HR Software Has A Big Impact on Candidate Experience

Implementing your recruitment technology for the best first impression

Is your HR Tech leaving the best first impression?

It’s well known that tech can be used to speed up the hiring journey and save recruiter time.

But it’s not just about process efficiency.

Recent research from Yello found that one in five Gen Z employees said a company’s lack of technology could keep them from accepting a job offer.

So today, the use of software or HR technology also helps to create a more attractive offer and positive candidate experience, but ensuring you are using tech well will be the difference between simply making a bad process faster, and creating a great first impression.

Where it can go wrong

There are a number of ways that tech implementation can do more to hinder than help your recruitment efforts, for example:

• Badly managed automated processes sending untimely or incorrect emails - automated communication is the perfect time-saving tool, but you must ensure it’s set up well to avoid it irritating recipients.
• Poor user experience making a process unnecessarily laborious - apps that require users to jump between platforms or enter multiple login details can damage the candidate experience and indirectly impact the employer brand.
• Bad tech complicating the process for in-house users - clunky or outdated HRIS can make staff self-service a challenge and impact the quality of the data they input, which can have a knock-on effect on candidate management.
• Non-mobile-friendly tech making the process difficult for an on-demand economy - according to recent research, 58% of Glassdoor users are job hunting using their mobile but it will typically take them 80% longer to complete an application. This lag in the process has a detrimental impact on first impressions.

What can you do? Start by assessing your employer brand

To ensure any tech investments you make will improve your employer brand, you need to start with an understanding of your current position.

Use online forums such as Glassdoor to evaluate what employees and candidates are saying about your company online. This may highlight any existing issues with your recruitment and onboarding experience but it will also offer you insights about the culture and work-life experience of employees - something that you can aim to improve and highlight to new applicants, to counter any preconceptions they may have.

Then, understand the dangers of making the wrong tech choices

Ensure you fully assess tech options before you invest, using case studies to help you understand the value a platform can offer and clarify exactly what it is and isn’t capable of.

For example, many hiring tools include Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a way to improve the process, adding efficiency and eliminating human error.

However, there are still precautions to be taken when applying AI-assisted decision-making to your hiring decisions.

AI is based on machine learning and this recently resulted in global online retailer, Amazon, being forced to abandon efforts to use it to find software developers. The system it was using had developed a bias against women after analysing past recruits, who were predominantly male.

Had Amazon not noticed, the tech they thought would reduce bias and improve diversity would actually have been eliminating women from the recruitment process and creating a terrible impression of the company’s inclusiveness.

Look at the tech you already have in place

Is the tech you’re using at each stage of the recruitment process doing the best job? For example:

• Attraction - are you using online platforms, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, to get out in front of people before they’ve even thought of applying to your company? If so, are you making sure you’re using the targeting tools offered by those platforms to get the right messages in front of the right people and create engagement rather than confusion?
• Background screening - are the steps you’re taking to check the candidate’s employment and criminal history adding insights without delaying the process? Make sure the platforms you use are proven to deliver results faster than you could collect them manually to avoid losing talent due to process delays. Xref integrates with background and ID checking providers to ensure candidate verification is a seamless and efficient process.
• Onboarding - onboarding tools offer a great way to engage with new recruits in the lead up to their first day. Ensuring they do more than send out generic, automated emails and offer a genuinely personalised experience will make all the difference in continuing the momentum and excitement created during the recruitment process. Enboarder is a great example of a tool that provides a truly tailored experience for new recruits.

Finally, don’t jump in without a plan

Make sure the tech you’re introducing is both right for your team and beneficial to the candidate experience.

Assess your current situation, look at the tech options available to overcome any existing issues and, crucially, make a plan:

• Where are you now?
• What is your candidate experience goal for the year ahead?
• What tech would help you to achieve that goal?
• How will you measure your success?

Simply adding tech to a process is not necessarily going to improve it, so do your due diligence to ensure the tech your invest in is improving your current processes and, importantly, not doing anything to ruin your candidates’ first impression.

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