Employer branding is a crucial element for attracting top talent. A strong employer brand not only helps attract candidates but also enhances the company’s reputation and employee retention rates. However, one of the often overlooked aspects of employer branding is the experience that candidates have when applying for a role.
A retailer invests in the in-store experience, as they understand that customers need to have a great experience up to the moment of purchase to secure the sale. It’s the same for candidates.
The difference in experience between many employers’ flashy career sites and their application process is stark and often surprising. Candidates explore a heavily branded, experiential website that showcases the brand, only to be hit with endless pages of forms and faceless CV uploads once they hit apply.
In contrast, investing in a positive candidate experience can significantly impact an organization’s ability to attract and retain the best talent, making it an essential part of any comprehensive employer branding strategy.
Understanding Candidate Experience
Candidate experience refers to the overall perception and feelings a candidate has about an organization throughout the recruitment process. Just as any organisation obsesses over customer experience, so too should the HR function obsess over candidate experience.
Your candidate experience is shaped by various stages, including:
- Awareness: How candidates first learn about your organization and its job openings.
- Consideration: The research and evaluation process candidates go through to determine if they want to apply.
- Application: The process of submitting a job application.
- Assessment / Interview: The experience a candidate has when being assessed and/or interviewed for the role.
- Decision: The outcome of the application, whether it’s a job offer or rejection.
- Onboarding: The initial experience of new hires as they join the organization.
Each stage is critical in shaping a candidate’s overall perception of your brand, which influences their decision to join the organization, and what they share of their experience with others.
The Link Between Candidate Experience and Employer Branding
A candidate’s experience can significantly impact an organization’s employer brand. Here’s how:
- Positive Experiences: Candidates who have positive experiences are more likely to accept job offers, recommend the organization to others, and even become customers. A smooth, transparent, and respectful recruitment process can leave a lasting impression, enhancing your brand’s reputation.
- Negative Experiences: Conversely, negative experiences can harm an organization’s reputation. Candidates who feel undervalued or disrespected during the recruitment process may share their experiences on social media and review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, deterring other potential candidates from applying. They can also deter the candidate from interacting with you as a consumer. For consumer-facing organisations hiring in high volume, this impacts revenue.
Benefits of a Positive Candidate Experience
Investing in a positive candidate experience can yield several benefits:
- Higher-Quality Applicants: Candidates who have positive experiences are more likely to apply, and likely to share their experiences with others, increasing the quality of the applicant pool.
- Increased Candidate Engagement: Reduced dropoff and leakage due to an engaging experience means more candidates remain through your hiring process, giving you a better chance of finding the candidates who belong with you. On average, candidates who are invited to a chat interview powered by Sapia.ai are 80% likely to complete it.
- Improved Employee Engagement and Retention: New hires who start with a positive experience could be more likely to be engaged and stay with the company longer.
- Enhanced Employer Brand: A positive candidate experience strengthens the employer brand, making the company more attractive to top talent. Brands that have invested in their candidate experience by leveraging Sapia.ai to give everyone a chat interview and personalised insights are elevating their employer brand. 81% of candidates are likely to recommend others to apply for a job with the company, and 82% are more likely to recommend the products and services of the company based on their interview experience.
Key Elements of a Positive Candidate Experience
To create a positive candidate experience, organizations should focus on several key elements:
- Clear and Transparent Communication: Keep candidates informed throughout the recruitment process. Regular updates, clear job descriptions, and honest feedback are crucial.
- User-Friendly Application Process: Ensure the application process is simple and intuitive. Avoid lengthy forms and streamline steps to make it easier for candidates to apply. Using an ATS that integrates with other tools that candidates need to engage with such as assessment providers, will streamline the process and keep it consistent for candidates.
- Respectful, Engaging & Inclusive Assessment & Interview Process: Treat candidates with respect and give them the space to bring their best selves to their assessment. Ensure that up-front assessments are untimed, chat-based, and blind – meaning all candidates can confidently put their best foot forward without fear of bias.
- Leverage Smart Automation To Progess Top Candidates Quickly: If you can’t move quickly, the top candidates will likely get snapped up before you engage with them. Using smart automation with tools like Sapia.ai, to automatically progress the top candidates to the next stage ensures they remain engaged in your process.
- Timely and Constructive Feedback: Providing feedback promptly, whether positive or negative, shows respect for the candidate’s time and effort. Using an assessment like Sapia ensures that every candidate gets positive, non-directional feedback from their initial assessment, automatically.
