As more and more companies embrace remote hiring, providing an exceptional candidate experience should be the top priority for every organization. With the in-person meeting, on-site interviews, and lunches with the team no longer an option, you need to find ways to make the candidates feel valued or creative ways of recreating these familiar interactions digitally.

Every member of your recruiting team plays a crucial role in providing a successful candidate experience. The way you communicate with potential candidates says a lot about your organization.

As digital interviews and remote onboarding have become the new normal, companies should enhance the candidate experience, resulting in developing a positive employer brand. If candidates have a great experience with your company, they’ll talk about it to their friends/relatives and might post a positive review on several recruiting and reviews sites.

When you provide a great candidate experience to the applicants, they’re more likely to accept your job offer than your competitors. On the other hand, a poor candidate experience can cause candidates to lose respect for you, both as an employer and a brand.

According to Talent Board, more than 46% of candidates sever their business relationships with companies if they had bad candidate experience.

Suppose a candidate is rejected for a particular job role but has great candidate experience. In that case, there’s a possibility that the rejected candidates will apply again in your organization whenever there’s a new opening in another department. That’s why providing a great candidate experience is essential for you as an employer and a brand.

Each step in your hiring process should be streamlined so that the candidate has the best experience in your organization. For example, you must organize your job descriptions, social media handles, the company’s website, and interviews.

To optimize your existing strategies to enhance the candidate experience in remote hiring, consider the following tips:

Be Clear

First of all, you need to be clear about what role you’re hiring for and the requirements.

For example, you must write a compelling job description that should clearly highlight the benefits, salary, perks, work hours, educational qualification, required experience, etc. When you post a clear job description, then only suitable candidates will apply to your job post. As a result, it will become easier for you to assess the candidates’ skills and identify who is the right fit for the company.

On the other hand, an unclear job description will confuse the candidates, and there’s a high chance that they will not apply for a job role in your organization.

Use An Easy-To-Use Hiring Tool

Having the right tools by your side can help you streamline the remote hiring process and enhance the candidate experience.

For virtual hiring, some of the best tools are Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, etc. These tools can help to simplify communication and make it easy to carry out online interviews.

In case of hiring a technical team virtually, you can use Intervue, which is one of the best tools preferred by recruiters. It relieves the pain in the recruiting process by structuring the interviewing workflow. Also, it organizes the interaction between the candidates and the recruiter, and it helps to take relevant feedback required for the decision-making step of hiring.

Give Candidates A Virtual Office Tour

An office visit is one of the best ways that candidates can learn about the company culture. But after the pandemic, a physical meeting and an office visit is not an option. As a recruiter, you need to think out-of-the-box about how you can bring the office to new hires virtually.

A virtual office tour includes the work environment, culture, introduction to teams, and getting to know about senior management such as managers, CEOs, CTOs, directors, etc. Providing a great virtual office tour can help candidates imagine working there.

Consider Collaborative Hiring

Collaborative hiring is all about involving your team in the remote hiring process. If you are looking for a well-skilled and experienced person for a particular job role, then it may be worth getting your team involved earlier in the process for remote hires.

New hires will have the opportunity to evaluate and get to know potential hires in the recruitment process. It will help you ensure that the remote hire is a good skill fit, in addition to a cultural fit for their potential team.

Communicate With Candidates Effectively

According to Talentegy, more than 68% of candidates never reapply with a company from which they had a bad candidate experience. Additionally, 54% of candidates say that they didn’t get any feedback from the company after an interview. All these lousy practices can lead to a negative candidate experience, and as a result, it can affect the company's reputation.

You can improve the candidate experience by regularly informing them about their application status and the next recruitment steps.

Additionally, when you post a job requirement on any platform, you will get tons of queries from potential candidates. As a recruiter, you must help candidates by addressing their queries immediately.

In remote hiring, you can create an FAQ COVID-19 hiring policies page on your website to put all the frequently asked questions from the candidates, which will help put your candidates’ minds at ease.

Give Preparation Tips To Potential Candidates

As virtual interviews are the new norm in the corporate world, most candidates are unfamiliar with video interviews and remote hiring tools. As a recruiter, you can help them by providing preparation tips and how to use the tool during the interview. It will help them to put their best side forward.

You can provide them the following information:

• What to wear during the interview
• Providing a link to join the virtual interview
• What equipment they need (for example, laptop, mic, webcam, and a good internet connection)
• Where to take the interview (a quiet room, neutral background, etc.)
• What questions can be asked

The pandemic has caused several significant changes in the recruitment process, and it has encouraged recruiters to rethink their existing hiring strategies. However, this situation is new to candidates and recruiters, but both parties need to adapt themselves to this rapidly changing world.

As a recruiter, when you carefully evaluate the current situation and revamp your hiring process, you can ace your recruitment campaign and can improve the candidate experience at the same time.