By Adrian Farthing, Enterprise Sales Consultant, DaXtra Technologies
Most of us are familiar with the heartache of applying for a coveted job and losing to a more (or, sometimes, less!) qualified candidate. But life is hard, as the saying goes, and such is the nature of the labour market. So why all this fuss about ensuring candidates have a good ‘experience’?Well, here’s the truth in 2019: in a GDPR world, candidates expect not only quick and meaningful responses from recruiters, but also rigorous privacy protections.
That means recruiters must now take an active approach to improving candidate experience, such as suggesting roles for candidates almost immediately following the submission of their CV.
Some recruiters know this, but they still have their heads in the proverbial sand: they are hoping the challenge simply goes away. Meanwhile, other recruiters are trying to cut costs, hoping they can address the problem with outdated tools and methods. Neither approach will work in this day and age.
Now, here’s the good news: DaXtra and others in the RecTech industry are developing tools to make this active approach to candidate centricity a reality, which should significantly increase candidate application completion rates.
Our Apply & Match technology is one such solution.
Why is addressing this matter so urgent? Look no further than two simple words: frustration and waste.
In recent years, candidates have struggled to deal with two frustrating issues. First is the experience of sending a CV to a recruiter, only to be thanked with a wall of silence. This undoubtedly makes the act of applying to job openings feel like a waste of time.
The second issue is being forced by recruiters to fill out an endless stream of online forms – but the candidate’s effort isn’t granted a single reward. Such time wasting is incompatible with the pace of life in today’s digital economy. The data bears this out: it shows candidate interest plummets when faced with these requests.
Thankfully these frustrations should soon go the way of history. New RecTech solutions such as DaXtra's Apply & Match allow candidates to submit their CVs via recruiters’ websites and instantly see relevant job openings based on an algorithm’s accurate reading of their skills and experience.
The technology is now advanced enough that applicants won’t see job adverts that aren’t relevant to their professional profile. That means if a candidate is already a ‘Director’, they won’t receive adverts for ‘Vice President’ positions. Engineers won’t receive notifications of positions meant for graphic designers, and so on.
By immediately seeing relevant job openings, candidates feel like recruiters actually care. They receive something in return for their effort (uploading their CVs) - and the process is streamlined and doesn’t involve filling out dozens of forms. This creates ‘stickiness’ and loyalty between candidates and recruiters. The relationship feels authentic and genuine, rather than self-serving and forced.
By deploying a solution such as Apply & Match, recruiters will also enjoy the knock-on benefit of being able to harness rich and structured CV data and absorb that data into their candidate databases.
With such data at their fingertips, recruiters will be free to allocate more time to the ‘human’ aspect of recruiting, such as getting out of the office more often and building lasting partnerships with the very top candidates - and responding to their unique needs with tailor-made services.
This means the cost of buying the technology is quickly recouped by the value of the data acquired through CV submissions.
As always, the proof is in the pudding. Our research shows drop off rates fall by as much as 60-70 percent for recruiters who use these solutions.
If all goes well, recruiters may also be able to increase application completion rates by up to 400 percent. That’s a data point that deserves serious contemplation.
Thankfully, many of these technologies are flexible and require minimal effort to implement. Recruiters can deploy the Apply & Match solution as a simple API service and host it on any careers website, or as a complete white-label web page with custom forms that can be integrated into a careers portal. There are few reasons to resist finding such a solution to help improve candidate experience.
In summary, the costs of avoiding the problem are obvious: higher drop-off rates, apathetic candidates and, potentially. candidate scorn unleashed for the world to see via social media. The benefits, on the other hand, are equally obvious and incredibly valuable to both candidates and recruiters alike.