The Importance Of Good Candidate Experience In Recruitment

Getting the recruitment process and candidate experience right has a significant effect on company’s branding beyond the immediate result of hiring a well-qualified scientist or engineer. Candidates who are unsuccessful but perceive themselves to be treated fairly, given timely and genuine feedback, will speak positively about the firm involved. If the candidate has a memorable experience, feels like they were listened to and given genuine consideration, the organisation is building a reputable company brand on the market.

And the opposite is clearly true as well: candidates may speak to others in the industry about a poor experience in terms of waiting a number of weeks for feedback, or an interview that seemed disorganised.

There are a number of key stages in the recruitment process which can influence what impression candidates have of your organisation. These can be particularly important in terms of sourcing life sciences candidates as the scientists, chemists, quality assurance professionals and others often stress to recruiters that they care about the values of a prospective employer. Among the important stages are:

• Initial stage; firstly if multiple hiring managers are involved, the requirements for the job itself need to be agreed before sourcing begins or differing views could hold up decisions mid process or even at final stages. Planning together will minimise later disagreement about what different candidates might bring to a job and also keep to a minimum the number of meetings required with preferred candidates.
• Interview process; this needs to be timely and efficient with again a minimum amount of delay. Feedback to unsuccessful candidates should be prompt (within less than a week ideally) and with something specific they can take as feedback from the process.
• At offer; hiring companies need also to get across selling points of the kind of career and organisation they offer. Not selling the benefits of your organisation to a top applicant could mean they decide in favour of another organisation which is providing clarity on career opportunities, benefits and so on.

As the market becomes a more difficult arena to source talent in, the impressions a company makes on applicants can be a powerful tool for generating interest from potential future candidates. A strong company brand in the life sciences sector will have received good feedback, referrals from satisfied candidates and become a resilient name among professionals.