The importance of the candidate journey in the digital age

Understanding the candidate journey is essential if you want to improve the process for your organisation and get the best talent. Most candidates won't simply see your website and decide to apply immediately, they'll hear about your business prior, and likely actively look to learn about it before they decide to apply. Especially in the digital age, top talent are being recruited by more companies than ever, and are ever more accessible through their online presence, as well as through the use of online job aggregators.

Working in a talent market like this, data can be an essential tool to have visibility over your candidate journey, and make sure that your marketing strategy is as optimised as possible. In this article we'll be going over the stages of the candidate journey, and why data is so useful in getting yours right.

End-to-End Candidate journeys

Put simply, the candidate journey is everything that job seekers experience during their job hunt, and for your business the process starts long before their application. From the first time that a candidate comes in contact with your brand, they've begun the end to end candidate journey. This includes those who are looking for a job, and also those who are content at their current position.

Once they actually make their application, candidates move past the pre application stage and into your selection process, where a few will be hired and eventually go through onboarding, ending the candidate journey. Studies have found that nearly 60% of all candidates have a negative candidate experience, and so if you're able to understand and put thought into yours, you can gain a serious advantage. Successful candidate journeys will make sure that your company has a strong reputation, and that any points of contact with your representative will be positive enough to create real interest.

How is data a useful tool in understanding the candidate journey

Data is essential in clarifying the parts of your candidate journey that you might not have a clear picture of. For example, 70% of companies think that their application takes less than an hour, while in fact the average applicant spends 3-4 hours working to submit a single application. Data can cut through misconceptions like this to provide an objective numerical look at your application process, rather than relying on the subjective judgements of individual recruiters.

It can then also allow you to evaluate if your current recruitment strategy is attracting the right kind of candidates in the right numbers in real time, and try out different channels until you find the process that works best for your company. If there are bottlenecks that you're not aware of, real time data reporting can allow you to address issues immediately in order to improve the candidate experience before it turns away great talent.

inploi's Reporting & Analytics tools can help to show you precisely what your conversion rates are, and which stages in the pipeline are responsible for the most drop off. When you're looking to make crucial investment systems, our end-to-end journey tracking will give you the information to maximise your ROI. It will provide you with actionable data insights and aggregated analytics, letting you get a full view of your candidate process broken down into an accessible format.

If you're looking to gain a full understanding of your candidate journey from end-to-end, learn more about inploi's analytics module get in touch with us.