How 4 Top Employers use Candidate Experience for Competitive Advantage

It takes a lot of effort and dedication to become one of the best places to work, and there’s no magic bullet to make it happen. There are various avenues to take to get there, and the best companies make candidate experience a priority in their recruiting and retention practices. How you treat candidates matters because what they experience when they apply, interview, and onboard with your company makes an impression.

If you don’t recruit with candidate experience as a priority, you can resign yourself to miss out on the best candidates. That’s because they’ll be lured away by the competition that is paying attention to communicating with candidates, making it easy for them to apply for their jobs, and offering opportunities to interact with people in their company.

Take a look at what the competition is doing right now to draw off the best and brightest from the candidate pool that you all recruit from.

Zappos! Zappos! goes after the candidates long before the interview with their interactive Inside Zappos career page and candidate newsletter Zappos Insider. Their career page doesn’t list boring open position descriptions. It offers vignettes of real employees talking about their work in various departments. They highlight and demonstrate their company culture and employer brand. They expand on that with their candidate newsletter Zappos Insider where candidates can stay tuned in to what’s going on at the company and stay in touch with recruiters and employees.

What does your career page look like? Do you have a candidate newsletter?

Automatic Data Processing ADP has been a Candidate Experience Awards winner for several years running, in large part for its highly engaging careers page. Candidates can browse employee stories, watch videos about any aspect of ADP’s business, find out about recruiting events and how to apply if they have disabilities and need assistance, explore career areas with the company, and easily plug into ADP’s social networks which include the ADP Talent Network, Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. Their application process is easy, fun, and interactive, and provides ways for candidates to easily find out about opportunities that interest them.

Are you this plugged into the candidates that you need?

W.L. Gore & Associates When job seekers land on W.L. Gore & Associate’s career page, they are invited to give feedback about their experience exploring opportunities with the company. They are then provided with tips about applying to Gore, explaining that the company likes to see tailored resumes, they phone interviews at the beginning of their recruiting process, and they interview candidates with interview teams.

Candidates on the career page can browse stories about employees and how they work at the company, easily find answers to questions about the application process on the FAQs page, and find out about company culture and benefits as well as the latest news about the company.

Do you help candidates understand your application and interview process on your career page?

The Bozzuto Group The Bozzuto Group’s career page gives candidates a complete overview of their hiring process with interview tips, what kind of development opportunities they provide, benefits and internships, highlights of veterans and military employees, and employee testimony videos. Bozzuto is recognized as a military family employer and for being one of the best places to work in Greater Washington, and Kristen Reese, Bozzuto’s VP of Talent

Management, says the company’s candidate experience is a metric for recruitment success and an area in which they seek continuous improvement to attract top talent.

Is your company recognized as supportive of military families and veterans? Are you focused on continuously improving the candidate experience?

Candidate experience is not just the latest buzz in recruiting. It’s a competitive advantage that companies develop to attract and retain the top talent they need to build their businesses and lead their industries. You need to pay attention to developing an outstanding candidate experience if you need the top-level candidate engagement that the competition goes after.