Category: Candidate Attraction

5 Career Site Must-Haves to Improve the Candidate Experience

Posted on by banderson

By Simon Wright, Global Head of Talent Advisory Consulting

Your career site is a one-stop shop where candidates can learn about your organization, evaluate your employer value proposition (EVP), and find opportunities. It’s not enough to simply list your job openings. Candidates are savvier than ever and want to be informed about your organization before they apply.

Your career site is a crucial resource for candidates as they research your organization and roles, playing a pivotal role in the candidate experience. For our recent research report, Inside the Candidate Experience, we audited the candidate journey—including the career sites—of 217 organizations across sectors. When we compared the findings with candidate survey data, we found that many career sites were lacking when it comes to providing the experience candidates expected.

In our Talent Advisory work with companies around the world, we often find that organizations seem to be under the impression that candidates visit the career site just once—to submit an application. In reality, we see candidates come back again and again throughout the recruitment process—usually before an interview and again when they receive an offer. Modern candidates, who are used to social media and e-commerce experiences, think of your career site as a content hub rather than a brochure—and you should too.

Here are five career site must-haves to create a positive candidate experience:

1. Intuitive Career Site Search Functionality

The first rule of career sites is to ensure that job openings are easy to find. That means ensuring your job descriptions can be found via Google and that your career site is easy to access from your corporate website. But it goes further—are your job openings searchable on your career site? Can your job listings be accessed from everywhere on your career site?

Candidate expectations are increasingly fueled by consumer experiences. So, employers should take a page from the e-commerce book and streamline career site experiences by offering relevant job searches. This means candidates can navigate quickly and easily to the types of roles that interest them. We’ve helped our clients up-level their job postings by featuring relevant content for certain jobs, including employee spotlights for someone who’s currently in the role and even recommending similar positions that the candidate may be interested in.

Search doesn’t just apply to your job openings. Does your site have a universal search accessible from every page? To satisfy today’s informed candidates, you must make it as easy as possible for candidates to find the content that matters to them—whether it’s information on your benefits, your sustainability statement, or your DE&I efforts.

Careers Sites

2. Information About Your Organizations’ Mission and Purpose

Historically, candidates have given rewards and benefits priority when it comes to their career decisions. However, our study confirms a change in candidate expectations following the pandemic, with more value placed on flexibility and organizational philosophy.

The top things candidates look for when evaluating a company are:

  1. Flexible working and work/life balance
  2. Mission/purpose
  3. Rewards and benefits
  4. Career development and mobility
  5. Company values

Half (50%) of candidates say an organization’s mission and purpose are key influences on their decision to apply. This is true across generations not, just for Gen Z.

Top Considerations by Generation

(Source: Inside the Candidate Experience 2023 Report)

With mission/purpose in the top five considerations for job seekers, it’s concerning how few organizations have this information on their career websites. We found an organization’s mission and purpose less than half (48%) of the time on the sites we evaluated. This means that half of employers are missing an opportunity to make an emotional connection with their talent audiences and help candidates understand how the role they have applied for fits into that mission. If candidates can’t find your mission on your careers site, they won’t even look at the roles you’ve got.

You might be thinking, we’ve got that on our corporate website. Can’t we just link to it there? As soon as you send a candidate away from your career site, they’re less likely to come back to apply. Streamline the candidate experience by giving candidates the information they want in the same place where they can submit an application.

3. Content Featuring Real Employees

During our diagnostic, we evaluated career sites to see if a diverse group of real employees was represented. We found that 35% of organizations don’t feature real employees on their career site. In addition, 60% of career sites don’t contain any video content in which employees share their personal journeys and stories.

Yet, when asked how hearing from actual employees would affect their job search, 86% of respondents said they value hearing employee stories. This is especially important to Baby Boomers with 92% saying it would influence their decision to join an organization. Plus, one in three women also believe it’s critical.

Videos that show a diverse range of employees in their real work environment help candidates see themselves in the role and at your organization. The number one obstacle for candidates when it comes to applying is not knowing what it’s like to work at an organization. So, brands that can show candidates what their day-to-day tasks will look like in a role will see more applications and higher-quality candidates.

4. Information on the Recruitment Process

Setting expectations and giving advice on the recruitment process after you’ve piqued a candidate’s interest is an often-overlooked way of improving the number and quality of applications you receive. If candidates are unsure of what they’re getting themselves into from the start, they will likely pass over your position entirely.

In our candidate experience diagnostic, we found that information about the recruitment process was lacking. Only 13% of employers offer candidates the opportunity to speak to a recruiter or current employee before applying. Just a third of career sites (34%) featured frequently asked questions (FAQs) or advice to support candidates throughout the process (31%).

