English 
Candidate experience is the feeling of a candidate during the recruitment process, from their job search to their interactions with recruiters and ultimately to their integration into the company (or the rejection of one or both parties). It encompasses all interactions that the candidate has with the recruiters and the company.
What are the stakes of candidate experience?
Candidate experience is a crucial element for the success of any recruitment process. Why? Simply because it can have an impact on a candidate's perception of the employer brand and influence their decision to accept or decline a job offer.
At the same time, a positive candidate experience can improve an employer's reputation, attract the best talent, and increase employee retention rates.
Conversely, a negative candidate experience can harm the employer's brand image, discourage candidates from applying, and in the future, lead to an increase in employee turnover.
Candidate experience can influence many things
It is therefore important to ask yourself how to create a good candidate experience? To answer this, it is necessary to understand that it is a process that requires effective practices to ensure its success. Discover in this article 9 tips to implement to improve your candidate experience.
1 - Structure your recruitment process
The first step to improving your candidate experience is to structure your recruitment process, which we believe consists of 7 phases that you can discover by going to this article. It is important to clearly define the stages, detailing the deadlines to be respected for each.
These must be carefully thought out to ensure good organization of applications but also a good feeling for the candidates.
In the same vein, it is essential to know who to involve internally during this hiring process but also to question the number of interviews necessary for the position. Thanks to this, a certain number of hours could already be saved.
2 - Carefully write your job ad
Writing a job offer may seem insignificant, but it is essential. Its reading will often coincide with the first impression a candidate will have of your company.
The perfect recruitment ad in 3 elements:
- A dynamic and realistic presentation of the company as well as the expected work tasks. It is important to create desire without overselling.
- Clearly announce the stages of your recruitment process as well as the different interlocutors that the candidate will have to meet.
- Provide a salary range.
Regarding the length of your ad, we recommend that it fit on one page in a standard writing format.
Once these elements are applied, your job offer can be posted on your career site, on various existing job boards, or on social networks such as LinkedIn.
Communication on these platforms should be a means for you to strengthen your visibility and attractiveness by sharing a clear and positive message about your employer brand.
3 - Offer a smooth journey
Recruiting, like being recruited, can be time-consuming, which can discourage some candidates. That is why it is essential to make their task easier by offering a smooth journey, trying to minimize waiting times as much as possible.
For exchanges, try to be as flexible as possible by adapting the tools (video, phone call, in-person) to the recruitment context and the technical and geographical possibilities of the candidate.
No matter what type of interview you have chosen, the most important thing is to exchange with the candidates in the most pleasant and appropriate way. Some flexibility and modernity in your exchange channels will reflect a modern image of your company.
4 - Use gamified assessment tools
Some companies have chosen to combine usefulness with pleasure by using new generation assessment tools. Indeed, in addition to helping them in decision-making by evaluating candidates' skills in a more objective and scientific way, they make recruitment more original (to learn more about originality, discover our article) and enjoyable.
There are different forms of playful assessment on the market. The most classic formats consist of logic games, quizzes, or 2D mini-games.
At Yuzu, we wanted to go even further by maximizing immersion to offer an exceptional candidate experience. To achieve this, we designed 3D situational assessments with the latest video game technologies in collaboration with a psychology and neuroscience laboratory.
Thus, candidates will live an exceptional and unique candidate experience from their computer, exploring adventures lasting around twenty minutes per soft skill.
5 - Keep regular and personalized contact
However, even with the most efficient tools on the market, you must prioritize moments of interaction with your candidates. Indeed, it is essential to maintain regular and personalized contact in order to establish a good relationship.
To achieve this, think about regularly communicating on the status of their application, but also keeping them informed about the next steps in the recruitment process. Transparent and proactive communication is a guarantee of success to make candidates feel valued and respected.
We advise against copying and pasting emails to all applications without a touch of personalization. Thus, a simple effort to add to your template a specific element related to the person can change a candidate's perception of you.
Our advice: To save time in your recruitment process, while ensuring a good candidate experience, we recommend that you equip yourself with an efficient ATS. If you don't know which one to choose, don't worry, we have written an article on 7 tips for choosing your recruitment software.
6 - Provide feedback
In the same vein, it is essential to pay special attention to unsuccessful applications. Indeed, whether the applicant is hired or not, providing constructive feedback can improve your candidate experience and, by extension, your employer brand.
It is never pleasant not to give an answer to a candidate. It is even worse to be refused a job, especially without knowing the reasons. You must take this into account and provide the candidate with advice to improve, answer their questions...
Your goal should be to reassure them by explaining why your selection was not on them.
In some cases, you can even advise them or try to use your network to recommend them to another company.
These small attentions will allow candidates to deal more easily with their disappointment. In some cases, it is even relevant to keep them in your pool of talent.
7 - Prepare a quality onboarding
As for selected candidates, do not believe that the strategy ends here: the better their arrival, the better your chances of keeping them within your company potentially to make a career.
Conversely, poor integration into a team can change the mindset of new employees and, in the worst case scenario, accelerate their departure (turnover)...
Therefore, preparing the integration of new employees is essential. We advise you to accompany your new employees by offering, for example, a welcome booklet or a team-building activity.
These tools will allow them to integrate more quickly and also to succeed in their new position.
Our advice: do not hesitate to establish regular points with your new recruits in order to better adapt the onboarding phase.
8 - Offer a welcome pack
In addition to the previous point, you can offer a welcome pack. This can contain goodies or small items that are key to reinforcing the sense of belonging.
This is also an opportunity that can allow you to assert your company culture and values.
For example, at Yuzu, we offer an indoor lemon tree to each new employee!
9 - Ask for feedback
The entirety of the previous advice should be retained and applied. However, it is important not to forget that behind each application is a person, and they are in the best position to provide you with quality feedback on your candidate experience.
Therefore, it is necessary to follow up and communicate with each candidate (focusing on those you have retained) and obtain their feedback. To do this, you can offer surveys or questionnaires.
This will provide valuable data to understand what works or not, define trends... Without this, you could miss out on valuable improvement opportunities.
Conclusion
For several years, candidate experience has been a major challenge in recruitment. It has even become one of the 5 key actions for successful talent recruitment in 2023. Therefore, it is important to invest time and money to optimize it, as the performance of your recruitment will depend on it.
As an employer or recruiter, it is important to work on your candidate experience. To ensure success, effective practices must be put in place.
First, it is important to structure your recruitment process by carefully crafting your job posting, ensuring that all necessary details are included.
Next, the focus should be on offering a smooth candidate journey, using modern assessment tools and maintaining regular contact.
Finally, we recommend providing constructive feedback to all candidates and preparing for the integration of the successful ones.