- Effective Onboarding Practices: Once a candidate is hired, an effective onboarding process can set the tone for their future with the company, helping them feel valued and integrated from day one.
The Case for a Chat-Based Selection Process in Enhancing Candidate Experience
Incorporating an AI chat-based interview into your selection process can significantly enhance the candidate experience. Here’s why:
- Low Pressure: Chat-based AI interviews are untimed and allow candidates to respond at their own pace, reducing the stress and anxiety often associated with traditional interviews.
- Accessibility: Mobile-friendly chat interviews make it easier for candidates to participate from any location, at any time, using their smartphones.
- Inclusivity: Rather than relying on CVs and Cover Letters, this format ensures that everyone gets an interview and feedback, making the process fairer and more inclusive.
- Engagement: Chat-based interviews are engaging and interactive, helping candidates feel more connected to the organization and, through the structured interview, giving candidates a realistic job preview.
- Unbiased: Automated chat interviews help remove unconscious bias from the recruitment process, ensuring a fair evaluation based on responses rather than personal biases.
For a deep dive into the importance of candidate experience & how to deliver a world-leading one, check out our Candidate Experience Playbook.
Related
Blog
The AGC Debate: Are AI-Written Interview Answers a Red Flag or Smart Strategy?
Every day, we read stories of increased fake or AI-assisted applications. Tools like LazyApply are just one of many flooding the market, driving up applicant volumes to never-before-seen levels.
As an overwhelmed hiring function, how do you find the needle in the haystack without using an army of recruiters to filter through the maze?
At Sapia.ai, we help global enterprises do just that. Many of the world’s most trusted brands, such as Qantas Group, have relied on our hiring platform as a co-pilot for better hiring since 2020.
Our Chat Interview has given millions of candidates a voice they wouldn’t have had – enabling them to share in their own words why they’re the best fit for the role. To find the people who belong with their brands, our customers must trust that their candidates represent themselves. Thus, they want to trust that our AI is analysing real human answers—not answers from a machine.
The Rise of GPT
When ChatGPT went viral in November 2022, we immediately adopted a defensive strategy. We had long been flagging plagiarised candidate responses, but then, we needed to act fast to flag responses using artificially generated content (‘AGC’).
Many companies were in the same position, but Sapia.ai was the only company with a large proprietary data set of interview answers that pre-dated GPT and similar tools: 2.5 billion words written by real humans.
That data enabled us to build a world-first:- an LLM-based AGC detector for text-based interviews, recently upgraded to v2.0 with 99% accuracy and a false positive rate of 1%. An NLP classification model built on Sapia.ai proprietary data that operates across all Sapia.ai chat interviews.
Full Transparency with Candidates
Because we value candidate trust as much as customer trust, we wanted to be transparent with candidates about our ability to detect artificially generated content (AGC). As an LLM, we could identify AGC in real time and warn candidates that we had detected it.
This has had a powerful impact on candidate behaviour. Since our AGC detector went live, we have seen that the real-time flagging acts as a real-time disincentive to use tools like ChatGPT to generate interview responses.
The detector generates a warning if 3 or more answers are flagged as having artificially generated content. The Sapia.ai Chat Interview uses 5 open-ended interview questions for volume hiring roles, such as retail, contact centre, and customer service, and 6 questions for professional roles, such as engineers, data scientists, graduates, etc.
Let’s Take a Closer Look at the Data…
We see that using our AGC detector LLM to communicate live with candidates in the interview flow when artificial content has been detected has a positive effect on deterring candidates from using AI tools to generate their answers.
The rate of AGC use declines from 1 question flagged to 5 questions – raising the flag on one question is generally enough to deter candidates from trying again.
The graph below shows the number of candidates, from a total of almost 2.7m, that used artificially generated content in their answers.
Differences in AGC Usage Rate by Groups
We see no meaningful differences in candidate behaviour based on the job they are applying for or based on geography.
However, we have found differences by gender and ethnicity – for example, men use artificially generated content more than women. The graph below shows the overall completion ratios by gender – for all interviews on the left and for interviews where the number of questions with AGC detected is 5 or more on the right.
Perception of Artificially Generated Content by Hirers.
We’re curious to understand how hirers perceive the use of these tools to assist candidates in a written interview. The creation of the detector was based on the majority of Sapia.ai customers wanting transparency & explainability around the use of these tools by candidates, often because they want to ensure that candidates are using their own words to complete their interviews and they want to avoid wasting time progressing candidates who are not as capable as their chat interview suggests.
