immediately when they visit your

career site. Go beyond providing only recommended jobs, and think about

the individual interests and needs of each job seeker.

When a visitor comes to your career site, his or her background and past

affiliations impact what he or she is interested in viewing. Take for example

a veteran who is viewing content on your site. By adjusting content shown

based on known visitor information, you can show career site content that

features veteran benefits or specific services your company offers directly

to veterans. Further, when candidates visit your career site, they likely have

had interactions with you previously. Their existing level of engagement

should determine how you interact with them. For example, a candidate

may visit your career site from a campaign in a talent network. So you

would definitely not want to re-invite them on your career site to join your

network again. Knowing the existing level of interaction a candidate has

with your company can help you determine how to continue to convert

candidates in their candidate journey and continue to personalize their

experiences.

Providing Personalized, Tailored Recruitment Content

When you know how job seekers and visitors are interacting with content on

your career site, you can start to create targeted or segmented campaigns

from your candidate relationship management (CRM) system that will

further engage them. For example, let’s say you have a microsite for nurses

in a specific city. For all active visitors on this microsite, you could invite each

individual to a meet-and-greet networking event at your hospital. Using

what you know from existing candidate behavior on your microsite, you

can develop and deliver personalized follow-up campaigns to deepen your

relationships with them.

By leveraging candidate data to personalize and contextualize content

on your career site to individuals, you can integrate this information into

your broader candidate relationship management platform for candidate

outreach. Using this information to directly communicate with and tailor

recruitment messages to individual candidates empowers you to start

personalizing each candidate journey and improve conversion results at the

individual level.

Taking What You Know From Your Career Site to the Next Level of Candidate Engagement

https://www.talemetry.com/candidate-relationship-management


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In addition to personalized, predictive job recommendations and content,

another key way to deliver tailored career site experiences is by enabling

candidate assistant chatbot functionality with intelligent job assistance

to answer candidate questions 24/7. Interacting through a personal job

assistant gives candidates the exact information they are looking for at the

exact moment they are searching for it. And it reinforces your organization’s

commitment that you are interested in each individual candidate as a person.

Further, consider leveraging this functionality for employee referrals and

to conduct candidate experience surveys so you can collect real-time

feedback from candidates.

As you consider integrating chatbot functionality to enhance the candidate

experience, remember that native chatbot within enterprise recruitment

marketing platform technology offers considerable advantage over

standalone or point solutions. Native chatbot functionality enables you

to easily capture candidate interactions, nurture talent, and manage

relationships more easily and effectively than just chatbot functionality

by itself.

Modernizing Candidate Engagement Through Chatbot Functionality

Strategy 4:Leveraging Modern Engagement Tools for the Candidate Experience


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Finding new ways to enhance the candidate experience, improve

candidate engagement and increase recruiting efficiency is a priority

for talent acquisition professionals. So it seems like an obvious fit when

a new candidate engagement tool can do all three. However, the recent

Talemetry 2020 Vision Survey revealed that 43 percent of organizations

admit that they are slow to incorporate emerging technologies like

SMS/text messaging to engage and interact with candidates. But those

organizations that have started using text recruiting solutions are already

realizing greater levels of candidate engagement. In fact, according to

Mobile Marketing Watch, text offers an unbelievable 98 percent open rate,

with average response time taking around just 90 seconds, making it a vital

candidate engagement tactic in your recruiting activities.

Recruiters often experience the limitations that solely using email

or InMail can present in interacting with candidates. These forms of

digital communication are often slower, can be cumbersome and even

feel somewhat impersonal. That’s why it’s essential that recruiting

organizations start incorporating candidate texting to offer a faster,

more direct communication channel that is highly personalized to

each candidate.

Engaging Candidates Through SMS/Text Messaging

Sending and receiving text messages with candidates reflects well on your

employer brand. More than 64 percent of consumers—and prospective

candidates—are likely to have a positive perception of companies that offer

communication through text, according to Harris, while 75 percent of people

like offers sent via text, based on research from Digital Marketing Magazine.

As you consider how and when to start incorporating texting as part of your

candidate outreach, make sure you consider native SMS/text messaging

functionality, and ensure you have a roadmap on how you will incorporate and

capture this data into your candidate relationship management system as well.

https://blog.talemetry.com/top-trending-results-from-the-2020-vision-survey

https://blog.talemetry.com/top-trending-results-from-the-2020-vision-survey

https://mobilemarketingwatch.com/sms-marketing-wallops-email-with-98-open-rate-and-only-1-spam-43866/

https://onereach.com/blog/45-texting-statistics-that-prove-businesses-need-to-start-taking-sms-seriously/

http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/mobile-digital-marketing/7-key-statistics-for-sms-marketing/558


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Despite the efforts and investment enterprise organizations are putting into

talent acquisition, they are not attracting and engaging candidates effectively.

