A seamless candidate experience

At Chatter we work with our clients to create an engaging candidate experience from initial enquiry, through to application, offer and beyond. 

A great employer brand has many parts that come together to create that experience. On its own a bottle of coke is just a product, the Nike swoosh is just a logo but when the messages, creative and essence of the brand all come together it creates an affinity and passion for a brand that can be frightening. Just look at the queues of people waiting to buy an iPhone 5, or plug the words “apple logo tattoo” into Google Image Search and you’ll see what I mean.

By creating a great employer brand online, you help close the online gap between you and the candidate, build emotional engagement  and help them  self-select in and out of the process. But that brand needs to run through every touchpoint from the initial recruitment advert through your social media activity, careers site, application process, emails, letters, text messages, interviews, onboarding and of course match up with the experience of successful candidates in their first days and weeks.

We’ve recently worked with two clients (Global Radio & eircom) to implement Hireserve ATS and integrate it seamlessly into their wider candidate experience. For many applicants gloss and polish of the candidate experience ends with a bump the moment they start actively searching for an open vacancy or click on apply. The ATS is often implemented with hours of thought into the internal HR process and then the candidate portal is left with it’s vanilla, off the shelf look and feel. Thankfully, with Hireserve ATS that doesn’t need to be the case.

With both Global Radio and eircom, our objective was for the candidate to neither know nor care that they’d transferred from the careers site into the ATS system and for the client brand and tone of voice to run all the way through to completed application and beyond. For Global we built a careers site packed with fun interactive features, you can even listen to one of their seven radio stations while you fill out your application. We also ensured that their down to earth tone of voice ran through every part of the process. From the main careers site, through the application form, even the Hireserve ATS generated emails to candidates, line managers and other users were rewritten to make them reflective of the wider employer brand.

For eircom, we built a careers site alive with content, from day in the life profile videos to an interactive timeline of the company history and the recruitment process. Again, we applied our careers site design to the Hireserve ATS candidate portal ensuring a seamless experience and spent time looking at the wording and layout of every screen and every button to make the process as simple and accessible as possible. We also made use of the Hireserve ATS integration with Apply with LinkedIn to allow candidates to apply for a role in just a couple of clicks using their existing LinkedIn profile.

A nice side benefit of integrating the careers site and ATS so closely is that we’ve been able to integrate Google Analytics throughout the entire application process, allowing us to track where candidates come from, their engagement with the site and the number of applications started and completed. For eircom, we’ve also been able to separately track the engagement with the Apply with LinkedIn tool which was generating applications from day one.

The results speak for themselves, with a pair of sites that are generating applications day in day out, in eircom’s case attracting several times more traffic that the previous site did and gaining positive feedback from candidates.

So, when you’re looking at your own careers site, spare a thought for the candidate experience…the tip of the iceberg is often as important as the 7/8ths below the water!

Jon Davies is a Partner at Chatter, specialists in HR communications. www.welovechatter.com