However, some of our customers feel that it’s a positive reflection of the candidate, showing that they are using the tools available to them to put their best foot forward.
It’s a mix of perspectives.
Our detector labels it as the use of artificially generated content. It’s up to our customers how they use that information in their decision-making processes.
This concept of having a human in the loop is one of the key dimensions of ethical AI, and we ensure that it is used in every AI-related hiring product we build.
Interested in the science behind it all? Download our published research on developing the AGC detector 👇
Research Paper Download: AI Generated Content in Online Text-based Structured Interviews
Blog
Joe & the Juice Partners with Sapia.ai, Scaling an Exceptional Candidate Experience and Cutting Time to Hire
Read the full press release about the partnership here.
Joe & the Juice, the trailblazing global juice bar and coffee concept, is renowned for its vibrant culture and commitment to cultivating talent. With humble roots from one store in Copenhagen, now with a presence in 17 markets, Joe & The Juice has built a culture that fosters growth and celebrates individuality.
But, as their footprint expands, so does the challenge of finding and hiring the right talent to embody their unique culture. With over 300,000 applications annually, the traditional hiring process using CVs was falling short – leaving candidates waiting and creating inefficiencies for the recruitment team. To address this, Joe & The Juice turned to Sapia.ai, a pioneer in ethical AI hiring solutions.
A Fresh Approach to Hiring
Through this partnership, Joe & The Juice has transformed its hiring process into an inclusive, efficient, and brand-aligned experience. Instead of faceless CVs, candidates now engage in an innovative chat-based interview that reflects the brand’s energy and ethos. Available in multiple languages, the AI-driven interview screens for alignment with the “Juicer DNA” and the brand’s core values, ensuring that every candidate feels seen and valued.
Candidates receive an engaging and fair interview experience as well as personality insights and coaching tips as part of their journey. In fact, 93% of candidates have found these insights useful, helping to deliver a world-class experience to candidates who are also potential guests of the brand.
“Every candidate interaction reflects our brand,” Sebastian Jeppesen, Global Head of Recruitment, shared. “Sapia.ai makes our recruitment process fair, enriching, and culture-driven.”
Results That Matter
For Joe & The Juice, the collaboration has yielded impressive results:
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33% Reduction in Screening Time: Pre-vetted shortlists from Sapia.ai’s platform ensure that recruiters can focus on top candidates, getting them behind the bar faster.
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Improved Candidate Satisfaction: With a 9/10 satisfaction score from over 55,000 interviews, candidates appreciate the fairness and transparency of the process.
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Bias-Free Hiring: By eliminating CVs and integrating blind AI that prioritizes fairness, Joe & The Juice ensures their hiring reflects the diverse communities they serve.
Frederik Rosenstand, Group Director of People & Development at Joe & The Juice, highlighted the transformative impact: “Our juicers are our future leaders, so using ethical AI to find the people who belong at Joe is critical to our long-term success. And now we do that with a fair, unbiased experience that aligns directly with our brand.”
Trailblazing for the hospitality industry
In an industry so wholly centred on people, Joe & the Juice is paving the way for similar brands to adopt technology that enables inclusive, human-first experiences that can reflect a brand’s core values.
If you’re curious about how Sapia.ai can transform your hiring process, check out our full case study on Joe & The Juice here.
Blog
Sapia.ai Wrapped 2024
It’s been a year of Big Moves at Sapia.ai. From welcoming groundbreaking brands to achieving incredible milestones in our product innovation and scale, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in hiring.
And we’re just getting started 🚀
Take a look at the highlights of 2024
All-in-one hiring platform
This year, with the addition of Live Interview, we’re proud to say our platform now covers screening, assessing and scheduling.
It’s an all-in-one volume hiring platform that enables our customers to deliver a world-leading experience from application through to offer.
Supercharging hiring efficiency
Every 15 seconds, a candidate is interviewed with Sapia.ai.
This year, we’ve saved hiring managers and recruiters hours of precious time that can now be used for higher-value tasks.
Giving candidates the best experience
Our platform allows candidates to be their best selves, so our customers can find the people that truly belong with them. They’re proud to use a technology that’s changing hiring, for good.
Leading the way in AI for hiring
We’ve continued to push the boundaries in leveraging ethical AI for hiring, with new products on the way for Coaching, Internal Mobility & Interview Builders.