Candidate experience, unlike popular perception is just not about the application and interview process. It actually starts much before the candidate has chosen to apply to a particular company. Let’s consider this simplified life cycle of a candidate

 

Though candidate experience encompasses the whole journey, for this post, focus is experience till apply stage. Triggers to change can be both, gradually building phenomena or some situation at the work or personal place. In either case, the individual goes on to take an action, on most occasions on digital platforms. These are what google calls micro moments. Ideally, candidate experience starts here.

Look at what P&G does with one of their key roles by using one such micro moment.

Results for this search string are filled with P&G and it literally owns the search in this case. What this tells us is that candidate experience is not just about jobs and applications, it is about providing a complete experience to the user and being relevant for them. In this case, P&G is not waiting for this user to search for jobs, instead by offering relevant information, it is creating an experience for the user that puts P&G on the top of the consideration set or even turning a passive query into an active job search. Fair to say that when this user finally starts applying to jobs, P&G will be the primary beneficiary.

Job Search:

Though candidate experience is not just about jobs, they form a greater and most important part of the life cycle. Jobs should be discoverable and accessible. Discoverable means to be able to find right job and accessible is to be able to apply on any platform / device. An overarching superior candidate experience is to make the discovery easy in any platform or device.

Look at this example.

Branded career site page appears on the first page of results, there by increasing chances of users discovering the job.

Now, click on the below screen.

 

Apart from the job description, users are exposed to relevant content. In a sense, organisation is not only creating great content, by integrating with the job descriptions, it is not only ensuring the content is consumed, but also giving as much information the candidate needs in the shortest possible path to help drive a decision / action.

Job of digital candidate experience is it is to make the content accessible, discoverable with fewer clicks and give a seamless search and apply experience that will enable the candidate to make decisions. in short, more easy and seamless the experience is, better the results will be.