candidate experience journey map

What are the candidate journey touchpoints and how to map it

Before consumers decide to buy, they go through a lengthy thought process. It takes time for them to learn about a company and the product or service it offers before they eventually decide whether they want to make a purchase. This customer journey does not differ too much from the candidate journey, showing that recruitment and sales are very much alike.

Candidates go through multiple steps in the candidate journey before they decide to apply to your company. As a matter of fact, when they make their final decision to apply, the second phase of their journey begins.

Understanding the candidate journey is crucial to improving the overall candidate experience and acquiring the best talent. As the market has become very candidate-centric, it is becoming increasingly harder to get candidates further down your application funnel. Understanding what candidates go through can improve your entire hiring process to ensure that candidates don’t churn or drop out in the process.

What is the candidate journey?

The candidate journey can be defined as the experiences that job seekers go through during the job-hunting process. It starts before candidates apply for a job, and it continues even after you have hired the candidate.

Understanding the candidate journey can improve the candidate experience, lower the cost and time to hire , and build a stronger employer brand .

The candidate journey definition shouldn't vary too much from company to company, though the candidate journey touchpoints may, depending on their unique hiring process.

What are the candidate journey touchpoints?

The candidate journey is a multi-step process that candidates go through in their job hunt. Generally, there are seven candidate journey touchpoints:

• Consideration
• Application

The first three touchpoints can be described as the pre-application phase. In this phase, your job as a recruiter is mainly to engage in recruitment marketing to reach passive job seekers . This means grabbing the attention of your potential candidates, getting them excited to work for your company, and eventually get them to apply.

The pre-application phase of the candidate journey involves all the touchpoints candidates have with your company before applying. These can be both online and offline.

Examples include:

• Viewing your job ads
• Talk to a company representative at a career fair
• Visit your career site
• Visit your company social media pages
• Talk to someone they know at the company
• Any interaction they might have had as a customer

Every touchpoint with your company plays a role in whether potential candidates will turn (or “convert”, as you might say in sales terminology) into actual candidates. That’s why it is crucial to make sure that each touchpoint gives the potential candidates a positive experience.

The pre-application phase consists of three steps:

1. Awareness

These are the first of the candidate journey touchpoints with your company. They make potential candidates aware of who you are, what your organization does and what it’s like to work there. In this stage, candidates are just getting to know you. This could be through jobs or speaking to a current employee.

2. Consideration

When candidates have experienced a few of your touchpoints, they enter the consideration phase, where they determine if they’re interested in working for your company.

During this stage, they may have additional points of contact with your company (like meeting representatives at job fairs or visiting your careers page) that will lead them to the next stage or filter them out of the candidate journey.

It’s essential to keep in mind that potential candidates can move back to the awareness phase from the consideration phase. The candidate journey is not a linear process for everyone, especially in the pre-application stage.

3. Interest

In this step, potential candidates are genuinely interested in working for your company. This is the final step in the thought process before applying.

When potential candidates have reached this step, they are likely to apply unless something happens (like getting a job offer from another company they applied to). There are still several touchpoints at this stage. Common examples include retargeted job ads or candidates emailing to ask questions about the job.

The application phase: application, selection, and hiring

As soon as a candidate starts filling in the application form on your website, they enter the application candidate journey touchpoint. From this moment, you have much more control over how they perceive you and their experiences with you. The application phase involves everything that happens from the moment that candidates fill out the application form to the moment that you hire or reject them.

This phase of the candidate journey has three main steps:

4. Application

The application step naturally starts when the applicants fill out the application form and end when they are rejected or after the job interview(s).

‍ The way you communicate with your candidates during this step is a crucial factor in determining their perception of your company. Also, the way you reject candidates is important to think about. It involves face-to-face communication as its main touchpoint.

At this point, you have an excellent opportunity to show your candidates what your company is all about and why they should work there.

5. Selection

The selection step starts immediately after the interview(s).

During this step, you evaluate your candidates based on their interviews. For the candidate, it means a lot of waiting. While most companies don’t communicate too much with candidates during this stage, you can still generate touchpoints to improve the candidate experience.

For example, you could send an email to thank the candidates for their time and let them know how long it will take before making your decision. You could also send them study materials if they would like to know more about your company. Remember, though, it’s poor practice to fail to supply candidates with updates if this step is taking some time.

The last step in the application phase is when candidates get either hired or rejected after interviews conclude. Many recruiters consider this step to be the final step of the candidate journey.

Nothing could be further from the truth for those seeking to create a great candidate experience. The touchpoint for this stage is the call or email that informs the candidate of the decision. If you reject a candidate, make sure that you let them know why they didn’t make it . Transparency in your recruitment processes significantly improves the candidate experience.

The post-application phase: onboarding

Recruiters often forget the onboarding process. They get so caught up in the hiring process that they often have little time to think about the successful hires they have made. This practice, however, can be damaging to the company.

7. Onboarding

Onboarding your candidates is an essential part of the candidate journey. It has a significant impact on whether your candidate stays at your company after the probation period. This directly correlates with your new starter retention rates.

As a recruiter, you should already be thinking about onboarding before you hire. After all, you don’t want to lose an employee just a month after spending so much time, effort, and resources on the recruitment process.

Onboarding involves different people from different departments. The best practice involves at least one person from the new hire's team and one from HR or hiring. The HR member can take care of company onboarding while the team member carries out the team onboarding.

Mapping out your candidate journey touchpoints

Mapping out the candidate journey is crucial to understanding what your candidates go through and what you can do to improve candidate experience. It can help you improve the journey to ensure that you attract the best candidates, shorten the time to hire and decrease your hiring costs.

Mapping out your candidate journey can be done in three steps:

Step 1: Define your candidate persona

Understanding your ideal candidates is the first step in mapping out your candidate journey. You need to understand whose journey it is that you are mapping, after all. Creating a candidate persona is one way to do this.

Creating candidate personas is similar to creating customer personas . It’s consideration into what your ideal candidate would be and describing them. It’s absolutely fine to have multiple personas for each job.

Candidate personas help you to clarify whose journey you are mapping for what job. This is important because different candidates can have very different journeys. A senior developer, for example, will not have the same journey as a junior legal counsel.

Step 2: Set up the candidate journey framework and identify the needs of the candidate

The different phases and seven steps described above should form the basis of your candidate journey map. This framework is universally applicable as all candidates go through every step of the process, regardless of where they apply.

The basis of every step in the candidate journey is made up of the candidates’ needs. To map out the journey properly, you will need to think about what those needs are and what thoughts and feelings drive the candidates' behavior.

These thoughts might be:

• Awareness: What does this company do? Who are they?
• Consideration: What can this company offer me?
• Interest: What makes this company different from others? Could I see myself working here?
• Application: Has my application been received? Will I get invited for an interview?
• Selection: Do they like me? Did I get a good impression of the company?
• Hire: I got the job!
• Onboarding: What should I be doing? What are my tasks? How do I do this and that?

Contemplating your (potential) candidates' thoughts helps you understand the candidate journey a lot better. Having a hard time knowing what it is that your candidates are thinking during their journey? Try sending out questionnaires after each step in the application phase (application, selection, and hire).

Step 3: Map out candidate journey touchpoints

To map out the journey, you need to know what the touchpoints are between your company and the (potential) candidates.

Touchpoints refer to all the interactions candidates have with your company. Your task is to discover all possible touchpoints that a specific persona can have in every part of the candidate journey.

The number of possible touchpoints that candidates could have is endless, especially in the pre-application phase. This can make it hard to map out every single touchpoint and where your candidate persona will be most beneficial. Think about their behaviors: how do they spend their time? What websites do they often visit? What social media channels are they active on? Try to identify between three and five touchpoints for every step of the journey.

When mapping out the touchpoints, don’t forget to create a list of channels where these interactions take place. Having an overview of the channels makes it easier for you to know where you can reach each persona, at what stage of the journey and for what job.

Using the candidate journey map

You’ve mapped out your candidate journey; now what?

Your map can help you with many things. First of all, you can use it to improve the candidate experience. Candidate experience has become one of the most critical factors in acquiring the best talent. A poor candidate experience can do a lot of damage to both your business and employer brand. The journey map shows you every touchpoint and stage that candidates go through. This helps you get a good overview of what your recruitment process looks like and where you can improve on the candidate experience.

The candidate journey map is also a great tool to help make your recruitment processes more efficient and effective. It allows you to identify bottlenecks within the process and get a good idea of which parts of the process aren’t going well. This way, you can improve both your hiring decisions and shorten your time to hire.

In conclusion: your new talent are people, not products

Candidate journeys and candidate experience are about people and relationships. Heading right back to the beginning of this piece, we talked about how similar the customer journey was to acquiring new talent and the candidate journey.

The crucial difference between products and people is people are living, breathing entities with feelings and emotions. We act on how we feel, so we must consider every interaction we make with those around us.

When it comes to candidate journeys, it’s more crucial than ever. Not only do you want to impress, you need your candidates to feel safe, valued, and informed at every step—even if you decide you don’t have a place for them at the time.

Use the journey and candidate map to look after your people, and you won’t go too far wrong. Use them to make your possible hires feel truly important and cared for, and you’ll succeed in boosting a far more substantial range of candidates through your acquisition funnel.