Less than a third (28%) of the career sites we assessed gave an overview of the key stages of the recruiting process. This information can help set realistic expectations for candidates, reduce their anxiety during the recruitment process and reduce drop-off. Plus, outlining the steps of the candidate journey has the added benefit of making your recruitment process more accessible to hard-to-reach talent groups, supporting your brand’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Careers Sites, Application

5. An Opportunity to Join Your Talent Community

As consumers, we’re accustomed to subscribing to offers and news from our favorite brands. Sharing tailored content via marketing automation tools is a simple, yet effective way companies build engagement with prospective customers until they’re ready to buy. Talent acquisition leaders can use a similar approach in their recruitment efforts.

Concerningly, only half of organizations (53%) give candidates an opportunity to register their interest or to sign up for job alerts. Even fewer (39%) encouraged candidates to join a talent community. So, you could be unknowingly turning away talented candidates if you don’t provide a channel for staying in contact with your company. When new roles come up, your talent pool of qualified candidates should be your first port of call.

Candidates wait an average of nine months between joining a talent community and applying for a job. So, maintaining talent pools and communicating with them regularly allows you to demonstrate to candidates what they are missing by keeping them warm until the right job becomes available. These communications should go beyond the standard job updates in order to showcase the value of your employer brand and what they’ll gain by joining your team. Organizations that can successfully implement this strategy will outperform the competition in securing top talent.

Research Report

INSIDE THE CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE 2023

Read the report

How to Scale Candidate Engagement for Total Talent Acquisition 

Posted on by akessler

By Mark Fita, Global Vice President of Implementation 

An extensive amount of time and energy is put into candidate engagement, as candidate-centricity continues to dominate in a labor market of inverted supply and demand. However, the engagement strategy often focuses solely on full-time hiring. But why?  

Contingent labor is critical for responding to the fluctuating supply and demand of today’s talent market. Many organizations have increased contingent labor spend to decrease costs and increase liquidity amongst our uncertain economic environment. A total talent acquisition strategy—encompassing both full-time and contingent workers—helps organizations reduce agency costs and improve fulfillment to meet the most critical business demands. 

In our recent study, Inside the Candidate Experience 2023 Report, we found that just two in 10 candidates rate their most recent recruitment experience as positive. Candidate ghosting, long application processes, and long delays in between hiring steps have become the norm.  Clearly, organizations must improve how they’re engaging with candidates to improve outcomes across all their hiring programs.  

Keep reading to explore the differences between the permanent and contingent candidate journey, and to learn how investing in candidate engagement as part of total talent acquisition strategy improves recruitment outcomes.

A Tale of Two Candidate Journeys: Permanent and Contingent Workers

Let’s take a look at the recruitment processes for permanent and contingent workers.

Recruitment process workflows for both permanent employers and contingent workers

The strategies for engaging with and acquiring both permanent and contingent talent are often siloed.  

Typically, Procurement leaders oversee contingent labor spend, while talent acquisition leaders look after full-time hiring. Contingent hiring is also sometimes decentralized, with hiring managers taking responsibility for their own departmental hiring. The two sides are often competing for similar talent, with each side paying a premium to get workers in the door. 

Permanent hiring typically involves thorough vetting with recruiters responsible for moving candidates manually through the process.  

The contingent hiring process includes various stages and handoffs, especially as suppliers pass along the candidate to the hiring manager. 

The Importance of a Total Talent Acquisition Strategy

We often see senior leaders go to their internal stakeholders to plead for 50 or even 100 workers in a particular job type to keep up with growth. Think of software developers, commercial drivers, nurses and more. These leaders are so desperate for talent that often they don’t care about the workers’ classification.  

This makes having a comprehensive total talent acquisition strategy that includes both full-time and contingent labor hiring even more critical. Silos between these recruitment processes result in poor candidate engagement. Full-time and contingent workers end up engaging differently with your brand, leading to ghosting and drop-off—and higher costs for the business. 

While employers understand the importance of the candidate experience, there is still room to grow. Some of the common pitfalls we see are: 

  • Delivering one directional communication to candidates 
  • Not tailoring the outreach and message to different target audiences  
  • Spreading the talent attraction budget too thinly across job boards and aggregators 
  • Not asking for feedback  

Now, let’s contrast that with what candidates want:  

  • A mobile-first experience  
  • Cultural immersion, regardless of worker classification 
  • Job flexibility, including remote work options 
  • A quick and easy application processes 
  • Fewer interviews and shorter assessments 
  • Real-time status feedback (No recruiter phone tag!) 

The Candidate Engagement Pyramid

So, how do you create an engaging candidate experience that gives both full-time hires and gig workers what they want? I like to think of the candidate engagement pyramid: the recruiting process, talent engagement technology and the worker value proposition. 

the candidate engagement pyramid

Why a pyramid? Because each level is built on the one below it. Organizations that focus on one area at the expense of others don’t have a solid foundation for their talent acquisition program.

