How (and why) forward-thinking talent leaders are focusing on improving the recruiter experience

August 26, 2021

 

iCIMS Staff

5 min read

In a world of uncertainty, one thing has remained constant in the realm of talent acquisition – talent leaders continue to focus steadfastly on the candidate experience.  

In fact, in a recent survey conducted by the Talent Board, candidate experience still ranked as the number one area of focus for global talent acquisition teams in 2021. 

And this makes perfect sense; the world’s most successful brands know that it isn’t the neat perks or features that draw customers and candidates in, but the memorable (and now, mostly digital) experiences they help create.    

When talent leaders dig deep and begin to look for ways to optimize each part of their candidate journey, they’re likely to find that one factor — one common denominator — determines the experience each candidate has throughout the hiring process more than any other: the candidate’s interactions with their recruiter.  

Think about it in terms of a simple analogy, one we can all likely relate to. Imagine you’re having dinner at a beautiful restaurant. The setting is gorgeous, the appetizers taste great.  

But then…your waiter gets your dinner order completely wrong. Or worse, they forget to put the order in with the kitchen entirely.  

At that point, the beautiful setting suddenly loses its luster, and so does the food; your experience is tainted.  

Similarly, your career site could be beautiful, your branding on point, and your job a perfect match for a particular candidate. But if the recruiter can’t find that candidate’s resume in their pile, or they aren’t enabled with the right tools to quickly and adequately engage the candidate, their experience will inevitably suffer. 

The candidate and recruiter experience are two sides of the same coin.  

Forward-thinking talent leaders know that when they improve the recruiter experience, amazing candidate experiences tend to follow. When they enable their recruiting team with easy-to-use tools that provide them with the right information at the right time, they’re empowered to engage in much more impactful and memorable candidate interactions.  

Here’s a look at three things talent leaders are doing today to activate better experiences for their recruiters, and by extension, their candidates:  

1. They’re enabling richer, more insightful conversations with a centralized candidate profile

Imagine if recruiters could easily start a conversation with every single candidate by referencing a recent action they just took — an email campaign they just interacted with, or a recruiting event they recently attended? Imagine if all of that information was centrally located and easy to find? They could have contextual, personalized conversations with each of their candidates and provide a truly differentiated, white-glove experience.  

The iCIMS Talent Cloud brings these seamless recruiter experiences to life through a powerful Dynamic Candidate Profile, which consolidates candidate activity and insights into a single profile, giving recruiters a 360-degree view into their candidates. Recruiters can see which talent pipelines a candidate lives in, which email campaigns they’ve engaged with, the recruiting events they’ve attended, and so much more — all in one central profile within the applicant tracking system.  By spending less time hunting down candidate information, recruiters can spend more time finding and engaging the best candidates. 

2. They’re facilitating better hiring team collaboration 

Recruiters spend so much of their time on administrative minutiae — scheduling interviews, receiving approval on job descriptions and postings, hunting down hiring managers for candidate feedback. The more painless and seamless these tasks can become for recruiters, the faster they’ll move candidates through the pipeline, and the happier those candidates will be.  

That’s why iCIMS recently launched an integration into Microsoft Teams that gives recruiters the ability to solicit interview feedback from their hiring managers right within Microsoft Teams. Hiring team members get to respond and complete feedback forms in their flow of work, while recruiters avoid having to chase down 5-6 panelists for feedback. Decisions are made faster, candidates are moved through the process quicker, and everyone wins. 

3. They’re making recruiters lives easier through more seamless integrations into the systems they use every day 

As I write this, I have roughly five or six tabs open in Chrome. That’s amateur hour for most recruiters, who likely have dozens of pages open in their browser at any given moment.  

They’re hovering over tiny tabs trying to figure out which one is LinkedIn so they can begin their sourcing efforts for the day. Next, they’ll hop into their applicant tracking system to see if the person they found on LinkedIn has applied to a job in the past. Then they’ll get an email from a candidate following up on their background check, forcing the recruiter to open yet another tab to log into their background screening software.  

This kind of constant toggling between different systems isn’t conducive to productivity nor a positive recruiter experience.  

To avoid this efficiency drain, talent leaders should work with their IT counterparts to map out and integrate their entire recruiting tech stack and workflow, from source to hire.  

iCIMS takes a unique approach to integrations. Thanks to standardized API integrations into hundreds of HR applications, talent teams can quickly connect their talent workflows. For example, our standardized HCM integrations enable recruiters to send new hires into leading systems like UKG and Cerdian in just a few clicks, saving time and effort.  

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To learn about more innovative ways to level up the recruiter experience, check out the  iCIMS 2021 Summer Release highlights video.