Adrie is a content strategist at Foleon, and the former Head of Content & Branding at Recruitee!

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Candidate Journey Map: What It Is & How to Create One

November 27, 2023 | Recruiting Insights

They go through a series of steps before consumers make a big purchasing decision. They conduct research online, look at reviews from other customers, talk to friends and family, chat with a sales associate, and more before ultimately deciding to swipe their credit card. 

Choosing an employer is a similarly significant life decision, so it’s no surprise that candidates go through a comparable series of steps when they’re applying for jobs. This is known as the candidate journey, and mapping it out can help you refine your hiring funnel to attract more of the best talent. 

What Is the Candidate Journey?

The candidate journey is a person’s sequential experience when applying for a job with your company. It takes place in phases, each progressing logically into the next one.  

Each company will define the parts of its candidate journey a little differently, but here are the most common distinct phases:

• Awareness – candidate learns about the company and its openings
• Consideration – candidate gathers information to help them decide whether to apply
• Application – candidate makes decision to apply and submits application materials
• Screening – candidate provides additional information to support their candidacy
• Interview – candidate interacts with company decision-makers
• Offer – candidate receives an offer of employment
• Hire – candidate accepts offer
• Onboarding – candidate begins work

What Is a Candidate Journey Map?

A candidate journey map is a visual representation of the candidate’s interactions with your employer brand while participating in your hiring process. It’s laid out a lot like a flowchart and consists of a series of touchpoints: individual engagements a candidate experiences. 

Some examples of touchpoints that could be included on a candidate journey map are:

• Job postings
• Employment ads
• Email campaigns
• Social media posts
• Your careers page
• Text messages
• Chatbot interactions
• Hiring events
• Educational programs
• Interactions with company employees
• Pre-employment assessments
• The job application
• The interview
• The offer letter

Example of a Candidate Journey Map

Here’s an example of how these touchpoints might look when mapped visually:

Benefits of Mapping Your Candidate Journey

Helps create an intentional candidate experience.

Mapping your candidate journey ensures that the experience a candidate has with your employer brand is not random but strategic. It helps you verify that each touchpoint contributes to your organization’s more extensive staffing and operational goals. 

Informs stronger recruitment marketing

In each phase of the candidate journey, the candidate is in a specific mindset, with certain questions, concerns, and interests. With a clearly mapped candidate journey, creating content tailored to each phase is easy. It answers the candidate’s questions, preemptively addresses their concerns, and nurtures their interest in becoming part of the team. 

Increases recruiting ROI

Because a candidate journey map puts your recruiting efforts into visual form, it’s easy to see where these efforts are paying off or falling flat. This reveals bottlenecks and pain points in your hiring funnel that you can improve on to save time and money. As a result of this continuous improvement, you’ll convert more prospects into applicants and more applicants into hires, improving all of your recruiting metrics . 

Simplifies recruiters’ work

A candidate journey map keeps recruiters on track with a clear outline of the next steps that must be taken after every action item. This helps recruiting teammates avoid duplicating efforts and also helps pinpoint where automation can help further simplify tasks. 

Aids in candidate nurturing

Only some prospects will apply after their first interaction with your brand. The decision could often occur months or even years after the initial engagement. Having a candidate journey map helps nurture these candidates over the long term so that your company is a top choice when they are ready to apply. 

Speeds up hiring

A candidate journey map can help you hire faster by maintaining a consistent line of communication with candidates and ensuring each step in the hiring process proceeds promptly. 

5 Simple Steps to Create a Candidate Journey Map

1. develop a candidate persona.

A candidate persona is a comprehensive profile of the person you target. It’s what you’ll use to customize the content within your candidate journey and should inform all of your recruiting efforts. 

Developing a candidate persona forces you to look at your journey through the candidate’s eyes, which can reveal insights and opportunities you might not have identified otherwise.

Related: Learn how to create a candidate persona here. 

2. Analyze and map existing touchpoints

List the touchpoints that already exist in your candidate journey. This should include everything you’re currently doing to engage candidates. 

Then, identify which phase of the candidate journey each touchpoint belongs to and map them in order. You can use a simple table, like we’ve shown above, or an online flowchart maker like Lucid to create a more detailed visual. 

3. Identify touchpoint shortfalls

As you look at your candidate journey on paper, are there any phases that need to be more light or completely lacking in touchpoints? Are there areas that seem too bloated with excessive steps or interactions?

Add touchpoints or remove them from your journey map as needed. Once again, you should be thinking about the candidate’s mindset as they’re experiencing each one and considering whether each phase makes sense as part of the whole. 

4. Use touchpoints to inform your recruiting content

The touchpoints in your journey are each tied to a particular piece of recruiting content. It might be content in the traditional sense, like an email campaign, or an alternative type of ‘content’ like a live conversation or a speaker presentation at an event. Regardless of the type of content, you should be thinking strategically about each one. 

An excellent way to use your map to inform your recruiting content is to think about the questions and concerns a candidate will likely have while experiencing each interaction. For example, maybe one of the most common questions you get from candidates in the offer stage is about your health insurance benefits. This means creating some additional content on this topic could be useful. 

You could add a new touchpoint during the consideration phase that includes a video overview of your benefits package, which will help candidates assess whether your benefits suit their needs before applying. 

5. Gather feedback and optimize

Don’t just use your best judgment about the quality of your candidate journey map; gather data from the actual candidates experiencing it firsthand to help you improve. Use surveys, interviews, and forms to collect candidate feedback, then incorporate it to optimize the flow of your candidate journey and its content. 

By building a strategic candidate journey map and creating tailored content for each touchpoint, you’ll develop a highly informative and engaging candidate experience, ultimately leading to better and faster hires.

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About Pete Newsome

Pete Newsome is the President of 4 Corner Resources, the staffing and recruiting firm he founded in 2005. 4 Corner is a member of the American Staffing Association and TechServe Alliance, and the top-rated staffing company in Central Florida. Recent awards and recognition include being named to Forbes’ Best Recruiting Firms in America, The Seminole 100, and The Golden 100. Pete also founded ze ngig , to offer comprehensive career advice, tools, and resources for students and professionals. He hosts two podcasts, Hire Calling and Finding Career Zen, and is blazing new trails in recruitment marketing with the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technology. C onnect with Pete on LinkedIn

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Candidate Journey: How to Create, Map, and Measure Candidate Touchpoints

Job seekers interact with companies across multiple touchpoints — both in-person and virtually. How to better map out and understand the candidate journey.

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You are how you treat people. For companies, that includes rejected job applicants. 

Sometimes, employers forget how large their hiring pool actually is. This makes them overlook the countless opportunities candidates have to interact with their company. To ensure a positive experience for all, you need to understand where all these job seekers are coming from. 

So let's talk about the candidate journey: what it is, how you can map it, and tips for how to improve the candidate experience so that all applicants feel seen and heard.

What is the candidate journey?

A candidate journey is the path a prospective employee takes toward finding and getting a job. 

It's often compared to the customer journey toward purchasing a good or service. If you need a new pair of pants, you may think about whether they should be jeans, slacks, joggers, etc…, then learn about all the different brands, then read product reviews, then ask friends for advice, and finally decide if (and where) you want to buy them.

Job seekers have a similar journey. Take Zoe, our hypothetical candidate who's spent two years at her current role and is considering a change. She'll mention to friends that she's on the job hunt, consult LinkedIn and other social media feeds, research roles on message boards and company websites, interview for different jobs, and ultimately decide on one of them based on her candidate experience . 

The journey starts before the candidate applies to any jobs. Then it doesn't end until after they've accepted a role and finished onboarding.

This path is often depicted as a funnel (similar to the sales funnel ) because the hiring pool dwindles as people advance through stages of the journey — going from leads to candidates to hires. 

The 6 Stages of the candidate journey

Below is each stage, along with a glimpse into our candidate Zoe's thought process. 

Awareness. What jobs are out there? What is this company? What do they do?

Consideration . What makes me a good fit here? What value can I bring to the company?

Interest . What makes this company stand out? Is this somewhere I can see myself growing?

Application . Has anyone looked at my online job application? Did I get an interview? How can I nail it?

Selection . Are they interested in hiring me? Does it still seem like a place I'd want to work?

Hire . Thanks for the offer — I'll take it!

Why does the candidate journey matter?

Hiring is a two-way street. Your best candidates are likely weighing a slew of other job openings, and they're judging whether they fit within your company with the same rigor your company uses to judge their candidacy. 

That's why their hiring experience is so important. In fact, 67% of job seekers reported a negative candidate experience in the last year, and 58% declined a job offer because of it . 

And a lousy candidate experience is almost always due to a long, tricky, and inconvenient journey. Anytime a prospective employee wades through a disorganized interview process, discovers the role's real responsibilities don't match the job description, or feels iffy about company culture — it likely means their journey wasn't planned out properly. 

This spells dangerous consequences for your company's brand. In one study, 37% of candidates said they've left a negative review about an employer after having a bad hiring experience. But on the flip side, 61% of candidates said they left a positive review if the experience was smooth . 

Be it online or offline, you have to game out every opportunity candidates have to connect with your company. See next:

What you need to know about touchpoints

The funnel-like shape of the candidate journey is a helpful visualization. But in reality, the actual path is nonlinear. Job seekers pave their own ways toward offers, at their own speed. And they probably have multiple in-person and virtual interactions with your company — whether it's your employer brand or the people who work there — before completing the journey. 