Streamlining the Recruitment Process

At the base of the pyramid, an optimized recruiting process engages talent every step of the way. Candidates should drive the process and be able to self-progress throughout the recruiting workflow, regardless of whether they’re applying for a permanent or contingent role.

Focus on Your Candidates, Not Your Company

Start by focusing on the targeted talent personas. Your recruitment marketing campaigns and job postings must feature thoughtful messaging that resonates with this audience and highlights what’s in it for them—not just what your organization needs.

Make Your Career Site Work Harder for You

Over 90% of job seekers globally use career sites to search for opportunities. Streamlining your career site to provide more information and eliminate candidate confusion goes a long way to increasing application rates for full-time and contingent roles.

Is your career site easy to navigate? Have you eliminated job duplicity? For example, let’s say a large retailer is hiring across 20 locations in a major metropolitan area. If I apply to one location, will I be considered for all, or do I have to apply to each location separately? Do I need to apply for the part-time role if I already expressed interest in the full-time role? Consider adding FAQ content to your site that answers these types of questions and lays out the process for each job type.

Move to Mobile-First Applications

Next, a mobile-first, quick-apply process is a must-have. Over 90% of candidates have used a mobile device to apply for jobs. Yet less than half of employers are taking advantage of a one-click application tool. When a candidate can complete an application in less than three minutes, completion ratios are as high as 80%.

I recognize there are regulated jobs that require specific information. However, I’d encourage you to work with your legal teams to determine what you must know upfront and what you can move to a screening step or to the formal paperwork in the post-interview or offer phases.

Streamline Interviews

The shelf life of an engaged candidate is short. Phone tag leads to disengagement. If you can’t connect with candidates quickly, they’re gone. Technology is a great way to connect with candidates and speed up the vetting process. You could introduce pre-recorded digital interviews, screening questions delivered and answered by text message, or even automated interview scheduling tools.

The more interviews a candidate must complete the more likely they are to drop out of the process. Obviously, if you’re looking for a senior executive, they need to be thoroughly vetted. However, a panel interview for a hospitality worker wouldn’t make sense, so make sure your recruitment stages match the type of role.

Make Faster Decisions

Close the candidate. Today’s competitive market requires you to make fast decisions.

If your candidate is “the one,” make them feel special and respect their time. Candidates will not wait for you, so get the offer paperwork out quickly.

candidate engagement for contingent workers

Leveraging Technology for Total Talent Engagement

Talent engagement technology is closely tied to the recruitment process. The right tools at the right point in your process can further streamline the candidate journey and prove that you value their time.

Here are some examples of how our clients leverage technology to improve their recruitment process.

  • Full-Time Candidate Journey
    Raquel submits a three-minute application via her mobile phone and receives an automated text-based assessment. Built using natural language processing, the assessment deems her a good fit against the scoring rubric. Raquel then gets a text with a link to self-schedule an in-person interview with a hiring manager as soon as two hours later. This entire process takes about 15 minutes. Raquel has an offer by the end of the day.
  • Contingent Candidate Journey
    Mario is a contractor who has worked on an assignment at your company before. He received glowing reviews and prefers short-term assignments due to the flexibility it offers him and his family. Your company has an advanced direct-sourcing platform that manages all current and former workers. This makes it easy and fast for Mario to find and apply for jobs because his information is pre-loaded. Mario was also pre-onboarded through your organization’s preferred supplier for this labor category. Now he can sign up for a variety of shifts without going through the formal vetting process.

Invest in Your Talent Tech Stack for Candidate Engagement

Here are a few tools to consider adding to your talent tech stack to create scenarios like these that will keep your potential full-time and gig workers engaged:

  • Chatbots: Chatbots help candidates submit applications, vet passive talent and even automate some of the screening process. They also support candidates by answering common questions and can even be linked to a standby live resource to assist with queries that fall outside of pre-determined content.
  • Interview Scheduling: Self-scheduling tools help the candidate take charge of their experience by allowing them to find interview slots that suit them. It cuts the lengthy back and forth of coordinating calendars, saving time and creating a frictionless experience for candidates, hiring managers and recruiters alike.
  • Digital Interview Tools: There are many options for virtual interviews, including on-demand phone interviews, text interviews as well as live and pre-recorded video interviews. Virtual interviews are mobile-friendly. Plus, they are perfect for remote workers and those with variable work schedules as candidates can record their interview responses when convenient for them.
  • CRMs: CRMs help with regular delivery of relevant communications and content to keep candidates engaged throughout the recruitment process. You can also keep permanent and contingent talent pipelines warm and ensure they’re informed about your latest vacancies and opportunities.
  • Analytics: A talent analytics suite aggregates data to empower you to increase fulfillment, decrease costs and reduce the time it takes to put a worker on the job. There are times when it makes sense to bring on a contractor or someone with less experience who can get trained in the same amount of time it takes to find the ideal permanent candidate. Recruitment analytics provides insights to power decisions like this and increase your agility in a competitive market.

