In today’s challenging talent market, an outstanding (or less-than-stellar) candidate experience can affect not only your hiring outcomes, but also how well you’re retaining employees and creating employee advocates.

So, what should you be doing to create an incredible candidate experience across your recruiting process? Brazen has created this resource guide to help you ensure that your candidate experience strategy helps you attract and retain the best talent for your organization.

Ready to elevate your candidate experience? Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

• Why Does Candidate Experience Matter?
• Measuring Candidate Experience
• How to Improve Your Candidate Experience
• How Can Virtual Events Boost Candidate Experience?
• Ways to Improve Students' Candidate Experience

Frequently Asked Questions About Candidate Experience

Why Does Candidate Experience Matter?

Great Candidate Experiences Help Attract Top Talent [Blog Post]

By giving your job candidates a great first-impression of your organization, you’re not just making sure they’ll be engaged with your brand throughout the hiring process, but also long after after they become full-fledged employees. This blog post talks about the different reasons why a great candidate experience helps employers attract and retain top talent in addition to other perks of maintaining that positive connection.

How a Great Candidate Experience Can Help You Win the War on Talent [Podcast]

In a highly contested job market, one the best way to ensure that you can find and hold on to the best talent is by standing out from the competition. Nick Haubach, University of Illinois Health Chief Human Resources Officer, stars in this exclusive podcast and offers his advice on how to do just that from within the high-paced world of healthcare recruitment.

How to Measure Candidate Experience?

Measuring Candidate Experience [Blog Post]

Here’s a useful how-to blog post that teaches you the basics of how to measure your candidate experience over time. From establishing a baseline to determining how and when to ask for feedback, read about the best strategies to find out where you are on the candidate experience spectrum so you’ll also have a clear picture of where you’re going.

The Best Candidate Experience Survey Questions [Blog Post]

Find the answers to your most pressing candidate experience questions at every step of the journey. Use the suggested sample queries in this blog post to successfully collect candidate feedback, identify weaknesses and opportunities in your application process, strengthen your employer brand, and improve your hiring and retention rates; all in one swoop!

How Does Your Candidate Experience Score? Take the Quiz [Guide]

Does your organization offer a great or so-so candidate experience? If you really want to find out, take this self-guided quiz to determine where your company stands, in which areas you excel, and learn how to zero-in on the parts of your process that need the most attention. Bonus tip: you can take it again at a later point in time to see how much better you are performing compared to when you started. 

How to Improve Your Candidate Experience?

Humanizing Your Technology Across Your Candidate Experience [Blog Post]

Highly-automated processes and procedures don’t have to be at odds with a positive candidate experience. Far from it! Technology can help deliver amazing results in the realm of candidate experience as long as you keep a people-centric approach at the forefront of your efforts. This actionable blog post will tell you exactly what to do to ‘humanize’ your overall approach.

Actionable Insights from the Talent Board: The 2020 Candidate Experience Report [Blog Post]

Read the key takeaways from the Talent Board study that encompassed the experiences of over 152,000 candidates across 133 North American organizations. Quickly learn what theory found makes for a good candidate experience and how you can implement those learnings in your own acquisition teams and initiatives.

Creating a Great Candidate Experience for Interns and Entry-Level Job Seekers [Blog Post]

How can you craft your candidate journey so it speaks your entry-level job seekers’ language? Dig in to these pro-tips to find out how you can give this job seeker group the attention they deserve and guarantee their first impressions of your organization are truly memorable ones.

Dos and Don’ts from a Brazen Intern: The Pandemic Candidate Experience [Blog Post]

What was it like to look for a job during the pandemic and what were some of the things employers did to make themselves stand out? Read this exclusive Brazen-only interview to delve deeper into what matters most to a new generation of job seekers, what they need to succeed in today’s job market, and the ways companies can come out on top amid growing competition for new employees.

Creating an Award-Winning Candidate Experience [Blog Post]

Read the recap from our webinar about how to build a winning candidate experience. Learn important insights from Cathy Henesey, Vice President of Talent Acquisition at AdventHealth and Brian White, the Executive Director of HR & Operations at Auburn-Washburn USD 437 about some of the tried-and-true strategies they use to create a positive candidate experience within their own organizations.

Why Candidate Experience Starts Long Before the Application [Blog Post]

Everything from your employer brand to your reputation as an employer counts when it comes to attracting new candidates to your company. So how do you engage with candidates at the very top of your funnel for more quality of hires at the bottom? Read this blog post for timely strategies, suggestions, and research on how to reduce existing hurdles, engage potential hires, and create a frictionless path to the inside of your hiring funnel. 

Candidate Ghosting: 4 Ways to Avoid It [Blog Post]

Does a significant portion of your applicant base seem to vanish into thin air? If so, you may need to address the issues behind these candidate ghosting problems, and fast! Try these four strategies to keep engagement high and attrition low across your recruiting process and say goodbye to ghosting for good! 

How to Identify Gaps in Your Candidate Experience [Blog Post] 

Find the gaps in your candidate experience before your talent pool does. Use this handy roadmap to evaluate everything from your careers webpage to your recruiter response times and learn how targeted improvements in each highlighted area can jointly contribute to an enhanced and applicant-approved candidate experience. 

Job Seekers are Consumers Too: 5 Insights to Enhance Your Candidate Experience [Blog Post]

In our current candidate-focused job market, if you aren't already treating your candidates as well as you do your consumers, there's never been a better time to start. Check out the many reasons why in this webinar recap as our friends at ERE Media and a panel of industry experts teach us how to fix and optimize the candidate experience with the help of a customer experience approach.  

Improving Candidate Experience: The Answer May Seem Counterintuitive [Blog Post] 

Attaining and maintaining a positive candidate experience isn't easy. In fact, it may require some unorthodox, outside-the-box solutions to emergent problems and roadblocks. This blog post highlights several strategies and technologies you can adopt to effectively speed up your recruitment process and improve your hiring outcomes from the top of your hiring funnel to the bottom. 

How Can Virtual Events Boost Candidate Experience?

Tips from Brazen’s Experts for Creating an Optimal Candidate Experience for Your Virtual Events [Blog Post]

Find out what works from the support team that have helped Brazen clients create thousands of successful virtual events to date. Read this behind-the-scenes blog post and let our own expert panel walk you through the most tried-and-true strategies to create an epic candidate experience at your next virtual event.

How to Create an Amazing Candidate Experience with Virtual Recruiting [Blog Post]

Did you know that virtual events have several built-in tools and features to help you deliver a better candidate experience overall? This blog post gives you a bird’s eye view of the many ways in which virtual recruiting and candidate experience go hand in hand and offers examples of how their shared synergies boost each other up.

Ways to Improve Students' Candidate Experience

Leveling Up your Student Event Experience [Blog Post]

Learn 6 ways in which you can take your student events from great to awesome! This blog post examines the most important measures you’ll want to implement when planning your upcoming in-person and virtual student events to make sure the spotlight stays on delivering stellar student experiences.

Prep-Event Ideas to Get Students Ready for Their First Virtual Career Fair [Blog Post]

Get inspired with this list of preparatory events you can host right now to get your students psyched and in tip-top shape for their first virtual job fair. Bonus: these events are so engaging on their own that your students’ positive candidate experience will start well before the actual day of the event!

Like this post? Try these!

• Why a Great Candidate Experience Helps Attract Top Talent
• Create an Amazing Candidate Experience in a Virtual Event: Tips from Brazen’s Experts

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