When it comes to hiring and recruiting technical candidates to fill your company’s openings, job seekers are in the drivers seat. A recent study shows that 67% of technical candidates are rejecting job offers at a higher rate year over year. Candidate experience is extremely important for all types of job openings, but particularly for the very small and insular technical community.
The candidate experience is the process of considering a candidate’s point of view and experience in interviewing and being recruited as a future employee of your company. While the candidate experience is a relatively new concept in the world of recruitment and hiring, it is becoming an important piece of a talent attraction team’s recruitment strategy and evaluation, especially in highly competitive industries and for positions like technical talent where the supply is greater than the demand of qualified candidates.
The market outlook for technical talent like engineers, programmers and data scientists only continues to grow. 59% of recruiters surveyed said they are looking for candidates with 2-5 years experience, while 71% of those same recruiters are also looking to hire candidates with 6-10 years of experience. In short, it is a crowded recruiting marketplace making it all about the relationships between candidate, recruiter and hiring manager. Perception is everything.
Technology companies are responding with perks designed to increase retention for this hard to fill positions like unlimited vacation, dry cleaning and most recently a vacation benefit aptly named pre-cation. It is a two-week paid vacation offered to employees before they start their first day at a company.
Recruiting teams are going to great lengths for technical talent, including offering extremely large referral bonuses for employees. Employees are paid an initial lump sum amount after their new hire’s first day. Employees receive the final lump sum amount on the referral’s six-month anniversary.
Referrals hands down remain the most popular source of hire in recruiting. Nearly 30% of all candidates apply for job openings after recommendation from a friend, peer or family member. Whether formal or informal, the candidate experience is an important one. A single bad candidate experience can stall your hiring and recruiting efforts. And talent is driving the success of not just your recruiting efforts, but the underlying success of a company.