Many providers offer a broad range of capabilities or act as a middle layer that brings together the best-of-breed tools to help you stay ahead. Whether you go with a technology suite or choose to leverage integrations to connect your systems, your selection should support a consistent and compliant set of workflows.

Employer value proposition for total talent acquisition

Expanding Your EVP to Include All Job Roles

Candidates today have greater expectations when it comes to work culture, flexibility, DE&I and pay equity—regardless of their working arrangement. While these expectations carry on well past onboarding, for the purposes of this article we’re going to focus on talent acquisition.

Change Your Perspective

We often talk about the employer value proposition (EVP) and how important it is to sell workers on a company’s proposition. But does yours apply to both your gig workers and permanent employees? Have you formally defined the value proposition for contractors?

Rather than using the term EVP, which implies the value is only experienced by those you employ directly, I like to use Worker Value Proposition (WVP) to make it more inclusive. Your WVP captures the essence of your uniqueness as an employer and the “give and get” between you and your workers—regardless of worker classification.

So, how do you move from EVP to WVP?

  • Boost Your Cultural Inclusion 
    First, make sure that the workers are culturally immersed in your brand. Where applicable, do your contractors get one-on-ones with managers? Are they included in company events and celebrations? Can they join ERGs? What about access to paid time off or flexible schedules? Be mindful that a person’s worker classification doesn’t change the need to do things like dropping off the kids at school, attending doctors’ appointments or running errands.  
  • Create Growth Opportunities
    Demonstrating growth opportunities is a struggle for many employers, for both contractors and employees. Has your organization invested in creating formal career paths for all its departments? Have you mapped out how workers, regardless of labor type, impact the organization and how their skillsets can translate into long-term mobility and growth?
  • Communicate Consistently
    You may be doing some of these things already, but are you communicating it during the recruitment process for both full-time and contingent roles? It’s not enough to tuck it away at the bottom of a job description. We’re helping our clients get more creative in showing their WVP through employee spotlight videos, realistic job previews, community spotlights and more.

One final note, WVP is not just a marketing exercise. The responsibility also sits with talent acquisition. Recruiters are often the first direct point of interaction between talent and your WVP, so make sure they understand their role as brand ambassadors.

Choosing a Total Talent Partner for Better Candidate Engagement

You may find yourself in a position where you need some help from a talent partner to achieve your total talent hiring goals. Here are three key things to look for:  

  1. Look for a partner with a holistic purview of the total talent landscape coupled with demonstrated success in hiring in your required labor categories. A partner should be prepared with the right market intelligence to map your talent personas against your talent market and identify, engage with, attract, and retain the talent that you need.  
  2. Your partner should have a tech stack that brings the right balance of open web sourcing, AI, and automation. Plus, these tools should introduce more candidate engagement and recruitment optimization.  
  3. Your talent partner should create a total workforce solution unique to your business that goes well beyond the traditional means of direct sourcing. They need a track record of creative problem solving, leveraging their in-house resources to enhance your social media presence, your employer brand, your DE&I strategies, and more. 

Webinar On Demand

Boosting Candidate Engagement with a Comprehensive Talent Strategy

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Rethinking Early Careers: Strategies for Graduate Recruitment in 2023

Posted on by nfuqua

As the world changed over the past three years, college and university students had their lives transformed by the pandemic and recovery. Those experiences have changed both their expectations and behavior when it comes to the recruitment process.

So, as an employer, how can you respond to find, engage and hire the best graduate candidates?

In this episode of Talking Talent, Kate Buchanan, PeopleScout graduate program manager in our Sydney headquarters, joins to share strategies for early careers hiring in 2023.

In 2020, university students saw their entire lives move online. From college classes to job interviews, the path to their future was virtual. Now, the world has shifted again, but some changes became permanent. Technology still remains central to the process; however, the process cannot remain fully digital.

In recent years, many employers experienced increased ghosting and saw more candidates dropping out of the graduate recruitment process. While a fully virtual hiring process moves candidates quickly from application through assessments to offer, it lacks a personal touch. When the process happens completely online, graduates don’t have the opportunity to build relationships, making it easier to ghost employers.

So, how can you respond and ensure those strong candidates stay engaged through their first day on the job? The key is building a process that combines technology and the human touch—with both the speed and ease provided by technology and the relationship building that happens when recruiters work directly with top candidates.

In this interview, Kate shares best practices from recruitment marketing through onboarding that help talents leaders build connections, decrease candidate fall out and minimize ghosting. She explains how the right technology at the right points can improve the candidate experience and make graduates feel like they are already part of the team before they even start.

