In this candidate-centric job market, providing the best candidate experience has become paramount in attracting and retaining top talent.

Candidate experience is an often overlooked but crucial aspect of attracting and retaining talent. Without a positive candidate experience, employers will miss out on high-quality talent in the industry.

In fact, according to Glassdoor statistics, companies that took the time to develop a positive candidate hiring experience reported a 70% improvement in the quality of hires.

With the pandemic, a lack of face-to-face contact has certainly brought its challenges, but in its place, the benefits of using digital tools to enhance the candidate experience are on the rise.

As the battle for talent remains fierce, recruiters and hiring staff have to meet the growing expectations of candidates. To help you give a boost to your candidate experience, here are five different tools you should invest in.

1. Applicant Tracking Systems & Recruitment CRMs

Without a doubt, one of the most commonly used recruitment tools is an Applicant Tracking System. But did you know an ATS goes beyond just streamlining hiring processes? With proper usage of an ATS, agency recruiters can leverage this technology for providing the best candidate experience.

Here’s how an Applicant Tracking System can benefit your approach to candidate experience:

  • Automated communication facilitates timely communication with candidates
  • Simplifies the application process
  • Automation helps speed up the hiring process helping candidates move on to the next steps

Other than Applicant Tracking Systems, a CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) software is another excellent technological investment for boosting candidate experience.

A Recruitment CRM helps build and maintain a pipeline of quality candidates. Recruiters can nurture these relationships with candidates through personalized marketing and closely following their career track.

Overall, an ATS and a CRM allow recruiters to develop and execute a more efficient workflow, directly impacting the candidate’s journey.

For instance– Recruit CRM provides the highest-rated ATS + CRM software for recruitment agencies in the global market. You can sign up for a free trial or book a demo with one of our executives to check how it can help you in managing candidates better.

2. Text Analyser Tools

A highly underrated aspect of attracting talent includes the structuring of job descriptions.

Ultimately, a job description is the first point of contact between you and the candidate. It is the first thing they are introduced to. With this being said, recruiters must ensure that they curate top-quality, concise and inclusive job descriptions to attract a broad scope of applicants.

To help with this, a text analyzer tool is key to perfecting job descriptions.

As the job market sees an increase in diverse and inclusive hiring strategies, a text analyzer has become crucial for creating more inclusive and gender-neutral job descriptions, assignments, letters, and other necessary documentation. Ultimately this impacts the type of candidates you may attract for a job.

If diversity hiring and inclusivity are on your agenda, a text analyzer is a must investment!

3. Online Interviewing Platforms

Since the pandemic, video interviewing and video calling tools have taken on a new dimension.

With an increase in remote hiring, video interviewing is being touted as one of the most effective modern recruitment techniques for improving the quality of hire and cost-per-This is evident in the growing number of video interviewing platforms on the market.

According to a Gartner survey, video interviewing tools have become so common that by October 2020, 89% of organizations said they were using video interviewing for recruitment.

Video interviewing tools are a great way to provide the best candidate experience as these tools efficiently help ease scheduling conflicts and reduce costs and hiring time.

In addition, with video conferencing software and online interviewing platforms, candidates do not have to waste their time and resources on commuting which forms a positive impression in their minds.

In addition, for organizations that want to harness the use of the increasingly remote workforce, video interviewing and online interviewing platforms are vital.

Read more: 8 effective recruiters must possess to deliver the best candidate experience.

4. Candidate Experience Analysis Tools

In order to provide a stellar candidate experience, the most critical step is to analyze your hiring process and measure the same.

This way, recruiters can get a deeper insight into what is working for them and how candidates interpret certain steps throughout the hiring process.

There are a few different ways recruiters can measure the candidate experience through candidate experience surveys or measurement through an analysis tool.

A candidate experience analysis tool can help accelerate interview productivity and reduce bias in the hiring process.

Along with this, these tools can improve the quality of your hires through integrated assessments, struc
tured feedback forms, and built-in scorecards.

Recruiters can also measure key recruitment metrics like time spent on hiring, offer acceptance rate, and interview to offer ratio. Moreover, many Applicant Tracking Systems help track key metrics and analytics throughout the hiring process.

This data can generate insightful reports that reveal bottlenecks in the recruitment process and ultimately help improve the candidate experience.

Recruiters cannot further improve the candidate experience without measuring and analyzing key metrics of the recruitment process and factors that are driving a positive candidate experience.

Thus, make sure you are implementing the use of a candidate experience analysis tool.

5. Chatbots

In a perfect world, recruiters would be able to reply to candidates promptly. However, this is not always possible with the overwhelming number of applications hiring teams receive on a daily basis.

A foolproof solution to this issue is the integration of a chatbot.

With numerous advantages to using chatbots an overwhelmingly popular feature is providing fast and consistent feedback and status updates.

An intelligent chatbot can provide immediate feedback to a candidate, updates on application status, and it can be used to answer frequently asked questions.

Chatbots can also assist candidates in scheduling interviews, and they can answer pre-screening questions, which allows recruiters and candidates to save a huge chunk of their time.

According to a survey by Allegis, 58% of candidates are comfortable with chatbot assessment for answering pre-screening questions in the recruitment process, and 66% of candidates are okay with chatbots scheduling their interviews.

This proves that a chatbot is ideal for providing more consistent communication for the best candidate experience.

6. Realistic Job Assessments

They take candidates through an online “day-in-the-life” or virtual shift ahead of attending a job interview.

They’re particularly relevant for frontline, high-volume hiring, where candidates get to learn about the roles they’ve applied for whilst at the same time being assessed for their job suitability via a series of realistic tasks and scenarios.

Of all assessment types, realistic job assessments deliver the best candidate experience, with 96% of candidates saying they’d prefer an assessment that helped them learn about the job and culture of the company they were applying for.

In the shrinking labor market, a typical candidate has evolved from being the seeker to being desired. And to attract these candidates, recruiters must take advantage of technological tools in this technologically advanced era of recruitment.

Let us know in the comments below what are you doing to provide a positive candidate experience and what are some of the tools you’re currently using?