These interactions are called touchpoints.

For instance, our candidate, Zoe, may: 

See a friend advertising your job on social media.

Visit your website and consult your careers page.

Check how employees review your company on job boards.

Grab coffee with a friend, who's a recruiter, to discuss the role.

Browse her college's alumni talent network.

Talk to a hiring manager at a job fair.

Fill out an application on your online job portal.

Interview over Zoom.

Knowing these touchpoints lets you track how candidates are interacting with your company at different stages of their journey. 

If you represent this visually, you have your map! 

Why is it important to map the candidate journey?

Mapping lets you envision the journey from the candidate's perspective. This way, you can anticipate what the candidate wants at every stage and deliver a more targeted experience, all while improving your recruitment marketing strategy.

For instance, if you find candidates get a lot of mileage out of social media during the "awareness" phase, but find in-person interactions are more fruitful when they're strongly considering the role, then you can allocate resources accordingly by only involving recruiters after a candidate shows strong interest. 

According to 80% of job seekers , this kind of breezy experience makes candidates likelier to accept a job offer, which, in turn makes it easier to hire top talent — all while lowering costs and reducing time to hire .

The 4 steps to mapping out your candidate journey

Seeing as how 91% of the workforce looks for new job prospects every year , your hiring pool is bigger than you realize. Here's how to map out the candidate journey so that you can access as many of those recruits as possible:

1. Sketch your candidate persona

When you think of your ideal candidate, what comes to mind? 

Think of the skills you'd like that person to have. What kind of work environment do they prefer? What are their career goals? 

These traits will help you dream up your candidate persona. It's rooted in real-people qualities, but it doesn't have to be a real person. 

What matters is that you're getting specific about skills and behavioral traits. Because those people will have a certain kind of candidate journey, different from other candidate personas. 

For example, if you're looking for entry-level sales representatives, you may want to focus on getting the word out in early career job fairs. If you want a more seasoned sales team lead, you probably want to take advantage of different touchpoints, like getting a senior executive to send a personal email. 

2. Identify candidate journey touchpoints

Think about what your candidate persona wants. Is it more money? Less oversight? A flexible schedule? 

What about their needs — more psychological safety? A greater sense of career purpose?

Answers to these questions help you predict a job seeker's behavior when interacting with different companies. And, as we discussed, those interactions make up the touchpoints. List all of them, trying to identify which touchpoints your candidate persona interacts with at each stage of the journey.  

Keep in mind that you're likely to have both passive candidates, who may be happily employed but occasionally browse their prospects, and more active job seekers, who want that next job ASAP. Passive candidates may employ different touchpoints than active ones. 

3. Put together a list of channels

Touchpoints are how a candidate interacts with your company (e.g., a career site). Channels are the specific tools that candidates use to make those interactions happen (e.g. Indeed or ZipRecruiter).

This to say the same touchpoint can have multiple channels — either online or offline — within it. For instance, maybe our hypothetical candidate Zoe uses Ivan, her old college friend who's a recruiter, as a touchpoint to learn more about the company. 

She could scroll through Ivan's LinkedIn profile, chat with him about the available role over coffee, look at his bio on the company website, E-mail him questions, and have Ivan put in a word-of-mouth referral to a supervisor. These are five different channels for the same touchpoint. 

It's worth noting that candidates can use tons of different channels to complain about a lackluster candidate experience. For instance, if you never updated someone about their application status, they could leave a bad Glassdoor review, fire off a frustrated Tweet, complain to their friends about it in person at brunch, etc… 

4. Draw your candidate journey map

Here's the fun part. 

With all the information you've accumulated in the previous three steps, you can make a visual representation of one job seeker's candidate journey. 

There's no prescriptive template for this. But the more candidate data you have, the merrier. This should include demographic information, along with the touchpoints and channels the candidate used at each of the six stages of the journey. 

Here's an example of a candidate journey map for Zoe:

Tips to ensure a smooth candidate journey:

Now that you know how to map the candidate journey, here are some tips on how to make it more efficient, all while maximizing the candidate experience. 

Place candidates front and center

If the hiring process is the solar system, your candidate is the sun. Companies need to focus on candidates at every stage of the journey — paying proper attention to any wants, needs, and pain points. 

This means being both communicative and transparent at every phase of the application process.

You may think this is wasted time, seeing as how you're picking one candidate out of a bountiful hiring pool. But candidates you turn down may be a great fit for the role a couple years down the line. They may also have friends or colleagues who'd be great hires in other departments. 

By keeping your journey centered around the candidate, you're bolstering your company brand while ensuring no one leaves the experience with a sour taste in their mouth. 

Think about employer branding

Your company's reputation matters. Three quarters of candidates think about it before applying for a job . And according to one study, almost 70% of all job seekers refuse to work anywhere with a bad rap . 

This is something worth considering across every touchpoint, throughout every stage of the journey. Whether you're sending emails, posting to job boards, sending recruiters to expos, or writing blog posts on your website, every interaction with a candidate has the potential to either boost or harm your reputation .  

Put yourself in the candidate's shoes

Earlier, we talked about how sketching your candidate persona makes for a breezier hiring experience. But it also helps for anyone involved in talent acquisition to swap perspectives. If you were a candidate, what does the ideal job look like? 

It's likely one where the candidate feels respected, understood, and fulfilled. Maybe it's one with a four-day workweek. Maybe it's one that encourages colleagues to spend time with each other outside of work settings. Regardless of what you come up with, thinking like the candidate helps you anticipate their needs and design your recruiting process around them. 

Show what it's like to work with you

The best candidates need an honest impression of what day-to-day work with your company actually looks like . Zoe may be excited about researching, applying, and interviewing for a role, but none of those steps speak to the job itself. You don't want a candidate to be unpleasantly surprised with the role after it's too late. 

This is where creative supplements to a job interview come into play. Think about giving finalist candidates a test assessment that mimics real work they'd be doing . You can also consider having them shadow an employee for a day, or getting them to interview with every colleague they'd be working with. This helps with retention — the more people new hires speak with before their start date, the likelier they are to stick around . 

Measuring your candidate experience

You've cobbled together your touchpoints. You've pinpointed which channels facilitate those touchpoints. You've even visualized it all onto a map for each individual candidate journey. But how exactly do you use this to evaluate candidate experience?

You need, in a word, data . For one, you can solicit feedback from candidates at each stage of the hiring process . Consider using hiring software to automatically send out surveys to accepted and rejected candidates. Asking short questions like, "how satisfied are you with your job seeking experience here?" 

If you score these responses with a rubric, you can measure them against one another and ensure they're improving over time. And if you're doing this across touchpoints, you can develop a sense of how different recruiting tactics work for different interactions. 

But the true goldmine for data lies in your interviews. You just need a way to harness it…

Unlocking your interview data with Hume

Hume is an AI-powered interview companion that records and transcribes conversations with candidates. Instead of scribbling pain staking notes, you can focus directly on the interviewee, ensuring a much more pleasurable candidate experience. 

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Hume also lets you annotate interviews. You can tag sections of the transcript where candidates discuss the touchpoints they interacted with, and then use those tags to help map out their unique journey. This way, every job seeker leaves your hiring process feeling valued. Why? Because the platform keeps conversations fair, focused, and personalized. 

Hume takes all the guesswork out of hiring by placing your interviews into a searchable repository. This way, recruiters, hiring managers, and all other interviewers can easily prepare for their conversations and quickly discover which common traits your top talent shares.   

Hiring experiences can get torpedoed by slipshod, unstructured interviews — which are cesspools for dangerous types of bias . But with Hume, you can ensure every interview follows a consistent line of questioning and delivers the fairest possible experience. Seeing as how most interviewers lack formal training, you can even build a coaching library of best practices that all hirers can turn to for insight. 

A smooth candidate journey makes for a delightful candidate experience. This does wonders for your company's reputation and promises a worthy ROI. See how Hume can help you create, map, and measure a journey any candidate would love to travel by visiting our homepage to sign up for the waitlist or following us on LinkedIn . 

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• May 5, 2022

What is a Candidate Journey Map? (And Why You Need One)

Any time you need to hire someone, you go through a process. You put out job ads, filter your candidate pool, schedule and conduct interviews, review the results, and make a decision. In broad strokes, progressing through those stages is known as the candidate journey. Let’s say that you want to improve your hiring process. So, you ask questions.

• What platforms that you post your job to have the best results?
• At what point in the process do most candidates voluntarily drop off?
• What turns people away from your hiring process?

You may or may not be able to answer these. If you can’t, then the chances are that you don’t have a great, nuanced, and granular view of your candidate journey.

Defining the Candidate Journey Map

That’s where the candidate journey map comes in. The journey map is a map – a literal, visual representation – of your candidate’s journey. Or, more specifically, a map of different paths that candidates can take through your candidate experience, because there are often multiple paths through the system.

For example, one candidate finding your job ad on Indeed and another finding your listing on your careers page have different experiences. So, too, does a candidate who was referred to your company by an existing employee. All three of these candidates are part of your hiring process, but they make their way through the process in different ways, and that difference in the journey can have a significant impact on hiring success.