Quorum Software: Delivering IT Recruitment with Multi-Country RPO 

Posted on by akessler
Quorum Software: Delivering IT Recruitment with Multi-Country RPO 

Quorum Software: Delivering IT Recruitment with Multi-Country RPO 

A global software company, Quorum, engaged PeopleScout for a full-cycle, multi-country RPO solution for IT recruitment to secure top technology talent and support global growth.

87 % Retention Rate
73 % of Candidates Submitted Invited to Interview
Upcoming Expansion to APAC and LATAM
Upcoming Expansion to APAC and LATAM

Situation 

Quorum, a global software company, had two North American in-house recruiters tackling all of the hiring for their operations outside of the U.S. On top of the challenging talent landscape in the IT sector due to skills shortages, they also needed help navigating recruiting across cultures. 

The client needed to streamline their international recruitment with an experienced RPO partner who could engage culturally varied candidates, support business growth and scale up their global talent acquisition program. 

Solution 

Quorum engaged PeopleScout for a full-cycle multi-country RPO solution, hiring for over 40 role categories across IT and technology, technical support and solutions consultants as well as corporate roles in HR, finance and customer success. The PeopleScout global recruitment delivery centers in Poland and India support over 20 stakeholders in Czech Republic, India, Netherlands, Norway and the UK.  

We’ve partnered closely with Quorum’s internal talent acquisition team to ensure we are compliant with company policies. Our specialist IT recruiters have also leveraged the client’s global EVP and employer brand in their candidate outreach on social media including LinkedIn. 

Our team regularly consult with the client’s TA leaders to advise on local market challenges, including a growing trend in India of candidates dropping out of the funnel between offer acceptance and start date. To counteract this, our team partnered closely with Quorum during the onboarding stage to keep candidates engaged with improved results. 

Results 

Through this focused approach to onboarding, PeopleScout has improved the dropout rate, with over two-thirds of candidates moving from the offer stage to starting their new role with Quorum. Plus, we’ve achieved an 87%+ retention rate of new employees after 90 days.  

With 73% of candidates submitted invited to interview, Quorum is so pleased with the quality of new talent brought in by PeopleScout, they have asked to expand our partnership to support client’s in-house talent acquisition team with specialist hiring across Malaysia, Australia, Spain and South America. 

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Quorum Software
  • INDUSTRY
    Technology
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing
  • LOCATIONS
    Czech Republic, India, Netherlands, Norway and the UK
  • ABOUT QUORUM
    Quorum Software is a leading provider of energy software worldwide. Since 1998, Quorum has helped thousands of energy workers with business workflows that optimize profitability and growth.
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5 Essential Elements of a Positive Candidate Experience

Posted on by akessler

By David Macfarlane, Head of Employer Brand and Insight

Candidates have never had higher expectations. They are more well informed than ever, and today’s candidate-led market means they’re less tolerant of poor experiences. With 83% of candidates sharing their poor experiences with friends and family, and 54% taking to social media to voice their discontent, organizations who create a positive candidate experience will achieve better recruitment outcomes.

Yet, in our recent research report, Inside the Candidate Experience, we found that the gap between what candidates want and what they get still remains wide—but it can be made smaller. While there is no such thing as a perfect recruitment process, improving the candidate experience will improve your organization’s ability to attract and hire great talent.

Through our work with some of the world’s largest brands, we’ve distilled the candidate experience into these five essential elements.

Research Report

Inside the Candidate Experience

Read the Report

A best-in-class candidate experience:

1. Is Differentiated from Competitors

Your candidate experience should set you apart from other employers at every stage of the candidate journey. In addition to being a crucial component of the hiring process, the candidate experience serves as a sales tool that persuades top talent to join your organization.

Your candidate experience should be unique to your brand and help you stand apart from other employers hiring for similar roles or skills. For example, does your situational judgement test put the candidate in the work environment they’re applying to join? For candidates, the pre-employment experience is a test drive for what it’s like to work at your organization, so make sure you’re bringing what makes your culture exceptional to your candidate experience.

2. Elevates the Employer Brand

Your candidate experience should be distinct from your consumer experience by reflecting your employer brand—the perception and lived experience of what it’s like to work for your organization. That means all of your candidate communications should be branded—not just with your logo and brand colours, but it should be written in a way that reflects your culture.

Your tone of voice, your career site, your photography and design should all reflect what it’s like to work at your organization. For example, for our client, The AA, we created AAbot, a chatbot with expressive animations and cheeky banter that brings The AA’s playful personality to life. By seeing your employer brand reflected consistently across each interaction with your organization, candidates gain confidence in your employer value proposition.

positive candidate experience

3. Is Informative, Clear and Direct

Candidates want to know upfront what to expect during the application and recruitment process before they apply. Yet, our research found that only a third of organizations (34%) had career sites that featured frequently asked questions (FAQs) or advice to support candidates throughout the candidate journey (31%). Less than a third (28%) gave an overview of the key stages of the recruiting process.

