Redefining Candidate Experience: How to Improve the HR Process from Application to Onboarding

You spend a lot of time, energy, and money finding new hires, training them, and getting them into the fold. Despite that, turnover still challenges every business in the world. How do you get ahead? If you can reimagine your hiring process — from application to onboarding — you might iron out a few kinks and create a better candidate experience for everyone.

Personalize Orientation

The more you can personalize orientation, the more you generate a positive candidate experience . Naturally, you don’t want to expend too many resources on early prospects, but as you narrow down your candidates, you can start introducing them to some of your orientation resources.

By the time you formalize hiring picks, you want to create as much personalization for the new hires as reasonably possible.

One thing that helps with this is a mentorship program. Pair the new hire with their mentorship before their first day. You can get early introductions, break the ice, and give them a lifeline as the bombardment of new information descends upon them.

Be Available

This is the simplest and most powerful tool at your disposal in creating a better candidate experience. Simply give away your contact information and let them contact you and/or ask questions. Your availability makes a world of difference. After all, you’re the first point of contact many people have with the company in the application and onboarding process.

Then again, being available is much easier said than done. Of course, many things pull at your attention and it’s tough to be available all the time. But the more you can commit your availability to hiring and onboarding, the more you will improve the experience.

Use Subject Matter Experts

Mentors and other personalization efforts help you pair candidates and new hires with people who work with the company. It gives them a point of contact, a friendly face, and a lifeline.

Resources don’t always allow you to pair mentors with mentees on a one-to-one basis — especially if you’re reaching out to prospects who aren’t hired yet.

To compensate, you can use the idea of subject matter experts. Recruit regular workers into the program, and try to pair high-level prospects and new hires with subject matter experts at stages that make sense.

The effect is similar to mentoring. People can talk to company representatives who work in their field (or as near as possible to their field). They get friendly exposure and personal insights, but you don’t have to create a one-to-one relationship.

One subject matter expert could pair with a whole batch of newcomers and help them through some of the most awkward transitional periods.

This also helps with the concept of being available. If the HR representative or hiring manager just doesn’t have the bandwidth, creating a subject matter expert team can fill in some of those gaps.

Connect with the Team Early

It might feel intuitive to connect a new hire with their team close to their start date, and this certainly has value, but you can push things a little further.

Especially for extended, intense hiring processes, you can put any final selection candidate in touch with the team, and you can do it before the hiring process is finished.

This helps expose candidates to the company culture in a direct way. It also gives the team a chance to provide input on final selection — engaging from both sides and finding the best possible match from both directions.

Most of all, it breaks the ice and creates introductions. New hires will already feel like they know people at work, and they can start to parse names, faces, and personalities before they’re on the clock. It eases the burden of information that often hits new hires and folds them into the culture much more easily.

Use Stronger Communication Tools

Using better communication tools holds especially true if a candidate passes through multiple points of contact during the hiring process. It’s normal to have multiple HR representatives or hiring managers involved in talent acquisition.

The problem is that going from one person to the next (as a prospect) can create a bit of whiplash. You have to constantly repeat conversations, and some key details often fall through the cracks as HR members think someone else already covered a topic.

With a unified, multichannel communication system, every member of the hiring team can review conversations and stay up to speed even before they talk to a candidate for the first time. It cleans up communication, lessens that whiplash, and helps create a better candidate experience.

Add in some automation tools for good measure, and you can take many common frustrations out of the process to deliver a positive candidate experience.

Follow Through for 90 Days

Most businesses pay close attention to new hires for a few days. If training or onboarding lasts longer, then so does some of the special attention, but there comes a point where it’s easy to assume that they’re part of the team now.

That’s the key moment when you want to follow up again. 90 days is not a magic number. It’s just an average that applies to a wide range of business positions.

The point is to follow up past the first day, week, and even month. Once they’re through with onboarding, still reach out a few times to see how they feel and how things are going.

This accomplishes two goals:

• First, it gives you direct feedback. As they get more comfortable in their position, and as they have more conversations with you, they’ll feel freer to give you honest, direct feedback. You can see what works and what doesn’t in your entire hiring and onboarding process.
• Second, it reminds them that you’re still there and still invested in their success. This improves morale and reduces short-term turnover. Typically, you hire a position in the hopes of keeping it filled moving forward. Many new hires feel good early when they get a lot of attention, but there’s a transition point that breaks a lot of early relationships. It’s right when they stop feeling like a trainee but also still feel like the new kid in the group.

If you follow up with them through that period (and your training periods and onboarding schedule can help you parse it), you build a stronger relationship and keep people around.

Avoid Leaving New Hires Alone

With some positions, you have to go through state-mandated training before you’re allowed to really get to work. Maybe it’s a cheesy OSHA video. Maybe it’s something else. There’s not a lot you can do about it; the state makes the rules.

The problem is that it’s really easy to throw a new hire on a computer to knock out those training sessions so you can down to the personalized, specific stuff later. That might be a mistake.

A new hire might feel like they’re thrown in a closet somewhere to grind through computer training. As much as you reasonably can, break that up. The key to onboarding is fostering engagement between human beings as early as possible.

If they have to complete these things, give them that opportunity, but mix it up with deliberate human interactions along the way.

Guest author: Ashley Nielsen

Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a freelance writer who loves to share knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, wellness, and financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music.