“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” Maya Angelou, the late Nobel laureate, once said.

Over the past two years, companies have had a challenging time navigating experience issues in a remote working world. A number of trends reshaped the world of work during this time.

Early on during the pandemic, companies focused on business continuity efforts and solving experience issues arising from prolonged work from home. By the end of the two years, the focus shifted on tackling trends such as The Great Resignation, which partly resulted from employee experience issues.

The pandemic also exposed broken hiring practices. There is an opportunity to improve efficiencies in the hiring process, finding candidates faster and using data sets to make quick and confident decisions.

When you think about enriching your talent acquisition journey, there are several different prisms through which you can tackle the issue. Which moments of truth are likely to impact candidate experience? Here are some points to reflect on:

Consistent brand voice and early touchpoints

Ensuring your brand voice resonates with candidates and is aligned to your mission is critical to stand out from your competition. Where are your candidates most likely to spend time? Whether it is on social media or platforms like Indeed, how you amplify your brand voice will be important to attracting quality candidates to your company.

Audit your online brand presence and highlight employee journeys. Showcase career and learning opportunities. Document milestones of the company’s growth, as well as your values, your ways of working, and your culture.

Workplace culture and candidate expectations

Work-life balance continues to be one of the top priorities of workers when considering a company. It’s a lesson that many of us learned during the COVID crisis. Throughout the pandemic, employees had a hard time “unplugging” from work during off-hours, according to a 2021 study from Indeed.

However, employers who advocate for workers to have more personal time and who proactively provide them with paid time off are more likely to attract talent. Hiring managers should therefore communicate how they, as a company, value work-life balance to candidates during screening interviews. 

Automation in the hiring process

Traditional hiring practices that are too slow and cumbersome are unlikely to attract top-quality candidates. Companies that rely only on recruiters to find potential recruits are unlikely to tap the best ones with speed and accuracy. 

By leveraging automated technology, however, not only will you be able to shortlist candidates faster, but you will also reach a wider, more diverse talent group in the process. Chatbots can help address the FAQs of prospective candidates. Technology can also support you to engage candidates who may not make the cut for a specific job role but who may still be important for the future.

Boosting your candidate experience goes hand in hand with boosting a recruiter’s experience. When recruiters are engaged in transactional tasks, they have less time to build relationships with suitable candidates and ensure they are hiring for the culture fit. Ultimately, any candidate becomes an ambassador for the brand, whether they are selected or not. Make sure you are making prospective candidates feel good.

Eager to learn more? Sign up for Indeed's Talent Innovation Conference 2022: The Great Revival where we will launch Recruitment Outlook 2022.