This is about delivering the right message at the right time in the right way to help them understand where they stand and what happens next. Plus, you should express this information in plain language. Make sure you’re using verbiage that your candidate would use rather than your internal terminology. A candidate looking for a hotel job is more likely to search for “housekeeper” than “environmental services engineer.”

4. Embraces Technology

Increasingly, employers are taking a page from the consumer experiences created by e-commerce brands. Many organizations are embracing social media tools (like the one-click apply option on LinkedIn) to increase the simplicity and convenience of applications.

At the very minimum your application should be mobile optimised. But really, with over 90% of candidates using a mobile device in their job search, your candidate experience should be designed for mobile first.

A mobile-first application means the candidate doesn’t have to fill in information contained in their résumé or CV. This may seem basic, but we found that nearly 40% of organizations ask candidates to duplicate information that was already contained in their résumé or CV.

In our modern world, a great candidate experience means a candidate can submit an application while standing in a queue—with one hand, via their mobile phone—before they’ve reached the front. Can your current tech stack do this?

5. Puts Candidates in the Driver’s Seat

Something that many talent acquisition teams don’t appreciate is that candidates don’t perceive the recruitment process as a funnel. They’re the main character in their own story, and they want to be treated that way.

Candidates want to engage in their job search on their own terms. So, anytime they encounter a roadblock to getting the information they want, especially if they don’t know what to expect in the next stage, means they’re more likely to drop out of your process. By creating transparency within your recruitment stages, you empower candidates to opt in or out from recruitment process—ultimately improving your hiring outcomes.  

For more insights into create a positive candidate experience, download the Inside the Candidate Experience 2023 Report.

What Candidates Want: Key Research Findings [Infographic]

Posted on by akessler

At PeopleScout, we hear a lot of talk about the candidate experience. Most organizations understand the importance of improving how they engage with job seekers. Yet, our latest research shows that less than two in 10 candidates would rate their recent recruitment experience as excellent.

We audited the candidate journeys of over 215 organizations around the world, assigning each a Candidate Experience Quotient (CandidateXQ) score based on 40 key experience indicators, 15 of which are critical to the candidate experience. Then, we analyzed these scores alongside data gathered from surveying over 2,400 job seekers globally. The results revealed a clear disparity between candidate expectations and their reality.

Check out this infographic to explore the key findings from the Inside the Candidate Experience 2023 Report.

For more global candidate experience insights, download the full Inside the Candidate Experience 2023 Report.

Inside the Candidate Experience: 3 Revelations from Our 2023 Report

Posted on by akessler

By Simon Wright, Global Head of Talent Advisory

When it comes to applying for and accepting new jobs, candidates have more options than ever before. Companies with poor candidate experiences will lose out on the top talent as employers battle for the best prospects.

So, how does the average candidate experience stack up against candidate expectations?

According to PeopleScout’s most recent research, less than two in 10 candidates rate their experience as excellent.

For the Inside the Candidate Experience 2023 Report, we used our proprietary Candidate Experience Diagnostic to audit the candidate journeys of over 215 organizations worldwide. Then we compared this to data gathered via a global survey of over 2,400 job seekers.

Research report

Inside the candidate experience 2023 report

Read the report

The findings reveal a significant gap between candidate expectations and the reality they face while looking for jobs, gathering information to support their decision, and applying.

Here are three surprises from our research:

1. Less than half of employers show information about the organization’s mission, purpose or values on the career site

Yet, they’re in the top considerations for applicants when deciding to apply.

Your takeaway:

Candidates want fulfilling employment and a company that upholds their values—especially Gen Z and Millennial workers. In fact, one in five Millennials state that an organization’s goals and mission are their top priority when considering a job. By not featuring this information on your career site, you’re passing up an opportunity to create an emotional connection with your candidates.

2. Just half (53%) of organizations provide an opportunity for candidates to register their interest or to sign up for job alerts

Even fewer (39%) prompted candidates to join a talent community.

Your takeaway:

Modern job seekers are more sophisticated than ever and are looking to grow a career, not just apply for jobs transactionally. In fact, on average nine months goes by between a candidate engaging with an employer and applying for a job. Maintaining a talent pipeline lets you build a relationship with your talent audience and ensures you get the best talent, not just those who are looking at the time a vacancy arises.

3. 44% of organizations did not provide an opportunity for candidates to give feedback on their experience

Plus, men are more likely than women to be aware of opportunities to provide and receive feedback during the recruitment process.

Your takeaway:

This is a major oversight for many organizations. If you’re not leveraging surveys to gather feedback from all of your candidates, you are passing up valuable insights that might help you enhance your employer brand, lower attrition and shorten your hiring cycle.