A candidate journey map is a map of the various touchpoints that candidates hit along the way. Touchpoints are specific events that happen as part of the candidate journey. There are seven defined touchpoints in most frameworks, though what specifically happens at each touchpoint can vary.

The seven are:

• Consideration
• Application

Every candidate journey map begins with awareness and progresses through the seven until either the candidate drops off willingly, is eliminated from consideration, or is successfully hired at the end of the journey. Note: If you think this looks similar to a sales funnel, you’re right. The process of mapping a candidate’s journey is very similar to mapping a customer’s journey through a sales funnel. The primary difference is that the candidate journey likely has far less in the way of analytics already in place.

However, different candidate journeys progress through these steps in different ways. For example, the first touchpoint is Awareness. It’s the touchpoint of the potential candidate discovering that your company is hiring for a role and that it may be a role they could take. That can happen in different ways, such as:

• Viewing your job ads on a job board.
• Talking to your representative at a job fair.
• Visiting the careers portal on your website.
• Talking to an existing employee that they know socially.

This is a simple list of four different starting points for example candidate journeys.

Note, as well, that the candidate journey is not necessarily linear. Just as a potential customer might bounce between awareness and consideration, a potential candidate may also bounce between stages as they investigate, gather more details, and eventually decide to apply.

How to Develop a Candidate Journey Map

Developing a map of your candidate journey – or, more accurately, a framework for mapping multiple possible candidate journeys – is a multi-step process. So, let’s go through the steps.

Step 1: Defining a Candidate Persona

Much like with sales defining a customer persona, HR will define a candidate persona for a candidate journey map.

A candidate persona is like a “character sheet” or a profile for your candidates. It’s semi-fictional, though it may be informed by the actual experiences of existing employees and the data you have on your candidates.

A candidate persona will have a lot of potentially useful details, such as:

• Demographics. What is their current position, skill level, location, current salary, and experience levels? Note that you should ignore demographics that aren’t relevant or are protected information , such as race, religion, age, etc.
• Goals. Why are they changing jobs?
• Are they active or passive?
• What channels do they use to look for new career opportunities?
• What are their skills and personality attributes, as measured by the pre-employment screening you use?
• What motivates and influences their decisions for employment?
• What sources of information do they trust?

Some companies stop at the first handful of attributes, while others build more robust personas. You have to find the right balance. The narrower and more specific the persona, the more potentially useful it can be, but the less likely it is to be on-target for your candidates.

Step 2: Set Up Your Touchpoint Framework

Above, we defined the seven touchpoints a candidate goes through to become an employee. Here, you set up a framework to track them. Since your candidate journey map is an actual, graphical map, you will want to assign each touchpoint a color, icon, and label to make tracking easier. Here’s an example image from TalentLyft , and here’s a simplified example of how a single journey map might look .

As you can see, candidates will likely bounce around in the early stages, but once they reach the later stages, they will be “locked-in” and progress from one to the next. The turning point is the application; once they decide to apply, the decision becomes yours rather than theirs, though they always have the opportunity to opt-out.

Step 3: Define Candidate Needs

Once you have your framework in place, consider it from the perspective of your candidate persona.

Given what you know about this archetype of candidate, what does the candidate want or need at each stage of the process?

• Awareness : Who is this company, what do they do, and are they hiring for my role?
• Consideration : Would working for this company improve my life, work/life balance, or career?
• Interest : What is the work culture like for this company? What makes this company better than another company in the same niche?

Each step of the way, the candidates want something. Your goal is to define what they want. Different candidates will have different needs, so this is a per-persona definition. For example, a novice fresh out of university will have different interests and needs than an experienced professional in the same field. People with families will have different needs than people without, and so on.

Step 4: Identify Specific Touchpoints

The fourth step is identifying the places and mechanisms candidates will use to fill their needs at each stage.

For example, during the consideration stage, the candidate will be researching your company. They might check:

• Your website About Us, History, and Careers pages.
• Your social media profiles.
• Social media results for searches for your company name.
• Reddit discussions about your company.
• Reviews of your product or service on marketplaces or review sites.

This helps you build out a complete map of the journey for that given candidate persona. Where do they find out about you, where do they go to learn more, who do they talk to, and what channels do they use?

Step 5: Build Your Map

Remember, a candidate journey map is not an abstract, conceptual document. It is an actual, graphical map that you build out using the information gathered in the previous steps.

For each persona, create a document that includes information about the persona. Then, for each touchpoint stage, define:

• What the candidate is thinking, what they’re looking for, and what they want to find.
• Where they will go to seek out this information.
• What channels you can use to reach them with the relevant information at the right time.

You build up this table of information and can even map out the bounces candidates take from stage to stage because those bounces can indicate something you can do to streamline the candidate journey.

Your map can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. For example, Rally Recruitment offers a template with more space for nuance, including defining the candidate’s expectations, experiences, and questions separately. In truth, you can build as simple or complex a series of maps as you want, so long as you can still use them to improve your candidate journey overall.

Making Use of Your Candidate Journey Map

A single candidate journey map helps you define and optimize the journey of one particular kind of candidate. That’s why you define many different candidate personas at the start; each one has their own map, and the data from each map, and the data you get in aggregate, can help you optimize your hiring process.

The first thing you should do is analyze your maps individually and your overall map to identify common issues. Do most candidates reach the consideration stage and linger for a long time before applying? Do many candidates apply, despite not matching the roles you have open? Do many candidates fall off the journey at a particular stage?

These are all signs of issues. Maybe there’s a prominent piece of information they tend to encounter that makes them second-guess their choice. Maybe they struggle to even find the option to pursue applying. Maybe some part of your hiring process, like salary ranges or an encounter with a particular HR staff member, turns them away.

It can also be worthwhile to look into the various channels your candidates use to find information about you and see what they’re seeing. When they search Google for your company, what do they find? When they ask about you on Reddit, what do they find?

Another thing you can do is submit surveys to actual candidates throughout your candidate journeys. Assign each real candidate to the persona that most closely fits them, and ask them questions about that persona you would want to know. You can then use their answers for additional information or leads to improve your candidate experience further.

Your goal with this process is to identify roadblocks, poor information, negative reviews, lack of information, or other problems. Any time a candidate hits a stumbling block, it’s an opportunity for you to work to remove that barrier.

• Get negative reviews removed, refute them, or use SEO to out-weigh them, so they’re harder to find.
• Create accounts on Reddit or other media to offer alternative positions and refute misinformation.
• Add information from frequently asked questions to your website or careers page so candidates can find it more readily.

Then, continue to monitor your candidate journeys and see how they change. Ideally, each change you make should improve the outcomes and streamline the application and hiring process.

Don’t forget to monitor candidates after you hire them, and look for ways to optimize long-term success in your workers, as well as just success in hiring.

Keep Improving

The key to using the candidate journey map is to improve every aspect of hiring continually. This means improving your hiring process, but it also means improving your candidate experience.

For example, you may find over time that one persona you developed seems to encompass two different groups of similar people. Instead of working around this, split the candidate profile into two distinct profiles with candidate journeys of their own. Doing so better allows you to track and optimize for those journeys.

Your candidate journey map is a living document, or rather, a series of documents for each potential persona. And as companies change over time and people change over time, the information in these documents will change over time. It’s up to you to keep on top of the information you receive, use it to edit and adjust your hiring process, and get the most out of your candidate pool.

Do you or your company have any questions about what a candidate journey map is or why you may need one? Was there anything we mentioned in this post that you would like a little more clarification on? If you answered yes to either of these questions, please feel free to drop us a comment down below, and we’ll get a conversation started! We’d be more than happy to assist you however we can in better understanding the topic.

Shannon Molarius

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Table of contents, what is the candidate journey here are its top 11 touchpoints and ways to map them.

From the moment a job seeker comes across a job post to the day of their successful placement, they go through a prolonged journey with recruiters. 

This ‘journey’ consists of a series of interactions that can make or break your recruitment process. 

In this article, we’re diving into its various touchpoints and top strategies to map them so you can create an experience for candidates to remember. Read on.

What is the candidate journey?

The candidate journey refers to the entire experience a job seeker goes through, from discovering a job opportunity to potentially accepting an offer in line with your hiring drive. 

It includes all the candidate-recruiter interactions, be it the application process, the interviews , the means of communication, or the onboarding procedure .

The importance of this journey lies in the impact on how a candidate perceives the recruitment process, the employer brand of the company, and the quality of candidates who are willing to sign up for the open position.

What are the touchpoints of the candidate journey?

The pre-application phase, stage 1: awareness.

In this stage, the candidate becomes aware of the job opportunity. This can occur through various channels, such as job boards, social media, referrals, or company websites. 

Remember, a company’s employer brand is critical in creating awareness and attracting potential candidates.

Stage 2: Interest

Now, the applicant tends to develop an interest in learning more about the position and the company. This also includes whether a job-seeker finds your job opening relevant to their work profile.

Further, they may dig into the business, study the respective job descriptions , and seek information about its culture, values, and benefits.

Stage 3: Consideration

At this stage, the candidate starts to weigh the pros and cons of applying for the position. 

They may compare the opportunity with other available positions, assess the alignment with their career goals, and evaluate the potential for growth within the company. 

Engaging content about the company’s culture, values, and employee testimonials can be influential at this stage.

Stage 4: Preparation

This is the final stage of the application process, where the candidate prepares their application materials. 

