At Blinkist, we’re very proud of our candidate experience. According to Glassdoor, Kununu and the candidate survey we send at the end of our recruiting process, the vast majority of people who apply at Blinkist have a great experience. Indeed, we receive emails from candidates on a daily basis praising the quality and humanity of our process. Here are just a couple of examples:
Email from a candidate
You know you’re doing something right when candidates you didn’t hire send you gifts
At this point, you must be wondering what we’re doing differently and what sets us apart from other companies. In this article, I’m going to share my top 3 tips on how to craft a candidate experience that’s inclusive, supportive, helpful and humane—which will ultimately help you attract great and diverse talent. The good news is: it’s simple, it doesn’t cost anything and you can start today. All you need is empathy, a candidate-centric mindset and a little bit of time.
Finding a new job is an important life decision and can be a daunting process—especially for candidates who are more on the introverted side of the spectrum. Part of our job as recruiters should be to alleviate the stress and feeling of uncertainty inherent to the process so that candidates feel at ease and psychologically safe during their interviews. Not only will your candidates perform better, but they will also open up more easily and show their authentic selves.
We send this Webpage to all our candidates
As recruiters, we often tend to forget that an interview process is a two-way street and that candidates are evaluating us just as much as we evaluate them. At Blinkist, we strongly believe that one of the outcomes of a successful recruiting process should be that candidates are able to decide if the company and role they’re applying for is a good match in terms of values and growth opportunities. In order to achieve that, we proactively share accurate information about the role, personalized details about our culture and create enough room for candidates to ask questions.
Rejection is the most difficult, and sadly, the most common part of our job as recruiters. After all, we reject most candidates we interact with so it’s important that we thoroughly think about how we end the process. Ideally, you want to provide each candidate with meaningful feedback, but unfortunately, if you work in a fast-growing start-up, I’m sure you will agree that doing it consistently is challenging. At Blinkist, we want every candidate to be treated with care, compassion and respect. We want people to have a memorable and pleasant experience regardless of whether or not they get an offer. We don’t have the capacity to provide feedback to everyone but we’ve found a way to manage their disappointment which I describe below.
Our rejection email template
In a nutshell, remember to put yourself into your candidates’ shoes and… be a good human! Last but not least, make everyone responsible for candidate experience—not only the TA team. Check out my article on Self-Service Hiring© for more info on that.
Now, we want to hear from you. How do you manage your candidate experience? Do you have any super-special-magic-trick to make your candidates feel good? Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn!
Deb is part of the People & Culture team. When she’s not busy making sure Blinkist is the best place to work, you can find her in Neukölln pondering life’s biggest questions while indulging in her two favorite treats – ice cream and vegan donuts.
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