You are down in the talent management trenches day after day, sifting through endless mountains of data and conducting interviews in an attempt to find the best possible candidates for your VC firm positions. From this angle, it is easy to develop a kind of myopia about the important role candidate experience plays for your organization.

How is your organization doing with creating a positive candidate experience? And how does the answer to that question impact the future of your firm?

Reality Check: How Are You Dealing with Your Candidates Now?

How often does this scenario happen for your firm? You interview a candidate that seems to be a perfect fit, but somewhere between your interview and your offer, that candidate’s interest cools considerably.

How about this scenario? Looking at data from your ATS, you realize that somehow your firm has failed to reach out to many of the candidates who took the time to apply.

If either of these things is a common occurrence for your firm, you are not alone. Revealing the results of TalentBoard’s 2014 survey of almost 95,000 candidates, Inc.’s “5 Tips to Improve the Candidate Experience” reports the following troubling figures:

  • 31.9 percent of candidates reported that they received no information to help them prepare for an interview.
  • Only 20 percent of candidates receive a quality final communication from a company with whom they have applied.
  • Less than half of new hires received a phone call from the hiring manager during the onboarding process, and less than 20 percent had any social connection with their future team members.
  • For unqualified external applicants, 91.4 percent of the employers made zero contact beyond the automated acknowledgement of application receipt.

Have things improved since 2014? TalentBoard’s 2015 North American Candidate Experience research notes: “Although most companies send an immediate automated “thank you,” nearly half of all candidates never receive an indication of the status of the application, and overall candidate communication has decreased from the application process to screening and dispositioning when compared to the 2014 CandE Research.”

Why Candidate Experience is a Big Deal

Why are these numbers so troubling? The simple reason is because candidate experience has a major impact on your VC firm in several key areas such as:

  • Level of employee engagement
  • Hiring outcomes
  • Employer branding and perception of your firm

If you think that the worst thing that can happen if a candidate has a negative experience with your firm is that he or she will simply not apply again, you may not be looking at the bigger picture. Just as a negative customer experience impacts your company brand, a negative candidate experience can impact your employer brand. A few comments from a disgruntled candidate on social media can spread like wildfire.

eBook: Using Social Media for Executive Search – Learn how to leverage social media in your executive search process more effectively.

A SoftwareAdvice.com candidate survey reveals that a negative candidate experience affects a firm in several ways.

  • 83 percent of candidates would likely never apply with the firm again
  • 63 percent would not accept a position from the firm if offered
  • 59 percent would tell others not to apply
  • 48 percent would post a negative review on Glassdoor
  • 42 percent would not buy a company’s products
  • 34 percent would tell others not to buy a company’s products

On the other hand, a positive candidate experience led to vastly improved outcomes, with 88 percent indicating that they would tell others to apply and 80 percent indicating a willingness to apply with the firm again if another position becomes available.

Quora’s “Why is the candidate experience so important?” sums it up this way:

“Candidates with negative experiences are significantly less likely to complete the application or hiring process, and many will tell their friends and peers about their frustrating experiences, deterring other potential candidates from applying. These poor reviews can be a huge hindrance in your recruiting efforts. You can also lose people who are potential or current customers; gaining back the customer-brand relationship after a poor candidate experience is nearly impossible.”

Improve Your Candidate Experience with ThriveTRM

ThriveTRM’s tools enable a more positive candidate experience. Just ask True, a seven-office firm that focuses exclusively on connecting emerging technology companies across the globe with dynamic talent from the top of the candidate pool.

Prior to choosing ThriveTRM, the True team found that they were often bogged down in search admin. Rather than providing the kind of candidate experience that they wanted to provide, they were spending hours each day cobbling together responses to client requests for information regarding market compensation, candidate outreach, target companies and references.

With powerful talent management tools, ThriveTRM streamlined the search admin process, freeing True’s team to do what they do best and improving the candidate experience in the process. True reports that now they spend less time managing the search process and more time actually adding value to it.

Are these the kind of results you would like to see for your VC firm? Schedule a demo today and see what ThriveTRM can do to streamline your search process and improve the candidate experience for your VC firm.