They may tailor their resume and cover letter to match the job description, gather the necessary documents, and seek advice or feedback from mentors or peers. 

Providing clear guidelines and tips on what the company looks for in an application can be helpful at this stage.

The application phase

Stage 5: application.

This part of the process is majorly about filling out application forms, submitting a resume and/or cover letter, and providing the required documentation. 

To ensure optimum convenience for candidates, you must adopt a user-friendly application process with clear instructions and minimal formalities to improve the candidate experience . 

Stage 6: Assessment

In this stage, recruiters make their grand entry into the candidate journey.  

This is an extensive step wherein you thoroughly review the application received and evaluate if the applicant’s profile aligns with the desired candidate persona. 

It involves multiple rounds of interviews , skills tests, and other assessments to hand-pick the most suitable candidate for the role. 

While assessing, recruiters are expected to communicate expectations head-on, followed up by a fair, transparent, and efficient screening process.

Stage 7: Selection

After a detailed examination has been conducted on all the candidates in the pipeline, the best one is picked for the role.

Recruiters finalize this decision based on factors like skills, experience, cultural fit, and potential for growth within the organization.

Stage 8: Offer

This is where the candidate journey finally comes to an end, now handing over the baton to the term “employee.”

This stage is marked with the extension of a job offer . 

It may also include a negotiation process where the candidate and company discuss salary, benefits, and other terms of employment.

The post-application phase

Stage 9: onboarding.

Onboarding belongs to the post-application phase of the recruitment process. 

Once the candidate accepts the offer, they transition into a new employee. This stage involves orientation, training , and integration into the company culture and team. 

A smooth and supportive onboarding process can help new employees feel welcomed and set them up for long-term organizational success.

Stage 10: Evaluation

After the onboarding process, there’s a period of evaluation where both the new employee and the company assess how well the integration is going. 

This includes regular check-ins, feedback sessions, and performance reviews. 

Open communication and clear expectations are key at this stage to ensure that the new employee is on the right track and feels supported.

Stage 11: Retention

The final stage is about retaining employees within the organization. 

This involves continuous engagement, professional development opportunities, recognition, and maintaining a positive work environment. 

The goal is to keep employees satisfied and motivated, contributing to their long-term success and growth within the company.

How to map the candidate journey? 4 quick steps for success

Step 1: Identify touchpoints and interactions

Touchpoints, the specific points of contact between a candidate and the company or recruiter, are integral to the recruitment process. 

In the pre-application phase, touchpoints range from initial interactions like job ads and social media posts to engaging content about the company’s culture and guidelines for application preparation. 

During the post-application phase, touchpoints extend to orientation materials, regular check-ins, and continuous engagement opportunities. 

Creating a comprehensive list of all potential candidate touchpoints and strategically aligning them with each stage helps in crafting a seamless experience, reflecting positively on the company’s employer brand.

Step 2: Gather data, identify areas for improvement

Collect data from candidate surveys , metrics, and feedback after interactions with candidates. 

Analyze this information to spot common problems and areas for immediate improvement. This isn’t just a one-time check; it’s an ongoing process that helps refine your recruitment strategy.

Find the gaps, address the issues, and continually evolve your approach. It’s about more than hiring; it’s about connecting with future employees and creating a streamlined, engaging experience that sets your organization apart. 

In a nutshell, the goal is to make the candidate’s journey as seamless as possible, building a positive connection that benefits everyone involved.

Step 3: Develop and make changes

Based on your analysis, develop a roadmap to address the identified areas for improvement. 

For example, this could involve updating your job descriptions , enhancing your career site, streamlining the application process, or improving communication with candidates. 

Implement the necessary changes and closely monitor their impact on the candidate experience.

Step 4: Continuously update and refine the candidate journey map

As your recruitment process evolves, stay on track with your candidate journey map and work on any deficiencies or outdated procedures that may need some tweaking.

Regularly review and refine the map to ensure it reflects the current scenario and the latest methods of your hiring cycle.

How to improve the candidate journey?

1. Invest in recruitment technology

Investing in recruitment technology like an applicant tracking system (ATS) can significantly improve the candidate journey in several ways, besides making it time and cost-efficient.

Automatic notifications, personalized emails, and consistent follow-ups help maintain engagement and ensure candidates are informed at each step.

A recruitment software also enables organizations to create user-friendly job portals and application forms, making it easier for candidates to apply for positions. 

2. Strengthen your employer brand

A strong employer brand helps attract and retain top talent, making it an essential consideration for long-term success. 

Build on your existing image by showcasing the company culture, values, and employee experiences on your website and social media, especially on professional platforms like LinkedIn. 

Use storytelling to highlight your mission, vision, and unique selling points as an employer of choice.

3. Optimize job postings

Ensure your job postings are clear, concise, engaging, and easy to understand. Highlight the key responsibilities, qualifications, and benefits of the position. 

Take note of inclusive language and avoid jargon or acronyms that may exclude candidates who belong to a certain community.

Use AI writing tools like ChatGPT to craft an attractive job post that caters to all the realms of your target audience.

4. Leverage social media and other channels

Expand your reach by promoting job opportunities and company culture through social media , job boards, and other relevant channels. 

Encourage employee advocacy by inviting your team to share job postings and company updates on their networks.

5. Train hiring managers and interviewers

Ensure that your hiring team understands the importance of candidate experience and how different gestures and initiatives can leave a lasting impact on a candidate’s mind.

Initiate mentorship programs and provide training on interviewing techniques, blind hiring, and effective communication to create a positive and consistent experience across all the steps of the recruitment drive.

Providing a positive experience to an applicant throughout their candidate journey is one of the major goals of every candidate-oriented recruiter. 

You can buy some handy tips from our mini-guide to enhance your candidate journey map and build a stellar employer brand for yourself (and definitely your clients as well!).

Happy recruiting! 

Frequently asked questions

1. what are the first and last stages of the candidate journey.

The first stage in a candidate’s journey is the awareness stage. It’s a crucial stage where candidates first become cognizant of a job opening or an organization that piques their interest. 

The last stage is onboarding. After the selection process, the candidate accepts the job offer and officially integrates into the organization, beginning their new role.

2. Why is the candidate journey important?

Emphasizing on candidate journey can have substantial benefits for a business. For one, a well-structured candidate journey can bolster an organization’s reputation and branding. This not only attracts potential employees but also paints a positive image of the company. 

Additionally, focusing on the candidate journey can enhance the quality of hires. It ensures the organization is engaging with the right talent, thus fostering a higher likelihood of success and meaningful contributions to the company’s objectives.

3. What role does #RecTech play in the candidate journey? 

Recruitment technology, or #RecTech, refines the candidate journey by automating routine tasks such as resume screening and interview scheduling. It uses tools like ATS for efficient candidate tracking and quick feedback. 

Automated email systems and chatbots enable real-time communication, enhancing candidate experience. Further, it offers personalization, providing tailored job recommendations and application updates.

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Why You Need A Candidate Journey Map (+Template)

Let’s take a moment to be fully honest with each other: not all of our content performs the way we want it to.

There are times when I’ve published a piece of content I had high hopes for, only to watch it fall flat. Or maybe people noticed the content, but it didn’t get the click-throughs that I expected. Every marketer I know has experienced the same thing. And that’s ok. It’s part of testing and iterating and learning, and it’s what makes us get better.

Despite that content marketing truth, there are some ways to take control and craft content that will have a much better chance of hitting the mark.

Candidate journey maps are a tool that you can start using right away to create more thoughtful content to grab the attention of your target candidates and drive them to action.

What is candidate journey mapping?

Candidate journey mapping is the process of thinking through the experiences and touchpoints in a candidate’s typical hiring journey with your company and plotting them out visually.

The candidate journey map then works as a visual reference point to use for content creation or for improving your candidate experience from an operational standpoint.

Mapping out your target candidate’s journey and thinking through what their experience looks like can give you a better understanding of what questions, concerns or even barriers they may have throughout your organization’s hiring process – and how you might create content to address those needs and drive them to action.

Here’s what a candidate journey map looks like (you can download our Candidate Journey Map & Content Planner template for free ).

Pro tip: Before you build out a candidate journey map, it’s a good idea to spend a bit of time fleshing out who’s journey your tracking first by creating candidate personas. It’s worth doing this because the candidate journey will often look different for a software engineer vs. a sales professional, for instance, as different groups will have different pain points and activities associated with their candidate journey.

>> Need more info on candidate personas? This blog post will walk you How to Create Candidate Personas.

Why create a candidate journey map?

1) You’ll capture candidates’ attention with content that speaks directly to their needs and experiences

Once you’ve mapped out the stages of the candidate’s journey, you can then plan out what content you need at each stage to attract a candidate’s attention and encourage them to engage with your employer brand.

A great way to do this is to use your candidate journey map to uncover the questions that candidates will have at various stages of their candidate journey and then turn those questions into content pieces that directly addresses any concerns or curiosities they might have.

Why does this work so well? People are much more likely to notice and engage with content that addresses questions that are on their mind, rather than content that’s unrelated to what’s important to them.

Examples of this in action:

2) You’ll convert more candidates to applicants and new hires

Each stage of the candidate journey is an opportunity to influence talent with engaging recruiting content. The secret is knowing what information candidates need to move them from attraction to new hire.

