Curious about employee experience and why it is important? How should you be focusing on this topic in 2024? Today, we’ll explore employee engagement and how you can improve it throughout the employee lifecycle and best practices that apply.
Employee experience is the interaction of people with a company’s employer brand, people, systems, policies, managers and internal stakeholders. The day-to-day work and employment transitions such as job offer, onboarding, promotion, performance reviews and offboarding encompass the employee experience. The workplace and workspace, whether in an office or online are all included in this definition.
Everyone’s employee experience is highly personal, and has an impact on how someone feels about their employer, their job and affects their perception of their career and also has an impact on their sense of well-being.
When a potential employee engages with your brand, their interactions with your company are defined as the candidate experience. It’s important to be highly aware of their interactions with your company’s brand as it affects their impression of your company. Their engagement in a recruitment process can determine whether they accept your job offer, affecting the offer acceptance rate.
It takes significant time to match the best people with your roles, so ensuring a positive candidate experience is key in obtaining a good return on your investment of time. Some technology companies have entire departments dedicated to candidate experience. If you don’t have the budget for such a department, you can take the following steps instead.
Here are some best practices to ensure a positive candidate experience for your potential employees:
When setting up your recruitment processes for open roles, you can improve the candidate experience by ensuring transparency of communication.
What exactly is transparency in the recruitment process?
The first step is to do the legwork of defining the below. This involves ensuring that you decide and plan for consistency in the recruitment process by ensuring the following:
1. The role requirements are made clear on the job description and match what your organisation actually hopes to achieve by hiring that particular individual into the company
2. Interviewers are given specific subjects or skills to assess throughout the recruitment process
3. Interviewers use the same set of questions for all candidates in the recruitment process
4. Feedback from the interviews is populated in a consistent manner and you have a scoring system or methodology to assess candidates against certain criteria and attributes
By doing these steps, you ensure clear expectations and explanations of the job requirements and a positive interview experience.
After you’ve done the above, the easiest way to ensure a positive candidate experience is to ensure transparency and communication with candidates. This would be everything from explaining the job requirements and expectations, being clear about the recruitment process, communicating the expected timeframes and explanation of any delays, as well as decision- making timeframes.
A very important element is to give feedback or an update on the application status across the candidate journey, updating the candidate about next steps, any feedback or whether they are still being considered for the opportunity. The worst case scenario is when candidates are left wondering the status of their application and aren’t aware of any next steps. It’s important to update candidates on every step of their recruitment process and candidate experience journey as this affects their level of engagement with your company and interest in the role.
You may also consider specific requirements that candidates may have, for example neurodiversity or disabilities which you should accommodate. In order to do so, using technology enables you to collect this data and provide reasonable accommodations.
If you think about the number of open positions a company may have and the number of candidates, interviewers, scheduling tasks and steps in the recruitment process, keeping everyone updated becomes a daunting task. However, with Talmundo by Talentech’s Talent Acquisition Software, you can streamline the process from beginning to end.
Ultimately, using technology to help scale and manage the candidate experience through templates, automations and various features ensures that you can provide a consistent and smooth candidate experience with less manual work on your side.
According to research by McKinsey and Forbes, diverse teams and companies perform better. So having an inclusive recruitment and onboarding process is good for your business.
Having a positive candidate and employee experience throughout the recruitment process and onboarding experience also has a positive impact on diversity and inclusion. In order to attract and retain diverse employees, you have to take a number of steps to reduce bias in the recruitment process, therefore ensuring that you have an inclusive recruitment process.
As mentioned earlier, make sure you know what you are assessing and why, and ensure you have all interviewers aware of what a “good answer or good example” is rather than relying on a gut feeling. Understanding what data you are trying to gather throughout the interviews in advance will help with this. Furthermore, ensure you have a diverse set of interviewers, who have been given guidance on what to ask.
When it comes to inclusivity, you have to ensure you use data to make hiring decisions, and the best way to do that is to collect information about the candidate’s skills, experiences and abilities in an easy to access way, ideally through a frictionless applicant tracking system that helps you keep track of all the interview feedback on the candidate.
Furthermore, having a positive interview experience can help improve your net promoter score and referral rate, as candidates moving through your recruitment process that see how inclusive the recruitment process is, are more likely to talk positively about your company, and refer talent to it. Using technology to help scale the interview steps can ensure that you are able to provide a consistently positive experience with every interaction with your employment brand.
Unfortunately, it often happens that the recruitment process may be a positive experience for candidates but once they are given the offer and as passed to the Human Resources or Onboarding team, the process can have too much friction. Your new employee is left wondering if joining your company was a good idea if their onboarding experience is a poor one.
According to Forbes a comprehensive onboarding makes employees 33% more engaged at work and 18 times more committed to the company. In addition, highly engaged employees are 38% more effective at their job. This is the very important statistic to keep in mind when designing your onboarding process.
Some best practices to ensure a positive onboarding experience include:
>> Designing a 30,60,90 day onboarding process
>> Having onboarding checklists for the new hire
>> Connecting the manager with their new hire within their first day or week
>> Building a “New Hire Buddy” programme
>> Automating IT and Equipment requests
Once your employee has joined the company and has successfully been onboarded, a key measurement metric is their intent to stay. Intent to stay is defined as their desire to stay at the company and the length of time they would like to continue to be with their employer.
When you consider the added costs of recruiting, onboarding and training employees, ensuring you have employees that continue to want to stay at your company for a long period of time is key. In order to do so, you have to ensure that you are engaging with your employees on a regular basis, especially when some workplaces are now entirely remote or hybrid.
How do you understand and improve employees’ intent to stay? Some best practices include: Measuring engagement levels throughout their employee journey, from onboarding, training, performance cycles to work anniversaries. A key differentiating factor is to collect engagement data by using surveys and addressing employee concerns before they affect them to the extent that they want to leave.
It’s important to know that if you don’t know the level of engagement across certain employee experiences, you cannot improve or address concerns. This is where anonymous surveys and regularly addressing concerns makes a significant impact on the employee’s intent to stay.
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The takeaway |
When you think about employee experience you should consider all of the interactions that people have with you as an employer, from candidate to current employee. Providing a positive employee experience has a significant impact on engagement, inclusion and retention of employees, all significant metrics that impact your organisation’s performance.
Looking to scale and automate these processes and provide exceptional employee experience?
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