It’s no secret that entry-level candidates are avidly searching for jobs. So why is your organization having such a hard time finding them? As it turns out, a lot of it has to do with your organization’s recruitment process. There are 4 major aspects to consider in your recruiting process: quality of job posting, the application process itself, quality of the employer brand, and candidate experience. Let’s take a look at each of these to ease the struggle of hiring entry-level employees.
Quality of Job Posting
According to LinkedIn’s Talent Blog, there are 6 components of a well-written job posting:
- A straightforward job title. It is stated that 64 percent of job seekers wouldn’t apply for a job if they don’t understand the job title.
- A great opening paragraph. This provides the opportunity to make job seekers want to apply for your position.
- Separate lists for required skills/qualifications and nice-to-haves. The confusion of having these jumbled together will discourage job seekers, because they believe they aren’t qualified.
- Performance-based descriptions. Explaining the day-to-day responsibilities and required outcomes of the position encourages responses only from those who are willing to perform to that level.
- Things are only getting more expensive every day. If job seekers cannot easily gather compensation information, they will move on to a different opportunity that meets their salary requirements.
- Travel time/distance is a huge factor for whether a candidate can and will apply for a position.
The Application Process
Top job seekers can easily be turned off of a company by tedious applications. Because they are juggling job searching and usually a current job already, they will see a long, tedious application as a waste of their time. Ask yourself: if you were looking for a new job, would you find your organization’s application worth your limited, valuable time?
Quality of the Employer Brand
Desirable candidates will be looking at your culture, benefits, reputation, and factors that relate to their personal goals, such as development opportunities. A 2012 Employer Brand International Survey found that 84 percent of companies believe the key to achieving employer branding objectives is a clearly defined strategy.
Candidate Experience
This is possibly the most important aspect of all, because a poor candidate experience not only affects your ability to hire that good candidate, it also affects your company’s entire reputation. Unfortunately, negative candidate experiences are all too common; usually related to a lack of communication between recruiter and candidate. To give you an idea, take a look at the findings of a CareerBuilder survey of over 800,000 job seekers:
- 44 percent had a worse opinion of the company as a whole after applying and not receiving a response
- 32 percent were less likely to buy products from a company that didn’t respond to their application
- 15 percent thought the recruiter was unprofessional for not responding
The blow to your company’s reputation would come from the whopping 78 percent that said they would talk about their bad experience with your company to others, and the 15 percent that stated they would even share the experience on social media.
As a millennial who has fallen victim to the unprofessional post-application silence on more than one occasion, I agree with these unfortunate statistics.
All it takes to prevent this issue is a bit of simple communication—let the candidate know you’ve received their application and that it is being processed. And if you have the need to turn the candidate down, a professional “no thank you” goes a much farther way than silence.
If you’re in the market to hire entry-level employees, keep these 4 aspects in mind to make that hiring process a little easier.
To learn more about Frontline Employee Development, contact us today!
