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Prakriti Rashi, a tech-marketer who has been helping start-ups and SME’s scale-up and navigate their brand image, is our contributor for this blog. She shares her experience and expertise on how to create a better candidate experience to aid a recruiter to attract diverse applicants for their clients.
Sourcing hard to find talent a client is no easy task. There is a definite pressure that is associated with the process. Recruiters even after years of experience in the field dread the hiring process. In an ideal world, only the best and the most suitable candidates would be attracted to a company’s job openings. But it’s often the case that candidates belonging to diverse groups-women, are struggling with the hiring process and workplaces more than ever.
Candidate experience explained
The candidate experience is nothing but the first impression of your company that the job seeker experiences when they’re going through the application process. The candidate experience can affect how the applicant perceives the company and whether or not they want to continue with the hiring process.
Why candidates from historically excluded groups might feel unwelcome?
A less than inclusive candidate experience can cause potential applicants to drop out of the application process. It is seen that the candidates who belong to historically excluded groups are more likely to withdraw their application mid-way.
Your job description might not be inclusive, your hiring team might lack diversity, your approach might fail to assist the applicants equitably. There could be several reasons that could decrease the representation in your hiring process.
Make Use of These Strategies To Better Your Candidate Experience
Here are few strategies your company could use to make the candidate experience more inclusive:
1. REVIEW YOUR DEI STRATEGY AND SET GOALS
To cater to candidates from diverse backgrounds and build a successful heterogeneous team, your company should review the DEI policy they have in place. As a workplace that has its foundation in equity, your management must set DEI goals for the entire organization.
Once set, the DEI goals and the policy of the company needs to be clearly communicated to the current employees in order to foster a culture of inclusivity. It is integral that conscious efforts are put in to continually improve the policy in place and set newer and better targets.
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2. TRAIN YOUR RECRUITMENT TEAM FOR INCLUSIVITY
As a company, you must lay emphasis on the training of your hiring team. You should make the interview panel more inclusive by including interviewers from diverse backgrounds. Putting in the effort to train the recruiters will help guide the hiring decision better.
The hiring team must be equipped with DEI hiring tools to make optimal decisions. Diversity hiring tools such as Diversely.io assist the hiring team by reducing human bias in the hiring process. A greater representation in your hiring team directly translates into a better candidate experience for potential employees.
3. USE INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE WHEN POSTING JOB OPENINGS
Your job openings must be catered to a diverse audience and should use neutral language. The hiring post is the very first interaction of your company with the candidate. If it is bias-free and uses the correct terminology, candidates from diverse backgrounds will feel welcome and are likely to hold the workplace in an inclusive light. You can use DEI tools such as Diversely’s bias analyser to edit the job openings and optimize them for diversity.
4. LEARN FROM YOUR PAST EXPERIENCES
Review and analyse the past experiences of the candidates who did not continue with your process in order to get to the root of the problem. Identifying the reasons due to which the applicants dropped out through surveys will help you optimize the process and ensure hiring diversity in the workplace.
Thank you to Prakriti for her insights.
Bettering your candidate experience is a key pillar when it comes to building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace and AI can help with the process.
