First Impressions: Your Candidate Experience is Everything

For tech organizations, recruiting talented engineers is a time-consuming and often challenging process that can directly impact company goals and the bottom line. Senior engineers are usually responsible for conducting interviews — siphoning their attention away from their projects. And while company engineers and hiring teams are busy interviewing candidates, they can sometimes forget that the candidate is simultaneously interviewing them.

A Positive Experience Yields Lower Costs Per Hire 😊

Whether you’re a burgeoning startup or a leading organization with a global presence, it’s critical that you give each potential employee a positive candidate experience. Why? Because a first impression is everything, and delivering an exceptional candidate experience fosters an environment where engineers want to work, aids in talent retention, and helps in recruiting future team members.

Top engineers are likely fielding multiple offers and competitive compensation packages, but you can give your company a leg up on landing a coveted candidate through a pleasant, frictionless interview process. 83% of talent say a negative interview experience can change their mind about a role or company they once liked, while 87% say a positive interview experience can change their mind about a role or company they once doubted. Bad experiences translate to a longer time in filling key roles and higher costs per hire, just as a positive experience fills positions quickly while saving time and money.

The Costly Cycle of an Inefficient Hiring Process 💸

Organizations typically understand the impact of negative customer reviews — no one wants a poor Yelp or Amazon rating — and yet, companies make the mistake of ignoring or discounting Glassdoor scores from employees. The scores offer insights into a company’s hiring process. Companies with strong scores (15% negative or less) are reported to offer candidates a great experience while those with poor scores (25% negative or more) indicate a poor interview process largely due to inefficiencies.

Companies with an inefficient process have no choice but to evaluate a greater number of candidates. But the larger pool overwhelms the hiring department and consumes the time of senior engineers, which leads to greater negative candidate experiences and forcing the company to sift through even more candidates in a costly and lengthy cycle. These companies also face the prospect of top candidates dropping out after considering the offer and positive experience delivered by a competing organization. What’s left is a talent pool of only weaker candidates and an extended position vacancy that can delay a department from reaching critical milestones.

Good vs Bad Experiences 👀

What separates a good interview process from a bad? According to interviewees, slow response times, as well as a lack of feedback and unknown expectations all rank as top reasons for a negative experience. Unfortunately, slow response times are the result of hiring teams that are overwhelmed due to inefficient processes. Candidates report that receiving preparation materials or detailed interview schedules in advance of the on-site makes for a better experience as it allows candidates to understand and meet expectations.

Qualified Optimizes Recruiting ✅

The recruiting process should be a positive, uncomplicated experience where engineers can unlock their talent and demonstrate their benefit to a team. Automated technical assessments or coding challenges are critical in evaluating the skills of engineers, and these should likewise be enjoyable, challenging, seamless, and based in real-world context. Qualified is designed to test coding skills using challenges with real-world relevance rather than an artificial setup. The platform effectively prescreens candidates to optimize the hiring process for maximum efficiency. It delivers a smooth user experience with a clean UI and modern integrated IDE, while providing feedback that explains where issues occur within real data.

Qualified assessments are a candidate’s first touch-point with a company and help generate an indelible, positive first impression which is critical to landing rockstar talent and quickly filling key roles. Send us a message to request a free trial.

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