Providing candidates with information they’re actively seeking will make candidates feel like you fully understand what they’re going through, that your organization cares and that an employment opportunity with your company will be a positive one.

In other words, by providing content that gives candidates the info they value, you’ll improve their perceptions of your employer brand and you’ll have more clout in persuading them to take action (apply to a job, join your talent network, attend a recruiting event, etc.).

3) You can improve your candidate experience and employer brand

It’s not all about content! (Did I really just say that?!)

But seriously, pulling together a candidate journey map can also help you determine your company’s strengths and weaknesses to improve your process from an operational and experiential standpoint.

These types of changes work towards improving the candidate’s experience with and perception of your employer brand, which will work alongside your content approach to attract and convert candidates in the short and long-term.

Download the Candidate Journey Map Template

So, ready to improve your candidate experience and create even better content to attract the candidates you’re looking for? Grab our Candidate Journey Map & Content Planner Template to get started.

About the Author

Lori Sylvia

Recruitment Marketing evangelist and community builder. Founder of Rally.

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The candidate journey: Key steps to creating, mapping, and measuring it

Recruitment and hiring have a few key points in common with sales processes. Much like buyers, candidates also go through several stages when looking into new job opportunities. And although most steps they’ll take have a whole lot to do with the online world , the candidate journey also happens offline. 

But what does this term stand for? How will you map it? Which touchpoints should you have in mind? This simple guide will offer you a clear overview of each stage your potential hires should experience. 

Candidate journey definition & key points

So, what is a candidate journey ? In simple words, this term is used to describe the stages talents who are entering your pool will go through. There are six stages to undergo:

• Awareness, 
• Consideration,
• Application,

While passing from one stage to the next one, candidates will interact with your company’s brand. So, it’s paramount to understand (and boost) the unbreakable bond between recruitment and employer branding . To nail the first three stages, a recruiter should know a thing or two about marketing. And as for the three final phases, it’s when true recruiting knowledge has to be emphasized. 

Now, aside from these steps that each job seeker encounters, there’s another element to keep in mind. This essential ingredient is called candidate journey touchpoints , and it stands for all online and offline interactions your aspirants will have with the company. 

Active vs. passive candidate journey 

It is crucial to mention that while the initial stages of the candidate journey concentrate on active job seekers, the last three phases focus on passive talents.

Studies show that only 12% of people actively look for new career opportunities . And if you’re aiming to fill one of the in-demand tech positions , the odds of receiving numerous qualified resumes are probably even slimmer. That is why recruiters must pay more attention to passive job seekers. That includes shifting the focus on brand awareness, consideration, and candidates’ interest in the company and the role it’s promoting. 

Candidate journey vs. candidate experience 

One thing is certain – in recruitment, there are lots of terms that seem like they’re interchangeable. Still, when put into practice, most show a few massive differences. Candidate journey vs. candidate experience is one of those common terminological dilemmas and quasi-synonyms. So, let’s see how to distinguish between these two. 

The first one represents a path. It’s a series of steps and actions candidates take. It outlines the process that starts with a job hunt and (hopefully) ends by being hired. So, decision-making and the job offer should be the final stages here. 

On the other hand, candidate experience is a blend of perceptions about the company and its hiring process. Candidates collect thoughts, impressions, and ideas about the firm and its procedures, and the people involved from the initial point of contact. And, surely – it’s inseparable from the candidate journey. So, even though they represent different things, the two form one complete image. Or, to put it even more simply, candidates collect experiences while their journeys last. 

What is candidate journey mapping?

Candidate journey mapping stands for creating a visual representation (in other words – a map) of candidates’ journeys throughout the hiring process. It outlines those main six phases and all points of contact with the brand. Its prime benefit is improved candidate experience. By following each potential hire’s path, actions, and notions (and gathering the valuable information), you can start fixing some problems, adapting to your candidate persona’s needs, and turning candidates into brand ambassadors . 

Improved CX and boosted awareness mean more qualified applicants in the future, improved recruitment strategies , shorter time to hire, lower costs, and more. 

5 tips for creating a candidate journey map 

If you’re still wondering – How do I map a candidate journey? – then, this brief guide is just what you need! Start by knowing who you want on your team . Once you build up a profile of your ideal hire, ensure to understand their needs and preferences and build a framework that will help you reach them. Focus on each of the touchpoints and make a list of channels that can help your candidates have a smooth experience. Here’s what each step you should take actually entails (+ a few pro tips on how to get the best results). 

Define your ideal job candidate

You’ve most likely heard of the candidate persona . In other words, a (kind of fictional) profile of an ideal applicant . They possess all the right skills and qualities to get the job done effortlessly, drive amazing results, and fit into the team like a pro. Sounds quixotic – but they’re real! At least partially. By outlining this perfect profile, you will gain the idea of whose journey you’re about to map. Wondering why this is essential? Well, different candidates will have different journeys, expectations, and experiences. Focus on who you need on board and align the plans and maps with their background, expertise, and preferences. 

Set up a framework

Remember those different stages candidates go through? Well, they’re the keystone of your journey mapping. Since these steps and elements are kind of inevitable, you should strive to watch them both separately and as a whole. Set up a framework that matches your company’s aims, hiring needs , and resources. And by resources, we mean money, time, and recruitment personnel + the tools they use. And more! Count in all of the key factors and see how each stage can be improved . 

Know your candidates’ needs

Each phase a candidate goes through triggers a new set of questions. As you can guess, the initial one will have them wondering about the company itself. So, it’s critical to provide the necessary information ASAP. So, promote your firm in multiple ways and through all the channels you can put to use. And never underestimate the power of a well-written job description . It should always start with a brief yet engaging intro. 

Then, questions like whether your company is the right place to work, play, and grow kick in. Also, both passive and active job seekers can think about the perks, values, and benefits that attract top talent to your organization. They’ll strive to find out what makes you unique and different from the competition. Do your best to stand out. And stick with the points that truly matter to potential hires. 

After that, the time comes to give and receive feedback. Did you receive and screen the resume? Did you like it? Did they like you back? It’s paramount that you keep the communication flowing. And to check out how the candidates perceive your firm. And finally, if it all goes perfectly smooth & just as planned – you get to the job offer phase . 

Discover the candidate journey touchpoints

Engaging candidates with the company, its employees, and employer brand is crucial. And candidates usually choose to interact according to their own needs and interests. Now, all of these interactions fall under the category of candidate journey touchpoints . Your goal is to discover when, where, and how to touch base at each stage. 

The easiest way to do so is by putting yourself into a potential hire’s perspective. So put your thinking cap on and focus on these key points :

• How can someone learn about your company, its open positions, culture, benefits, etc.? Where would they get informed in the first place?
• What is your EVP, and how will candidates get familiar with it?
• How will applicants compare your company to the competitors?
• What is the application process like?
• How long is the hiring process, and which steps will potential hires go through?
• What happens after you welcome a new member to the team? 

Those are the elements candidates will think about throughout their journeys. So, you should cover all of them. And, if possible, ask your current and previous candidates about these essentials. Organize a brief chit chat or send them a concise survey.

List your channels and sources 

There are countless channels candidates can use for each of the touchpoints. And your job here is to find out which does the trick for you. And to learn if someone’s been badmouthing your firm. So, you’ll be dedicating a few moments to reputation management . 

So, candidates express their experiences and thoughts in different ways and through various platforms. If the whole recruitment process was described as poor or biased, you could expect a negative review on a website like Glassdoor . But each company uses different resources and channels to promote their vacancies. So you should map the sources you’ve used and those that drove applicants to reach out. Detect the channels that mattered for each touchpoint. The first few points of contact could happen through social media or career pages, while the final phases usually imply email, phone calls, etc. 

Final step: Get ready to use this map

Creating a candidate journey map entails graphic visualization. But that’s not all! Once you depict the path your potential (and future) hires take, you must use the info. So, the time to act is now ! And here’s the drill: analyze + improve ! 

So, first of all, these maps are super-efficient tools that could enhance your recruitment results. Use them to find out how good or bad your company is at each specific phase and touchpoint. Here’s your roadmap:

• Start by Googling your company,
• Ask for feedback & tips from your recently hired employees,
• Create and send out CX surveys (+ make them short and precise),
• Read and analyze company reviews and social media comments,
• Track the basic marketing and recruiting metrics .

Now, the ultimate step: put your insights into practice! First, prioritize. Take care of the issues that have the most massive impact on your processes, reputation, and outcomes. Then, establish a precise time frame and resources you’ll use to measure and improve your journeys and experiences. And just get ready for upgrading. 

Use this step-by-step guide to map & improve your candidate journey 

Learning how to make and use a candidate journey map will have a massive impact on your business. Because – it all starts with hiring . Smooth processes and steady growth are the key. And once you start following these steps and analyzing each one’s strong & weak points, you’ll be on the right track. 

If you need some extra guidance – talk to us ! A recognized recruitment agency is the best ally when it comes to positive experiences and lasting bonds with top talents.

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The Candidate Journey: How To Create, Map And Measure It

Most of us read several reviews before pulling the trigger on a purchase. As consumers, we prefer to learn about a company, product or service before we invest time and money in it.

Turns out this is pretty natural. We tend to interact with brands because they connect with us emotionally or they can provide a solution to a problem we need to solve.

