Top 3 Things to Ensure a Bad Candidate Experience 🙅

In 10+ years in recruitment, we’ve had the opportunity to work on almost 500 hiring projects, spanning from Product Managers in Brazil to CMOs in Cyprus and Quantitative Analysts in the UAE. While each project presents its unique challenges, there are 3 common mistakes that can jeopardize candidate experience, regardless of the industry or location.

📌 Here are top-3 things that we believe can greatly diminish the candidate experience, whether you’re a 15-person startup or a 10,000+ employee company.

🔕 Radio Silence Between Hiring Stages:

Regardless of how enthusiastic your prospect may be, nobody likes to be left hanging for days or weeks after an interview. We all have been there!
It might be the case that there’s simply no news to share. We get it! But taking just a minute to send a “we haven’t forgotten about you” message will help you prevent a lot of damage to your employer brand, even if you’re still sorting out hiring priorities or considering other candidates. Just be open to the dialogue about it with the candidate, they will appreciate it.

🔮 Little-to-No Overview of the Upcoming Interview Process:

Even the most qualified candidate can’t showcase their full potential if they’re not adequately prepared for the interview. Failing to provide an overview of the upcoming interview stages, including the focus areas or stakeholders involved, sets everyone up for inefficiency if not failure. On top of that, a lack of transparency in your recruitment process can look shady from the outside and give a (hopefully) wrong impression about the company’s culture.

😮‍💨 Hours-Worth Lengthy Home Tasks:

We’re not suggesting that home tasks are inherently detrimental to candidate assessment. They can be great, but only if the hiring team ensures that the task:

1. reflects the core responsibilities and required skills for the role
2. can be completed within a maximum of 2 hours
3. can’t be ‘outsourced’ to ChatGPT 😅

Think about the ideal candidate you’re eager to interview and hire for your most burning role; they’re likely occupied with impactful tasks in their current position. If you want to headhunt them, try not to kill the mood with 3 working days’ worth of a home task. 

At the end of the day, ensuring a positive candidate experience doesn’t always require extravagant efforts; often, it’s about avoiding common pitfalls.

We’ve only mentioned some of the areas where the majority of the damage is made. What are your observations on the top 3 issues? Share in the comments below!