Recruiters, let me ask you a question and be honest here. How many times have you forgotten to follow up with candidates? It happens a lot. Admit it. Look, job seekers would rather chew tinfoil and rake their fingernails across a chalkboard than apply online. With so many unemployed people applying online now, is the time to improve the candidate experience with a candidate journey map.
What’s a candidate journey map and why should you care? It’s the process of identifying every step and stage where applicants have a touchpoint. Believe it or not, candidates are very much customers too. When someone has a negative interviewing experience, they won’t buy your product or use your service.
With so many issues around attracting talent, assessments, and interviewing, mapping out the candidate journey is the best method for finding solutions. Trust me. Once you start the mapping process, you’ll uncover a lot of inefficiencies, pain points, and bottlenecks that are negatively impacting the candidate experience.
To get your recruiting team out of the stone ages and avoid looking like a bunch of Neanderthals, consider these 7 steps to kick-start candidate journey mapping.
1) Outline and define your entire recruitment process including the offer stage. This should be easy after you do some research. You’ll be surprised to learn the where, why, how, and the what-the-hell applicants go through to get hired!
2) Identify a touchpoint for every stage including after each. Again, you’ll be surprised how many stages need a touchpoint. I know. I know. It’s a lot but you can’t just stop and settle on a couple of automated notifications.
3) Collect as much data as you can. Surveys are a great way to learn what applicants truly think about your application, interview, and offer process. Check out Talent Board. They specialize in this and can get you the real feedback your company needs.
4) Analyze the data. This is really where you need people who know their stuff. Again, check out Kevin Grossman and his Talent Board. The good news is you’re halfway there but the bad news is you’ve got a lot of areas that need improvement.
5) Create a type of flow chart or a visual representation of the candidate’s journey.
6) Implement touchpoints for each step in the process. Automation is key here. Look within your CRM to see if it has automated features.
7) Continuously refine the candidate journey map until you get positive feedback.
Look, this is going to take some time to get it right but the mapping process doesn’t take as long. Plus, there’s are lot more to it than what I’ve outlined here. Today, CRMs are a great way to automate touchpoints. I’ve been using Phenom People for years and it has tons of features with the candidate experience in mind.
The most important thing here is the candidate journey map. Once you identify the touchpoints, it just matter how you’ll implement them. If you want to learn more about candidate journey mapping, please sign up for my newsletter as I’ll be discussing more on the topic.
