As a leader in your organization, you know that recruiting teams are facing challenges in finding and engaging quality talent. And you know that the ability to attract talent is a strategic imperative for your business. But ensuring that all stakeholders within recruiting have a positive experience may be new to you. It’s called the recruiting trifecta, and it means ensuring that candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers each have optimal experiences throughout the hiring process.
The key to creating positive experiences for the recruiting trifecta is to leverage technology and streamline communication to create a cohesive experience. To learn more about how to do this, we were joined by industry experts as they shared the importance of focusing on the whole picture of the candidate, hiring manager, and recruiter experience at the Talent Acquisition Experience Trifecta webinar. If you missed the event, don’t worry. We’ve recapped it and shared our top three takeaways on how you as a leader can encourage your talent acquisition function to focus on incorporating these strategies within your organization.
#1: How to Optimize the Candidate Experience: Focus on Consistency and Timeliness
Kevin Grossman, Talent Acquisition and Human Capital Strategist at Talent Board, mentioned the following true difference-makers when it comes to improving the candidate experience:
- Consistent and Timely Communication
- Consistent and Timely Expectation Setting
- Consistent and Timely Feedback
- Consistent and Timely Transparency
Clearly, there is no silver bullet for talent acquisition teams, and the positions in highest demand in each industry may differ, but these four core ideas are the same. Make sure that as candidates move through the application, screening, offer/rejection, and onboarding processes, they’re getting enough clarity to understand which stage they are in, what’s needed from them, and what they can expect.
While technology and automation can help in the early stages through FAQ, chatbots, or AI, candidates who are making it further into the process should feel the additional investment that is being made at those stages. At the end of the day, while these are details that drive many decisions on our end, candidates are generally not that interested in our people, processes, or tech stack; candidates are interested in getting the job, and it is your duty to empower your teams to guide candidates through the talent journey.
An important additional note on the candidate experience, especially when considering lower volume hiring, is to request some sort of feedback from candidates regardless of where they end their recruiting journey. Ensure that your recruiting organization is as unbiased as possible. Understanding which points in the journey were pleasant or painful for candidates can help your recruiting function pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses in the hiring processes.
#2: How to Optimize the Recruiter Experience: Focus on Empowerment and Automation
Madeline Laurano, Founder and Chief Analyst at Aptitude Research, presented a number of perceptions that recruiters have regarding their jobs and why they joined the recruitment industry as well as how those perceptions can differ from their leadership teams.
From the value of their tech stack to the availability of talent, recruiters, by and large, see their situation as more desperate than do business and HR leadership. Whether this is accurate, perception is the keystone of experience. This means that either:
- Business and HR leadership must invest more time in enabling and empowering their recruiters to make full use of their current toolset, OR
- Business and HR leadership must invest more into the tools available within their firm’s recruitment team
Regardless of which option fits your organization better, the value of the investment will be the same – your recruiters will be happier. Remember, one thing you should know about recruiters is that they look forward to the people-facing aspect of their jobs. They enjoy meeting new people, learning about them, supporting them through the candidate process, and, ultimately, seeing them thrive in a new community.
It turns out, however, that most recruiters are spending most of their time on technical tasks like finding applicants, reviewing applicants, and scheduling interviews. These mundane tasks could be streamlined and automated with better technology or a better handle on the technology available to them. A reduction in manual technical tasks by increased investment in automation or enablement allows for an increase in time recruiters can devote to that personal aspect of their job. This means a better experience for not only the recruiter, but the candidate as well.
#3: How to Optimize the Hiring Manager Experience: Focus on Expectations and Communication
The importance of clear communication between recruiters and hiring managers is essential in supporting a positive hiring manager experience. Yet hiring managers must often have their expectations checked on what a good candidate should look like. From a recruiter’s perspective, this almost requires over-promising and under-delivering, and that defeats supporting a healthy talent acquisition function.
Instead, the solution is to widen the communication channels between your recruiters and hiring managers, and to empower your recruiters to give push back a little when hiring managers expect a candidate to exceed or meet al the job requirements.
As a leader within the organization, make it a known expectation that recruiters should bring honesty and market expertise to the table in any conversation with a hiring manager. Remind hiring managers that they should bring flexibility, an open mind, and a realistic compensation budget.
Make the Recruiting Trifecta a Priority in Your Company
Focusing on the experience of candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers offers a competitive advantage to your company. Set the tone to your recruiting and hiring teams that each audience is important and delivering positive experiences is essential to drive a well-performing talent acquisition function. Understanding the expectations of candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers supports cohesiveness and consistency in hiring, and will make you a differentiated leader if you can support and find the balance of meeting expectations of all three groups.
For more information and insights on the recruiting trifecta, check out the Talent Acquisition Experience Trifecta webinar.