The candidate experience is a hot topic, and most talent leaders I speak with appear to recognize the value of improving the candidate journey. However, this research demonstrates that organizations still have work to do to live up to the standards of today’s job seekers. My hope is that our recent findings will mobilize talent acquisition teams to put real action behind their words and make bold moves to improve their candidate experience and speed up the pace of progress.

To get the full research and more actionable insights, download the Inside the Candidate Experience 2023 Report.

The Future of Work: 4 Key Factors That Will Shape the Workplace by 2030

Posted on by akessler

It’s no secret that the labor market has been volatile over the last several years, and talent acquisition teams have experienced a multitude of highs and lows. In our capacity as trusted advisors, PeopleScout analyzed patterns in global workforce trends to help our clients create informed strategies for future-proofing their workforce by examining how these patterns may affect their workforce. While we can’t predict the future of work, we think there are four key factors will shape the world of work over the next decade.

1. Flexibility

Flexibility is here to stay, and it will apply to everything from where and how we work to the roles we do and who we do them for. There will be no hard and fast rules about working hours and shifts in the future.

As life becomes increasingly characterized by change, employees will need to be agile—always ready to reskill. Learning becomes a constant, and we may even find ourselves counting AI robots as our trainers and mentors.

Flexibility and upskilling will manifest differently from generation to generation, so organizations must facilitate working arrangements for different demographics. Over the next decade, the generation gap will widen and then gradually close as Baby Boomers begin to settle down to retirement by blending work and leisure. Millennials and Gen Z will bring their progressive perspectives to work.

10 Predictions for What’s NEXT in the World of Work

DESTINATION 2030

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2. Fluidity and the future of work

Globalization will enable much more cross-border, cross-company collaboration. Project teams will be established based on all sorts of factors, not just who’s in what department or which location. People will work with talent from all sorts of specialities as they move from project to project.

Technology helps to support our wellbeing as the lines between work and home become more blurred. But with new technologies come new laws, so security and compliance will also be strategically important, especially for organizations working at the cutting-edge of innovation.

3. Focus 

future of work

Organizational culture will become more important than ever before as people make career choices based on ethics, values and purpose above things like pay and benefits. More and more employees will choose to work for organizations that have a clear purpose and are committed to working in the most ethical, sustainable and socially responsible ways.

Technology also plays a role here, in helping people focus on the work that matters to them as automation takes over the mundane tasks. However, more AI and machine learning will make some roles redundant and create many others—generating even greater demand for technical, analytical and digital skill sets across sectors.

4. Forward-thinking and the future of work

Organizations will continue to compete when it comes to creating innovative new technologies and using those technologies in the most creative ways. But they’ll also be happy to pool some resources to create a better future for everyone. 

Issues like equality and climate change will continue to grow in importance, forcing organizations to find new and better ways of making social and environmental improvements at speed.

Onward, Upward and Who Knows Where the Future Workplace Will Go

You may feel more prepared for some changes more than others as we approach 2030, but it’s safe to say that there will be plenty of surprises that will require creative thinking in order to stay resilient.

PeopleScout will be on the journey with you to support, challenge and inspire you—no matter what the future holds.

To learn more about how we came to these predictions and see our research findings, check out our Destination 2030 white paper.

Creating an Effective Employer Brand for Volume Hiring 

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It’s no secret that job vacancies continue to outnumber job seekers.  But what many employers focused on volume hiring don’t realize is that they already have one of the most effective tools for out-recruiting their competition at their disposal: their employer brand.

Investing in your employer value proposition (EVP) and employer brand is one of the best ways an organization can differentiate and attract the volumes of candidates it needs without compromising on quality-of-hire. In this article, we share ways to make your employer brand work harder for your volume hiring needs.

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Employer Brand vs Consumer Brand        

At PeopleScout, we define employer brand and EVP as follows:

  • Employer brand: Your employer brand is the perception and lived experiences of what it’s like to work for your organization.
  • Employer value proposition: Your employer value proposition, or EVP, captures the essence of your uniqueness as an employer and the “give and get” between you and your employees.

When an organization’s brand is well-known, there is frequently an overlap in sentiment between the consumer and employer brands in the minds of the general public. What candidates expect from you as consumers will be very different from what they’re looking for as potential employees.

Your employer brand should showcase the characteristics that make a company a great place to work, as well as the benefits, career growth opportunities, work-life balance and company culture that help you attract and retain talent.

Understand Your Audience & Tailor Your Content

The key to an effective employer brand is to know your audience. Zero in on who your ideal candidates are by looking at the most successful employees in each role. Are there similarities in their work experience, motivators or personalities? For example, we helped a telecoms client create candidate persona profiles for their contact center and found that many of their longest tenured employees were previously employed in beauty salons. These employees were applying their previous customer service experience to their phone and online customer interactions.

