How Can A Recruiter Give The Best Candidate Experience?

4 min readJan 11, 2021

In the early days, recruiters focused their work mostly around what clients (hiring managers) wanted. But with today’s changing recruitment scenario, candidates have started demanding the same treatment as well.

Recently we came across a discussion on Reddit (An online discussion website), that was filled with bad experiences candidates faced while dealing with recruiters!

The subreddit (thread) is called #recruitingHell, you can check it out here: https://reddit.com/r/recruitinghell

Here Are Some Samples

Spelling mistakes completely kill a job description

and another one…

No candidate likes dealing with something like this! These mistakes are very simple to fix.

Things You Need To Do

1. Approach Candidates With A Short & Professional Pitch

Candidates really don’t like useless buzzwords like ninja or rockstar in a job description. If you’re wondering where all those great “ninja” candidates are, they’re probably skipping your job description.

Being pushy like this is another way to turn people off

Candidates prefer to be approached via email because it can be checked at their leisure. We’ve created an email template that you can use to approach potential candidates. Templates Below:

2. Update Candidates On The Status Of Their Application

Did a candidate apply to a job with your agency? Awesome! Now, you have a responsibility to:

1. Send an acknowledgement message to the candidate either by email, phone or SMS.

2. If there is a vacancy, let them know.

3. If the candidate is not a good match, politely reject them (we have an email template for this too!)

4. If a candidate gets shortlisted, communicate the next steps in the process very clearly.

Updating candidates frequently about their status leads to a better candidate experience! Sending an email doesn’t take a lot of time. If you use great email templates & have a good ATS, You can allocate just 15 minutes every day to do this like a pro!

3. Write Great Job Descriptions

Six Seconds.

That’s how long a candidate will take to read your job ad. (Source)

Poor job descriptions often lead to low numbers of quality applications. A poor JD is a massive red flag to the candidate and can be very damaging to your company’s brand.

Writing appealing Job Descriptions is really simple, all you have to do is add the following things to the JD to make it look good:

i. Add a clear title

Bad example — Tech Lead

Good example — Technical Lead — iOS Developer

ii. Avoid spelling mistakes

Spelling mistakes are nothing but embarrassments. They happen when you are in hurry or fail to proofread, and that’s okay. You can avoid spelling mistakes by using free tools like Grammarly.

iii. Job summary needs to be direct

The summary doesn’t have to be long. A Few, high quality, sentences are enough for the candidate to make a decision.

iv. Job duties

These are the tasks an employee will be expected to do on a daily basis.

v. Skills, qualifications & requirements

Mention the skills needed to get the job done. If the job requires special certification, be upfront about it and prevent future heartburn.

vi. Salary

This point is debatable but being transparent about salary is probably the best thing to do. You don’t need to have this in the JD but be honest with the candidate when they ask.