Click here to download the 2012 Candidate Experience Awards Report

This past year, we were fortunate enough to sponsor the 2012 Candidate Experience Awards.  This marks the 2nd year for the awards and the feedback this year was overwhelming positive.  And with more participating companies than last year, there is a lot more learnings to be had from the rich candidate survey data they have been able to capture.  (For a look at the CandE presentation and “with distinction” award winners at HR Tech last year, check out our recap article here.)

This will be a short post but before I pass you to download the research report a few quick thoughts that I think are important about the candidate experience:

• It’s not going away:  This is not a fad or something that doesn’t apply to your organization.  Candidate Experience is important not only to apply rates but more importantly for the quality of the candidates you are trying to recruit.

• Process first, Engagement Second: When I read the report and from talking to recruiting organizations, there’s an obvious flow to how organizations need to go about tackling the candidate experience.  First, you need to make sure that your process is set up to improve experience.  This means setting up automatic targeted campaigns, enabling candidate application tracking, ensuring feedback to candidates and finding the right systems that enables your recruiters to better manage the full recruiting and apply flow.  Once this is in place then your team can start thinking deeper about engagement and building out a robust communication strategy to better engage candidates with targeted and timely messaging and content.

• Candidate Experience is fluid:  While you need to work hard on getting the process right, a good candidate experience will require constant attention and improvement.  This means you need to consistently track and capture feedback along your process.  This will help you identify trouble areas and test new ideas that are needed to improve the overall experience.

I highly encourage you to download the 2012 CandE Results Whitepaper and hope you think about applying for the awards this upcoming year.  Use the link below to download the white paper:

Download CandE White Paper