Stress Awareness Month has been held every April since 1992, to raise awareness of the causes of stress and the strategies for managing and reducing it. As experienced recruitment consultants, we understand that the process of finding a new job can be incredibly stressful. In fact, 73% of job seekers say the process of looking for a job is one of the most stressful events of their life (CareerBuilder).
Many of us attach a strong emotional weight to our work and jobseekers could be dealing with all kinds of worries including: Am I making the right decision moving jobs? What if I accept a job that I end up enjoying less than my current one? Will my future prospects improve? Can I earn more money? And even, I have found myself out of work unexpectedly, how quickly can I find a new job? What will happen if I don’t? With this in mind, hiring managers can play a key role in ensuring that their recruitment process is as stress-free as possible.
This Stress Awareness Month, we encourage you to review your candidate experience and look for any ways in which you can make it less stressful. Some ideas to get you started are:
1) Make the application process easy:
Many candidates will be working full time, and having to complete a long and detailed application form, submit examples of work, or supply a detailed cover letter, are all things that might cause them additional stress. Unless you really need anything more than a CV and some basic screening information, leave the rest to later on in the process. You’ll find that this also increases the number of applications you get, which is especially important when you’re recruiting for hard-to-fill roles.
2) Streamline the interview and selection process:
As detailed in our recent blog, making your process as quick and flexible as possible will not only help you to snap up the best candidates, but also make the process easier for everyone involved. Plus, according to Glassdoor, organisations that invest in a strong candidate experience improve their quality of hires by 70%.
3) Communicate:
Make sure you have the systems in place to acknowledge every application and lay out the process / next steps and timings, then stick to it! If you can’t, then update the candidates so that they know about the change or delay. This is where working with a recruitment consultant can really help, as we will handle the candidate communications, but you should still aim to provide timely information and decisions to us so that we can manage the candidates’ expectations.
4) Make the interview less one-sided:
Many interviewers see it as their chance to assess a candidate, which, of course, it is. But there is sometimes less consideration for the candidate, and the opportunity it should give them to find out more and decide whether they would want to join the organisation. Fortunately, the days of interrogation-style interviews or ‘pressure tests’ are gone, but treating the interview as a two-way conversation and helping to make the candidate feel comfortable and that their questions are addressed can make it a much less stressful experience. If you’re training interviewers, we have some tips on the best types of questions to ask.
5) Always provide feedback:
According to LinkedIn, 94% of candidates want to receive interview feedback, but only 41% received interview feedback before. Plus, candidates are 4 times more likely to consider your company for a future opportunity when you offer them constructive feedback. Again, this can be made easier when you work with a recruitment consultant. We find that candidates appreciate feedback, and it can help boost them in their ongoing search when it has been well considered.
Taking some of the stress out of the recruitment process for candidates will not only improve their experience and potentially result in better hires, it can also help you to spend less time and money on recruitment. You’ll also have a strong bank of potential future candidates, willing to reapply, or share their positive experience with your company. For help recruiting difficult to find hires in lab informatics, contact us.