And this is a result of failing to convert candidates throughout the talent journey.

According to Talemetry research, enterprise organizations typically see just 20

to 30 percent application conversion rates. That means, on average, between

70 to 80 percent of all prospective talent are choosing to walk away rather

than apply. Measuring candidate conversion should also occur at the audience

level. Since you have prioritized audiences crucial to your business results, you

also need to ensure that you can measure conversion across your key talent

audiences, strategic audiences and relationship audiences. For example, if one

of your strategic audiences focuses on executive hiring, then make sure you

can benchmark conversion for each stage of the hiring process for this high-

touch audience. Conversely, conversion may look very different for high volume

or hourly key talent audiences across the talent journey. Hiring for high volume

positions requires a broader scope of outreach and volume of candidates for

your recruitment marketing efforts. And that impacts your overall conversion

results and recruiting performance.

But candidate conversion is not just for measurement alone. There is serious

money at stake when you think about converting candidates. While more than

$200 billion is spent on recruitment activities annually, nearly 70 percent

of all dollars invested in recruitment marketing fail at the point of candidate

conversion. In essence, companies are throwing their recruitment dollars away.

Put another way, of that same $200 billion put into recruitment, only $60 billion

is actually making its way into applicant tracking systems (ATS). And this is a

huge missed opportunity.

Shifting Focus toCandidate Conversion

Strategy 5:Emphasizing Candidate Conversion in the Candidate Experience


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One important thing to remember about candidate conversion is that it is

best done incrementally. Think of it as tracking conversion through a series

of small ‘yesses.’ For example, get candidates to first sign up for a job alert,

then encourage them to sign up for your talent network. That way, given what

you know about each candidate, you can start to recommend jobs that would

make sense for them. Remember, conversion rates are not just about how

many candidates are applying, but instead are about tracking and measuring

conversions across the talent lifecycle. Yet despite the best efforts and

intentions, recruitment and talent acquisition professionals often get derailed in

their candidate conversion efforts. And here are five primary ways this happens:

1. Distracting candidates: Career sites may provide too much information

and overwhelm candidates. They may not provide the right information or offer

targeted content. And they may distract candidates and make it difficult to

move forward in their talent journey.

2. Adding unnecessary steps: Sometimes, candidates are not even given

a chance to convert. You may lose them early on by making candidates enter

information multiple times without capturing and storing their data. And that’s a

big fail on the technologies talent acquisition has relied upon for far too long.

Where Does Candidate Conversion Go Wrong?

What isCandidate Conversion?

Capturing information about an individual to

increase what you know about each person, so you

can effectively nurture and move each candidate

along their journey, and eventually, motivate job

application. Remember, candidate conversion, or

candidate opt in, occurs in a number of ways. Not

just completing a job application. Conversion also

includes joining a talent network, signing up for job

alerts, registering for an event or acquiring profiles

from personalization. Candidate conversion should

be a top priority throughout all of your recruitment

marketing activities.


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3. Ignoring important details: By ignoring important details in the

candidate experience, you may not empathize with the candidate

perspective. The irony here is that people are often called a company’s

most important asset. But candidates are not given the same

consideration that B2C companies have toward consumers.

4. Putting the workload on candidates: An ATS is designed to

help organizations, not candidates. And what has resulted is that

candidates now have to do the heavy lifting. Filling out 50 to 100

fields of data. Multiple data entry. Think about candidate conversion

and recruitment marketing as a vehicle to improve the candidate

experience so you can improve the quality of talent brought into your

organization and remove the massive burden candidates face.

5. Unwillingness to change: By growing accustomed to the current

way of doing things, recruiting organizations are often unwilling to adopt

new strategies or processes to improve the candidate experience. And

this unwillingness to change has become a roadblock to improvement.

Why Does CandidateConversion Matter?

Because companies that measure candidate conversion rates

are two times more likely to improve the candidate experience

and three times more likely to improve quality of hire. That’s a

business impact you can take all the way to the boardroom.

Improving Candidate Conversion Across Eight Key Areas

The Talemetry Fortune 500 Candidate Experience Audit examined eight key

areas of candidate conversion and its importance in improving the candidate

experience—from job application and talent networks to job alerts and

event registrations. Here are the eight specific ways you can enhance

your approach to conversion and optimize your strategies, processes and

technologies to drive candidate conversion and improve your candidate

experience.