Companies try to establish a relationship and a certain level of trust with you, often through a series of interactions, before asking if you want to buy something. This is known as the customer journey.

Recruiting is no different. Candidates rarely just show up to your website ‘ready to apply’. They like to learn about your company culture and opportunities before they’re ready to dive into the application process.

This decision-making cycle is known as the candidate journey.

What is the candidate journey?

The candidate journey is the set of experiences that job seekers and candidates go through during their job hunt.

There’s one very important thing to note here. The candidate journey starts long before the application. It starts the very first time a candidate ‘touches’ your brand.

At each stage of this journey, recruiters and hiring managers can do different things to impact candidate behavior, experience, and attitude.

In short, companies have the opportunity to influence candidates enough to turn them from passive strangers into enthusiastic applicants.

Getting the candidate journey right can also lead to more referrals, increased job applications, reduced time-to-hire, improved quality of hire, and a stronger employer brand .

Why does the candidate journey matter?

Nearly 60% of candidates have a negative candidate experience, and it often comes down to a lack of thought being applied to the candidate journey.

There is a web of different online and offline interactions between candidates and your company. Every time you interact with a candidate, you have an opportunity to build your relationship and increase the likelihood that they will feel connected to your brand.

But if you’re not careful, these interactions can also lead to disaster. If any of these critical interactions give candidates a negative experience, you’re at risk of doing some real damage to your employer brand – which may be very difficult to repair.

For many brands, candidates can also be customers, so a negative candidate experience also has the potential to impact the bottom line.

How to create a great candidate journey

A great candidate journey doesn’t just happen overnight. Making sure the candidate experience is optimal at every touchpoint requires a lot of planning and hard work.

We’ve broken down some of the most important areas to get started with:

Fill out your own application

There’s a severe disconnect over the application experience in particular – 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity.

And according to Appcast, companies can increase their application completion rate by up to 365% by simply decreasing the length or complexity of their job applications.

High dropoff rates lead to loss of top talent and damage to the employer brand from candidates who are frustrated with the process. Application abandonment can also increase an organization’s cost-per-hire .

Some employers believe that a lengthy application process is a positive thing because it “weeds out” applicants. They often believe that the ‘good talent’ should be dedicated enough to fill out the complex forms if they really want the job.

In reality, the opposite is true – the best candidates have plenty of opportunities. They aren’t as willing to jump through hoops and will happily go where the grass looks greener.

Taking your own application is the easiest way to walk a mile in your candidates’ shoes and see what needs to change. Apply with a fake name and details, and take an honest look at your process.

Does it make you more or less enthusiastic to work at your company?

Focus on relationships not resumes

This is something we say a lot at Beamery. ‘Online people’ are not simply candidates or consumers. They are both. And they look at purchasing decisions and applications in a very similar way.

This can create a problem for recruiting teams. Marketing departments have got extremely good at providing customized experiences for consumers. They pour money into the consumer journey, investing in relationships with the brand and making it as easy as possible for consumers to buy.

Today’s consumers expect high levels of personalization and so do today’s candidates. Yet nearly 7 5% of candidates don’t even receive responses from potential employers after filling out their applications.

Instead of feeling like a company cares about them and is invested in their future, they often feel like they’re throwing their resume and CV into a black hole.

Companies need to move from a transactional approach (e.g. filling a role) to a relationship-first approach (building value with candidates whether they apply or not).

If you want your competitive advantage to be your talent, you need to learn from marketing departments and focus on building relationships, not simply collecting resumes.

Map your ideal candidate journey

Sit down with your team and map out what you want your ideal candidate journey to look like. Storyboard the entire process from start to finish – what does best-in-class really look like?

Here are a few questions that you should start with when planning out your new and improved candidate journey:

• Who is your ideal candidate?
• What does your candidate persona look like? And what’s the best way to interact with those candidates online?
• What do you want candidates to feel when they first come across your brand’s online presence?
• How regularly can you reasonably expect your team to communicate with candidates? Is there a way that you can use automation to make a candidate’s experience more personalized?
• How can you make candidates feel welcome, valued and well informed at every stage of your process?
• What is the best way to nurture candidates that aren’t ready to apply and keep them warm for the future?

Learn from your mistakes

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” – Albert Einstein

No one has a perfect candidate journey. There’s always room for improvement and optimization. You can always do more to strengthen your brand, improve your process and delight candidates.

There’s another simple way to learn what’s currently broken and try and fix it.

Ask your candidates.

They’re the people that are actually going through your process and they’re the ones that you need to impress.

Some companies survey candidates at the end of the application process. This is a step in the right direction, but typically the survey data sits in an excel file, never to be opened again.

The majority of companies are in even worse shape. They have no idea what candidates think until the reviews start rolling in on Glassdoor (a very public way to find out).

Ideally, you should get feedback from candidates at every stage of the recruiting process. This way, you can see bottlenecks and issues immediately, and put fixes in place to improve the candidate experience before too much damage is done.

Measuring and monitoring the candidate experience is something that Beamery enables companies to do, but even if you don’t have a Recruitment Marketing platform , you should at least be collecting feedback in some shape or form.

The bottom line is, if you aren’t focused on building relationships with candidates and providing a high-quality candidate experience, you will lose top talent.

Today’s best candidates are typically only on the market for about 10 days , meaning you have a very short window of time to impress them and get them excited about the possibility of working for your company.

With thoughtful planning and the right tools and technology, employers can improve their candidate experience and as a result, can attract and hire high-quality talent.

Learn more about how Beamery can help organizations provide highly personalized candidate experiences to win top talent.

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Candidate Journey Map: What It Is and How to Make One

With such a wide range of employers to choose from, the best candidates today are no different from your best customers. Top candidates discover new opportunities through social and personal networks, expect a great candidate experience, and respond to organizations whose values resonate with them.

Many HR managers and business leaders have discovered the wonders of a candidate journey map. A seamless and pleasant candidate journey will have applicants singing praises and eager to get on board. An impersonal and inefficient one will send them running in the opposite direction and warning their network to do the same. According to a survey, 72% of job seekers report sharing bad candidate experiences on review sites, social media, or directly with friends and colleagues.

With today’s fierce competition, it’s important for employers to offer a stellar candidate experience with a journey map that runs smoothly and meets all the needs of applicants. 

On this page, we guide you through the stages of the candidate journey and provide you with a candidate journey map template that helps your hiring team achieve recruitment success.

What is a Candidate Journey Map?

Before anything else, let’s first describe the definition and essence of a candidate journey map.

A candidate journey map is basically a visual representation of a candidate journey. It tackles all the touchpoints candidates have with your brand during different stages of their candidate journey.

Having a candidate journey map template is important to enhance your company’s employer branding strategy and improve the overall candidate experience. It helps you further understand the needs, wants, and expectations of applicants in different phases of their journey.

Aside from providing a great candidate experience, a journey map also serves as your guide for a better online recruitment marketing strategy . You will discover which type of content works best at every stage of the candidate journey map and how to showcase your employer brand across various channels.

A Deeper Look into the Candidate Journey Map

When creating a candidate journey map template, it’s important to understand the stages in your candidate journey. Let’s go through each of them.

Seven stages of a candidate journey map:

1. Awareness

These are the first few touchpoints a candidate has with your company. These touchpoints make applicants aware of who you are, what you do, and the culture in your organization. In this stage, candidates are just getting to know you. Possible touchpoints could be viewing your job ads, visiting your career site, or talking to a company representative at a job fair.

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage of the candidate journey map, candidates start determining whether they are interested or not in working for your company. During this stage, they may have additional points of contact or touchpoints such as visiting your Careers Page or talking to a current employee. With the help of referral recruitment software , you can empower your employees with a referral program that further pushes applicants from the Consideration stage to the next steps in the candidate journey.

3. Interest

At this stage, potential candidates are now genuinely interested in working for your company. They are likely to apply unless something intervenes, such as getting a job offer from another company. Common touchpoints for this stage of the candidate journey map include job seekers emailing you questions about the open position or clicking on retargeted job ads.

4. Application

This stage starts when candidates fill out your application form on your Careers page and end when they are accepted or rejected. The way you communicate with candidates during this stage is crucial as it influences their perception of your company.

If you have a Careers page, make sure it’s optimized and looks professional. You can easily do this with job portal website development . Face to face communication is also a vital touchpoint. Interviews are the perfect opportunity to show candidates what your company is all about and why they should choose you as their next employer.

5. Selection

This happens right after the interview. At this point, you’re evaluating your candidates based on their performance during the interviews. While most companies simply let their candidates wait during the Selection stage, you can still generate touchpoints to improve the overall candidate experience.

For instance, you can send a thank-you email to candidates stating you appreciate their time and effort. You can also let them know how long it will take before you make your final decision.

The last step in the application phase. However, this is not the last stage of your candidate journey map, especially if you want to provide a stellar candidate experience. Touchpoints for this stage include calling or emailing your candidate about your decision. If a candidate is rejected, make sure you inform them why they didn’t make the cut. When you’re transparent with your candidates, this greatly improves their impression of you.

7. Onboarding

Onboarding your candidate is a vital method of ensuring a consistently great candidate experience throughout your journey map. It has a huge impact on whether your candidate stays at your company even after the probationary period.