By shifting the mindset from getting candidates with previous call center experience to getting applications from candidates with past customer service experience in salons, restaurants and hotels, we were able to help the client increase offer acceptance and reduce attrition.

Similarly broadening your target audience will help you hire at scale in today’s tight market, and understanding who is most successful in a role—what makes them tick, what motivates them—will help you lean into the aspects of your employer brand that will be most meaningful to them. That could mean playing up your flexible work shifts, growth opportunities or your organizational values.

Create a Positive Candidate Experience

Even if you receive an influx of applicants for a role, don’t sacrifice the candidate experience. Word of mouth is still alive and well, and candidates have no problem sharing their experiences (especially negative ones) on social media.

Investing in CRM tools to introduce more personalization into your candidate communications can boost your candidate experience. Look for tools with texting and SMS capabilities to reach candidates where they already are. Texting is often more accessible for many hourly job seekers who are more likely to rely on their mobile devices for job searches and internet access.

Automating your screening and interview scheduling processes via text helps free up time for your recruiters and hiring managers to connect one-on-one with candidates and hold meaningful conversations that improve the candidate experience.

Your recruitment process should leave every applicant, regardless of whether they get a job with you, with a positive impression of your organization. Candidates are often your customers, and the last thing you want is for your candidate experience to negatively impact your consumer brand reputation. An exceptional candidate experience is essential not only in engaging the talent you need today, but in establishing a strong employer brand that will serve you well into the future.

Get Tips to Optimize High-Volume Recruitment

Want more tactics for high-volume recruitment? Check out our ebook, 9 Strategies for Solving High-Volume Hiring Challenges.

Recession, Recruiting and Resilience: Creating Opportunities for Workforce Planning Success

Posted on by akessler

With signs pointing toward a global recession, employers are preparing their workforces for what’s to come. This may mean cutting back on their investment in talent acquisition, delaying HR projects or even reducing their workforce.

While economic uncertainty can lead to difficult decisions for employers, it’s also important to recognize the opportunity it provides. This may be the perfect time to assess the resilience of your workforce and invest in workforce planning to make it fare better in the long run.

Is your talent acquisition program resilient enough to weather the storm? Here are four questions to ask to find out where you stand.

1. Is your employer brand and EVP still relevant?

If you haven’t updated your employer value proposition (EVP) in the last 18 months, it’s probably out of sync with the market and what candidates want. Now is the time to sense check if it’s relevant in 2023 and beyond. Does your employer brand work for a remote and hybrid workforce? Is it an authentic reflection of what you have to offer your employees?

Even if you’re not planning to hire actively in the near future, employer branding is also important for retention. Auditing and updating your brand will help you retain your current talent and ensure you’re ready to attract top talent in the future.

2. Is your hiring process working for remote and hybrid employees?

At the start of the pandemic, if you shoehorned your old in-person hiring process into your new hybrid or remote work reality and never looked back, it’s time to assess whether that’s really working for you. Remote work often requires a different set of skills than office-based work. Is your current process helping you assess those skills to achieve the quality-of-hire you need?  

Review the competencies and behaviors you need for each role to ensure they’re relevant for hybrid or remote employees. Now is the time to update job ads and evaluate your assessment process to ensure they are in tune with the success factors that drive your business now—instead of those that drove success pre-pandemic.

3. Are you achieving your DE&I recruitment goals?

While you may not be actively hiring, now is a good time to engage with diverse communities to ensure candidates from underrepresented backgrounds make up a significant portion of your talent pipeline when you’re ready to ramp up hiring again.

Increase your visibility in diverse communities via campaigns or event sponsorships. Look into your diversity analytics to understand what’s working and what’s not when it comes to sourcing and hiring your target audiences.

4. Is it time to consider RPO?

Now is the time to re-evaluate how you’re going to market for talent, whether via an internal talent acquisitions team, staffing agencies, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) or a hybrid model. Work with your procurement partner to scrutinize your spend and evaluate your options to streamline and minimize risk—including standardizing with one global RPO partner.

Just because you’re not hiring at the same volume you were before, doesn’t mean outsourcing is out of the question. Recruiter On-Demand or project RPO engagements offer flexible solutions for targeted hiring needs. An RPO partner can also offer value-added talent advisory services like market insights, employer branding, assessment services and more. Plus, once engaged, your RPO partner will be on tap to hit the economic recovery running and scale up for your hiring surge.

An economic slowdown is not the time to put your talent acquisition strategy on the back burner. Use this time to take stock and get prepared so you’re ready to bounce back faster. You’ll be able to beat your competition and create a resilient workforce that’s ready for whatever the future has in store.

Want more insight into the future of work? Check out our ebook, Destination 2030: 10 Predictions for What’s NEXT in the World of Work.