Candidate Experience

Candidate Experience is not a new buzzword, but it has also not yet been overused and that’s good. Because we still see tremendous potential to improve the candidate experience, this is one of the topics we deal with in our lab. Our experience has shown, and studies confirm, that the online application form is not the favourite recruiting channel. We are on our mission to change this.
The bad reputation of the online application form is due to the fact that, in most cases, they are not very user-friendly. Since I recently applied for a few job openings (before I joined softgarden), I experienced that from a personal point of view. What I noticed is that many companies do not care about the candidate experience. From the candidates’ perspective, a lot of things should be changed and improved to create a great online application experience. For us, the solution is the design thinking approach. In this approach, the user orientation is the key element and ultimately the candidate is the user. Our aim is to create an online application form that improves the candidate experience. Therefore, we present the following hypotheses:
A great and user friendly online application form should…

Firstly: Request only the information from the candidate which is needed for the vacancy and nothing else. From the perspective of the candidate this will increase the user friendliness: the candidate can be sure that he did not forget to hand in any important information. On the other hand, he also does not have to provide any information which is not relevant for the company he/she applies for.
Secondly: The online application form needs to be adapted to the vacancy and therefore to the needs of the specific target group. Thus a prospective apprentice will not be asked for professional experience and a 35 year old professional will not be asked for his diploma from the 10th grade. From the candidate’s perspective it makes no sense to be asked to provide these unnecessary details.
Thirdly: The registration effort should be reduced. Candidates do not want to go through complicate procedures before they can apply for a job. The registration can occur automatically after he/she entered the application without any further steps from the user.
Fourthly: A candidate wishes to present his/her personality. Therefore, only use predefined spaces where it makes sense to ask for it. For example, there does not exist a general term for a master’s program in Business Administration. Each master’s program has its own unique specialization and hence its own description. That means you should ask for the future degree, but a blank space for the name of the master’s program.

Dear candidates and recruiters: What do you think about these point? Do you see it the same way as we do? Lets talk about it. We are interested in your opinion.