With the Bureau of Labor Statistics pegging the October unemployment rate at 3.6 percent, the labor market undoubtedly favors job seekers.
What does that mean for your company? It’s essential that you find a way to stand out from the competition to hire top talent. And a surefire way to achieve that goal is with a positive candidate experience.
But a great candidate experience can accomplish another important goal: It’ll drive more top diverse applicants, enabling your team to create a more equitable recruitment process. Here’s how.
A key to a positive candidate experience is valuing a candidate’s time. One way you can do that is by offering flexible interview scheduling.
By providing candidates interview times outside the traditional nine-to-five time slots, you’ll add students who work full- or part-time to your hiring funnel. According to ERE, unconventional interview hours allow low-income candidates to avoid missing work. This, in turn, will prevent candidates from “ghosting,” because interviewees are less likely to cancel or “ghost” on an interview if it better aligns with their packed schedules.
The tight labor market ultimately means candidates have more power over where and for whom they work. And while they’ll research your company and its reputation, they nonetheless want to learn as much as they can about what it’s like working there.
Your employer branding fully shapes the narrative—and it contributes to a positive candidate experience. You can share articles, video testimonials, and other content with candidates throughout the interview process to keep them engaged and provide as much information as possible about what it’s actually like working in your unique environment.
A major issue companies deal with are unprepared job seekers. As Time points out, more than 60 percent of early-career candidates don’t move past the first round of interviews because they lack certain soft skills. There is a solution for this, and it fortunately coincides with an interview preference.
To combat this, make sure you provide the interview agenda and tips throughout the hiring process. (That’s something candidates are absolutely looking for.) According to Glassdoor, 58 percent of U.S. workers and job seekers expect a company to communicate clearly and regularly throughout the interview process. On top of that, LinkedIn notes that 94 percent of interviewees want feedback after an interview.
The main takeaway? You need to thoughtfully communicate the right information to the right candidates at every step of the interview process.
Doing so can have a profound impact on your diversity hiring. While Interview agendas and tips benefit all candidates, they are especially important for, among other groups, first-generation college graduates. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), these students make up one-third of the U.S. student body yet often don’t have access to the same experiences and opportunities as their counterparts. By providing them with this kind of information, you’ll do your part to drive diverse candidate in and through your funnel. The results will speak for themselves.
Just as having a positive candidate experience is essential in today’s competitive labor market, so too is having a diverse staff. Invest in the former, and you’ll see the impact reflected in the latter.
