Enhancing the Candidate Experience With Talent Intelligence

In the world of recruitment and talent acquisition, the candidate experience is not just a critical piece of the hiring puzzle – it also plays a crucial role in shaping a company’s reputation and brand. Factor in a turbulent, highly competitive job market, and it’s easy to see why the candidate experience is such a significant factor affecting your ability to land top talent.

But there are also logistical challenges recruiters and hiring teams face when it comes to providing a positive and personalized candidate experience. Not enough hours in the day, inefficient recruiting processes, lack of automation – you get the picture. The good news is that there are solutions for overcoming these challenges. We’re talking about AI-powered Talent Intelligence; advanced technology that does more than just help recruiters enhance the candidate experience, it can also measurably improve recruiter efficiency resulting in substantially better recruiting outcomes. But before we go any further, let’s dig a little deeper into why the candidate experience is so important.

The Importance of Candidate Experience in Recruitment

Candidate experience refers to the entire journey that a candidate goes through when applying for a job at a company. It encompasses all interactions that candidates have with recruiters, hiring managers, and even the organization’s hiring process. To put it another way, the candidate experience represents a candidate’s impression about an organization or their hiring process. Providing a positive candidate experience is critically important for a few reasons.

Employer brand and reputation – What is the most powerful marketing tool out there? Word of mouth! Nothing can tarnish or enhance your employer brand more than the positive or negative experience of candidates or employees in your organization. In fact, one study found that 72% of candidates tended to share poor hiring experiences online or directly with someone else.

Quality of hires – According to a report by Glassdoor, businesses who deliver an exceptional candidate experience improve their quality of hires by as much as 70%. It stands to reason that candidates who have a positive experience during the recruitment process are more likely to accept job offers and stay longer with the company. This can also lead to higher employee retention rates and overall better workforce productivity.

But, while there are tangible benefits to delivering a superior candidate experience, the challenges are also tangible.

Challenges Faced by Recruiters in Providing a Positive Candidate Experience

Recruiters and hiring teams have their work cut out for them when it comes to ensuring the candidate experience is positive throughout the recruitment process.

• High volume of resumes: Recruiters often receive hundreds or even thousands of resumes for a single job opening, making it difficult to provide individualized attention to each candidate.
• Lack of automation: If there is no way to automate routine tasks such as manually sifting through a sea of applicants, recruiters often have a limited amount of time to review applications, which in turn can impact their ability to make the right hiring decisions.
• Poor communication options: An effective candidate engagement strategy is the precursor to an excellent candidate experience. And keeping candidates engaged means making consistent communication a priority. If recruiters don’t have a comprehensive solution for candidate communication, candidates may not receive timely or clear communication from recruiters, leading to frustration and a negative perception of the company.
• Not enough intelligence around key data points: Not having access to market intelligence around key data points such as location, skill set distribution, compensation, education etc., can make it difficult for a recruiter to gain a holistic view of the candidate and their needs, which in turn can affect the candidate experience.

This is where Talent Intelligence and recruiting automation can be a game changer for the hurdles referenced above. But what does Talent Intelligence really mean in recruiting?

What is Talent Intelligence in Recruiting and Talent Acquisition?

To understand Talent Intelligence, it’s important to separate the process from the outcome. With the power of AI and machine learning, you get market intelligence (essentially market research on steroids), which provides real-time insights into the competitive landscape of an industry or role.

Where it becomes Talent Intelligence is when these tools are leveraged to analyze large amounts of data quickly and accurately, to help organizations better understand the overall talent landscape, market conditions and other area-specific situations that may be relevant to their talent search.

Talent Intelligence goes a step further by combining automated data collection and analysis with natural language processing and machine learning to provide recruiters with the most accurate and up to-date talent profiles available. In more simple terms, Talent Intelligence helps recruiters better understand the skills, capabilities, and potential of job candidates. And let’s face it, the more you know about a candidate, the more you can tailor your engagement strategies accordingly and ultimately deliver an unparalleled candidate experience. But it’s also critical to establish a solid candidate experience strategy and stick to it.

Best Practices for Creating a Positive Candidate Experience

• Communicate clearly and promptly with candidates, setting expectations and responding promptly to their questions.
• Keep candidates updated on the status of their application, letting them know if they’ve been selected for an interview or not.
• Make the application process simple and streamlined, avoiding unnecessary or repetitive steps.
• Provide a positive candidate experience during the interview process by being courteous, respectful, and providing feedback.
• Cultivate a positive candidate experience by keeping in touch with candidates even after the hiring process is over.
• Foster a strong employer brand that promotes a positive candidate experience, highlighting company values and culture.

The Role of AI and Talent Intelligence in Enhancing the Candidate Experience

There’s no question that recruiters today need every tool at their disposal to attract and engage top talent. Using an AI-powered Talent Intelligence tool can help recruiters streamline workflows, automate processes, enhance the candidate experience, and so much more.

But an AI-powered Talent Intelligence platform such as the Arya sourcing platform, goes even further by using Talent Scoring and Ranking to identify the most compatible candidates for the job. This means recruiters can focus their efforts on the candidates who are most likely to be successful in the role, dramatically improving the overall candidate experience.

What to look for in a Talent Intelligence Platform

With thousands of HR platforms on the market to choose from, it can be tough to figure out which is the right one for the unique needs of your business. But here are some of the must-have features to look for in a Talent Intelligence platform:

1. Access to a local and global talent database – With the Arya platform, clients get immediate access to the largest talent database in the industry. (850+ million curated *local and global candidates sourced from 70+ channels).
2. Talent scoring and ranking – Using 300+ parameters and six multi-dimensional data points to understand and assess candidate relevancy, Arya scores and ranks talent for compatibility, *simultaneously sourcing candidates from multiple channels on 90% of jobs in 23+ languages across more than 150 industries – in under 5 minutes, while reducing candidate review and shortlisting time by 50%. Arya can also score and rank a client’s internal database enabling candidate rediscovery in your existing talent pool in under 5 minutes.
3. Dual-purpose recruiting and forecasting research tool – Arya’s Talent Landscape and Market Intelligence data use predictive analytics around key data points such as location potential, skill set distribution, salary projection, company mapping, and education, etc., to establish more effective search parameters that lead you to the most compatible candidates faster and empower you with the right recruiting strategy up front.
4. Powerful search options for recruiters with all levels of experience – Experienced recruiters can create customized Boolean search strings to refine and optimize sourcing output, while less experienced recruiters can leverage Ayra’s AI assisted search to achieve the best recruiting outcomes.
5. Active sourcing on demand capability – Predictable cost, pay per applicant service, with Applicants on Demand. From searching, qualifying, and engaging talent, to shortlisting the most compatible applicants, you get more than qualified candidates, you get applicants who have already expressed interest in the job, reducing or eliminating sourcing time.
6. Built-in diversity indicators that deliver diverse candidates but eliminate bias – Arya delivers a list of diverse candidates, but maintains scoring and ranking integrity, putting the power to choose the appropriate candidate in the recruiter’s hands.

Final Thoughts

Prioritizing a great candidate experience can attract top talent, build a strong employer brand, and ultimately help you achieve your recruiting and hiring goals faster and more efficiently. By investing in an award-winning Talent Intelligence tool like Arya, recruiters can streamline their processes and better understand candidates’ needs, preferences, and expectations, driving more informed hiring decisions, higher quality candidates, and a better overall experience for everyone involved. Book your demo of Arya today and explore what Talent Intelligence can do for your organization!