1. Registration Requirements: More than 90 percent of Fortune 500

companies require registration with a username and password to apply for a

job. Avoid candidate frustration and distraction. Don’t require candidates to

register or ask them for information that discourages them from applying.

https://info.talemetry.com/download-f500-candidate-experience-conversion-audit-report-2018


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2. Social Profile Apply: 70 percent of the Fortune 500 now enable

candidates to leverage social profiles to apply for a position. Allow

candidates to pull from their social profiles to apply for jobs to streamline

the application process and increase application conversion rates.

3. Cloud Storage Apply: More than 72 percent of companies have no option for

candidates to apply using cloud-based resumes. Demonstrate your modern approach

in the application process to improve the candidate experience. Enable candidates to

use resumes stored in the cloud from services like Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive.

4. Campus and Event Conversion: Neary 34 percent of the Fortune 500 allow

candidates to quickly find relevant internships, jobs or even register for events. But

the remaining 66 percent offer no conversion opportunity, even if they do present

event or campus content. Make sure to display upcoming events with registration

forms that feed into your CRM directly to avoid missing opportunities to convert.

5. Opt-In Talent Networks: More than 53 percent of Fortune 500 companies do

not offer a talent network, while 39 percent offer it optionally. Talent networks give

candidates an opportunity to opt in to receive information about your company

and job opportunities. But as best practice, never force candidates to opt in to your

talent network before they complete an application. This creates an unnecessary

hurdle and may deter candidates from applying.

6. Opt-In Job Alerts: Around 61 percent of the Fortune 500 offer a job alert

sign up to attract passive candidates. Make sure you are taking advantage of the

opportunity to build your talent database with passive talent by offering a way to

attract candidates today and in the future with opt-in job alerts.

7. Google for Jobs: More than 46 percent of Fortune 500 companies have

no consistent direct index to their corporate jobs. And that’s a lot of wasted

opportunity. Ensure if you put the investment into your career site that you are

driving traffic to the right place and not splintering your opportunities for conversion.

8. Indeed: Less than five percent of the Fortune 500 takes advantage of one of the

best conversion opportunities to the biggest source of candidate traffic. Remove

additional layers that make the application process complex and leverage new

technologies that streamline the process so candidates can directly feed their

profiles into your applicant tracking system, all without leaving Indeed.


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Strategy 6:Improving Candidate Engagement

Building Long-TermCandidate Engagement

According to Talent Board, more than 95 percent of candidates who

apply for a job never receive any additional communication from

the recruiting organization. And only 48 percent of talent acquisition

professionals view the candidate experience as effective in their

own organization. However you look at it, there is tremendous

work to be done to build long-term candidate engagement and

ensure your organization can compete for talent by delivering a

hyper-personalized candidate experience. Remember, relationship

management and candidate engagement are two core recruitment

marketing process areas according to the EVOLVE Framework. This

means you need to actively build relationships with candidates, and

also continue to provide them with relevant content and ongoing

communication to engage them throughout their talent journey.






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So with the reality that the candidate experience is often negatively

impacting candidate conversion and hiring outcomes, how can

organizations start to improve the candidate experience and build long-

term candidate engagement? According to Brandon Hall Group, the

answer is by creating a candidate experience that values candidates as

individuals, and ensures that organizations:

• Set clear expectations

• Are transparent and fair

• Handle candidates with care

• Uphold diversity & inclusion values

• Keep candidates updated and provide regular feedback

• Respect candidates’ time

Recruitment content should speak to the heart of candidates and

encourage them to feel positive toward your employer brand. The

employee value proposition should be reinforced throughout the entire

experience, and amplified by the right technology and delivery mechanism,

like the leading enterprise recruitment marketing platform from Talemetry

to nurture and engage candidates all the way through job application.

Your employer brand and employee value proposition is what attracts

and appeals to candidates, but it’s your technology that is the delivery

mechanism for getting your message to them. When communicating

with candidates, your content should educate, inform and engage at the

individual level. And it should encourage candidates to quickly convert.

If you lack the right platform for delivering a streamlined and enhanced

candidate experience, then you should consider how you can prioritize

your investment for finding the right recruitment marketing platform that

supports your recruitment and hiring process, and integrates with your

existing systems.

https://www.talemetry.com/recruitment-marketing-platform


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Strategy 7:Leveraging Analytics and the Candidate Experience

You can’t improve the candidate experience in your organization unless

you measure it. Like all other areas of recruitment marketing, the candidate

experience needs to be understood, analyzed, and refined. So what are some

of the key metrics you can use to measure the effectiveness of your candidate

experience? Here are six that you should consider for your organization:

• Number of quality hires: For many talent acquisition functions, this

is one of the most important metrics to monitor. At its most basic level,

it is a combination of measuring overall new hire fit to the organization,

knowledge, ability, skills and engagement level. Manager satisfaction and

time to productivity thresholds can also help determine quality of hire.

Analyzing the Effectiveness of the Candidate Experience

• Time-to-hire: Measuring time-to-hire allows you to determine the length of time

between when a candidate engages with your open position and when he or she signs

the offer letter. And this information can help you identify bottlenecks in your hiring

process so you can improve, streamline and enhance the candidate experience.

• Career site engagement: This is determined by metrics like overall

number of career site visitors, sources of visits, career site bounce

rates, pages viewed per session and time spent on your site. Another way

to measure engagement is at the individual level. Leading enterprise

recruitment marketing platforms allow you to measure the types of content

engaged with and the actions taken by candidates at the individual level.

• Candidate drop off rates: This identifies specifically where candidates are

dropping off in the hiring process. In other words, where are you seeing the

greatest decrease of candidates engaging across the talent lifecycle? Is it

on your career site itself? Signing up for job alerts? Maybe it’s in the actual

job application process. Whatever it is, you must be aware of where you are

losing candidates in the hiring process so you can work to improve each area.

• New hire surveys and ongoing candidate feedback: Many organizations

conduct new hire surveys, which are vital for understanding the experiences of

candidates who have been newly hired in your organization. But beyond these

individuals, consider collecting feedback from candidates across all segments, like

those who were interviewed, those who did not get an offer, those who turned down

an offer or even those candidates who did not actually complete an application.


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• No matter what stage of the talent journey, you can collect information

with modern candidate-centric feedback tools, like chatbot, to

get valuable information to improve your candidate experience.

• Application conversion rates: This is a very focused metric

that zeroes in on how effective your applications are at converting

interested candidates into engaged applicants. It is calculated by

dividing the number of completed applications by the number of

started applications. Standard industry application conversion

rates are 20 to 30 percent, but typical Talemetry customer

conversion rates are just the opposite—ranging between 70

and 80 percent completion.

Results. Simplified.


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By improving its candidate experience, enhancing its career site and

personalizing recruitment content, CDW, a Fortune 500 technology solutions

company saw application conversion rates of over 83 percent, far surpassing

the typical 20 to 30 percent industry conversion rate. The organization also

improved the average time spent on its new career site to nearly six minutes

per visitor, and saw 86 percent of career site visitors brand new to the

organization within just a few months of launching its new candidate-centric

career site. By delivering personalized email campaigns, CDW also reached a

72 percent email open rate.

UPMC, a global non-profit health organization, received more than 1,800

applicants within one month and had one million visits to its new career

site within six months of implementation. The healthcare organization also

reached a 54 percent open rate and 18 percent click rates on its targeted

email campaigns in a difficult healthcare talent market. It has also hired more

than 25 new employees through its new chatbot employee referral program.

UPMC now regularly processes more than 3,000 hires per year with 27,000

jobs posted and 750,000 candidates managed seamlessly.

A large national retailer delivered targeted campaigns for its seasonal hiring

initiatives, including email, text and other candidate engagement strategies.

The company received 31,000 applications from personalized emails

and had more than 75,000 applications overall, increasing its historical

application rate by more than three-fold. These campaigns supported the

national hiring event where the company made more than 18,000 job offers

in one day, and far surpassed the program goal of 7,500-10,000 job offers,

with only a 1% fail rate on background checks

A global financial services organization with more than 80,000 employees

streamlined its candidate experience, and was able to reduce external

advertising costs by more than 45 percent, saw overall application

conversion rates increase to 57 percent, with some job categories increasing

to 97 percent. Search traffic increased more than 50 percent and the talent

network grew by 18 percent.

Leveraging Talemetry Candidate Experience Solutions, Enterprise Organizations See Tremendous Success


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Talemetry offers award-winning candidate-first solutions that personalize career

site interactions, modernize engagement with candidate-centric recruiting AI,

develop genuine relationships from a single profile, and deliver engaging experiences

across the talent journey.

Start Delivering Exceptional Candidate Experiences with Talemetry

Take the next step and learn how

Talemetry Candidate Experience

Solutions will amplify your employer

brand and recruitment content to get

more of the right talent at the right

time for your organization.

Ready to Power Your Candidate Experience?


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About Talemetry

Talemetry is Recruitment Marketing Results. Simplified.™ We combine our

enterprise-grade Talemetry® recruitment marketing platform with tools,

training and support to make recruitment organizations and professionals

successful. Talemetry gets the right people to apply for the right jobs by

delivering results-based attraction strategies and extending reach for talent.

Our solutions optimize operations, drive ROI and deliver client success. Finally,

a recruitment marketing platform powerful enough to deliver results, and easy

enough to leverage across enterprise organizations.

The Ultimate Candidate Experience Guidebook

Documents