As a recruiter, you should already be thinking about your onboarding process before you hire. After all, you don’t want to lose an employee in just a month after you’ve spent so much time, effort, and resources on recruiting them. The overall costs of hiring an employee can take a huge toll if you don’t onboard them properly.

How to Create a Candidate Journey Map Template

Making a candidate journey map template is best done with collaborative efforts. It typically involves three steps:

Identifying your candidate persona

Setting up the candidate journey framework, mapping out candidate journey touchpoints, 1. identifying your candidate persona.

The first thing you need to do is to determine the type of candidate whose journey you are mapping. In other words, you have to create your candidate persona.

The persona of your candidate journey map template is basically a semi-fictional representation of your ideal candidate. The persona is formed by specific skills, traits, goals, values, expectations, and experiences of your perfect hire.

To identify your candidate persona, start with the data you’ve already collected. Analytics from your HR recruitment software and results from candidate feedback surveys are extremely helpful.

Qualitative research is also valuable. Consider conducting informational interviews with fresh hires or candidates who declined your job offer. Get the individuals to share their stories. For instance, what kind of career growth do they anticipate with the company? What did they feel at every step of their candidate journey?

Pro tip: Collate all your research into a detailed portrait of your candidate person. This allows you to understand the person whose candidate experience you are visualizing.

2. Setting up the candidate journey framework and specifying the needs of a candidate

The different stages of the candidate journey described above form the basis of your candidate journey map template. The stages are universally applicable as all candidates go through each step, regardless of the company they apply to.

The basis of every step in the candidate journey map is made up of the needs of your candidates. To create a proper candidate journey map template, you will need to mull over what their needs are, as well as the thoughts and feelings that drive your candidates’ behavior. For example, these thoughts might be:

• Awareness: Who is this company? What do they do?
• Consideration: What kind of career growth do I anticipate with this company? How will they help me further advance my skills?
• Interest: What makes this company better than the rest? What’s the work culture like?
• Application: Did the company receive my application? Will I be contacted for an interview?
• Selection: Did I get a good impression of the company? Did I do a great job during the interview?
• Hiring: Will I like my new co-workers?
• Onboarding: What are my day-to-day tasks? What tools will I use? Who will I report to?

Understanding the thoughts and needs of your candidates will help you understand your candidate journey map a lot better. It also helps you come up with solutions to their needs.

For instance, during the application period, you can invest in candidate scheduling software that automates interview scheduling. This ensures your candidates always receive constant updates about their interviews.

Another example is for the consideration stage. You can post an infographic on your Careers page that showcases a typical career path in one of the openings at your company. You can also post an article that highlights a current employee’s journey with your company.

3. Mapping out the touchpoints of the candidate journey

To provide a truly great candidate experience with your journey map, identify the touchpoints between your company and your candidates. As mentioned earlier, touchpoints refer to the interactions candidates have with your company.

The number of possible touchpoints is endless, especially during the first stages of the candidate journey. This makes it hard to map out each and every single touchpoint, which is why your candidate persona is useful. Think about the behaviors of your candidate persona: Which recruiting channels do they visit often? Are they active on social media or present in career fairs? Try to include at least three to five touchpoints for each stage in your candidate journey map template.

Create Your Candidate Journey Map Today

After mapping out your candidate journey, create a graphic visualization! There’s no right or wrong way to do this. All you need is to gather all of the information we’ve tackled and then combine them in a candidate journey map template.

Some HR teams create a candidate journey map using post-its. Others map it out on a whiteboard with markers. The choice is up to you. The important thing is that your visual candidate journey map combines all the valuable insights you’ve gathered into a format that’s easy to understand and simple to digest.

Once you have a good overview of your candidate journey, you can identify bottlenecks in your recruitment process, improve your hiring decisions, and ultimately shorten your time to hire.

Hire faster, hire easier.

For more information and inquiries about our recruitment management software, reach out to us and fill up our contact form.

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How to do journey mapping in recruiting to create a great EX

Human resources are the core of any organization, its capabilities, and the driving force. No wonder recruiting is one of the essential elements of a business. At the same time, finding, attracting, hiring, and onboarding people takes a lot of resources. And often, having hired somebody perfect for their position, you return to the start while many more vacancies are on the way to your HR task list. 

To make the recruiting process as efficient as possible, you can find a magic lamp, seek external help from HR agencies (alas, not the option when this agency is you), or study your HR department’s internal kitchen and the experience of candidates and new hirees. Then valuable insights at hand with an action plan will not take long.

• 1.1 Things to remember about journey mapping in recruiting
• 1.2 Benefits of having such a journey map
• 2.1 Building a persona 
• 3.1 Awareness
• 3.2 Consideration
• 3.3 Application
• 3.4 Selection
• 3.6 Onboarding
• 4 How to act when a journey mapping in recruiting is done
• 5 Summing up

Why consider journey mapping in recruitment? 

The recruitment process is bursting with challenges every HR specialist dreams of zooming smoothly between. How to attract the right people without spending much time reviewing applications from those who clearly are not a good fit? What engagement techniques are better to retain the perfect candidates so that no other companies or agencies entice them away from you? How to optimize the recruitment flow to timely close human resource gaps in the organization? 

Well, a candidate journey map (or candidate-specific stages of an employee journey map ) can become a reference book for the HR department and even kind of a go-to source for everyone involved in the hiring process.

But first, what is journey mapping in recruiting? It’s a method that comprises three major steps: gathering information about candidates, visualizing their experience by creating a map of their “journey”, and finding problems that can be fixed coupled with ideas on how to do so. 

All in all, you end up with a visual representation of a candidate's journey composed of interactions with your company and spiced out with this candidate’s goals, motivations, frustrations, actions, expectations, and more. 

How long does such a journey last? A candidate’s path starts when a person learns about your company or starts looking for a job and ideally ends with retirement in old age. Okay, maybe in a few years of effective and fruitful work. But sometimes that journey cuts short long before the expected happy ending. A candidate’s journey is a part of an employee’s journey, but its successful frontier is a passed probation period. 

When reviewing each stage of the candidate's journey, you will better understand their experience and find points of its improvement, which will certainly allow you to quicker and better form harmonious teams of highly motivated and engaged employees.

Benefits of having such a journey map

If you are still on the fence about using journey mapping in recruiting, here are six (of many more) perks of having a candidate journey map: 

• You don't fantasize about your ideal or real candidates. You know their background, their challenges and pain points, and how best to interact with them. That helps to close the breach between illusion and reality. 
• You can go beyond the boundaries of the journey in its usual sense and improve not only direct interactions with your personas but also the company's image as an employer outside these interactions.  
• 81% of candidates consider regular feedback and status updates from the employer or recruiter throughout the candidate journey a good experience enhancer. With a journey map at hand, you will know for sure at what stages your personas expect you to follow up and through what channels. 
• Workers are fish in the vast sea, and to catch yours, you need to know where to set the nets. Understanding what job-related platforms and channels your personas use will help to do this.
• More people will pass the probationary period and be happy to work further. That is, the positive effect on the recruiting journey will echo through all stages of the employee journey and improve the entire employee experience.
• The company has a single source of truth about the people it wants to hire and is recruiting. Thus, your colleagues will understand their role in the candidate journey and the steps they can take to take it to the next level. 

Journey mapping in recruitment: how to do it right

Like any initiative, journey mapping in recruitment can’t be launched abruptly. First, you need to gather a team. Mapping is a collaborative methodology. So ideally, this team should include not only people from the HR department but also researchers, colleagues from other departments, and top managers. Together, you will decide on the scope of the soon-to-be-mapped journey and specify the purpose of this project. You also have to understand how frequently you are going to meet, who will be responsible for what, etc. Then you will collect a sufficient amount of information and proceed to building personas.

Building a persona 

Personas in the recruitment journey are called candidates. Candidate persona profiles help HRs to navigate the seemingly endless space of people who are searching for a job or might switch jobs or are just going to graduate and become a part of a labor market. Such profiles let you focus only on those who fit most of its content, use the right channels to reach out, and tweak your messages to the relevant pains and motivations of a potential employee. 

To build your candidate persona(s), you have to collect valuable data to put into their profiles. It can be information from past job interviews or feedback shared by the team and top managers. If you’re new to personas, check out our Persona creation guide with expert tips and template library with ready-to-go persona profiles.

Pro tip: Sometimes it’s important to have not only candidate persona profiles. It can be useful to include in the journey map everyone who significantly influences candidate experience: recruiters, direct superiors, onboarding buddies, etc. Having those at hand, you will be able to build a multipersona map . And, if you’re going to map a candidate journey in UXPressia, you can reflect all personas’ interactions in a dedicated Personas section.

Stages of a journey mapping in recruitment

Once you define the persona(s), it's time to move to a candidate journey map. There are typical stages a candidate persona goes through. Their titles aren’t set in stone and you may tweak them to your liking:

• Consideration;
• Application;
• Onboarding.

Knowing the steps your persona takes through their candidate journey is not enough to build an actionable journey map. Every stage of the journey should contain essential information, such as: 

• Goals to know what drives them at each stage;
• Expectations based on a candidate’s previous experience and mindset; 
• Actions and the process to check what your persona does to achieve their goal and help them optimize this process; 
• Emotional experience to always know how your persona is doing(it’s a perfect way to highlight moments of truth or pain in your persona’s journey); 
• Quotes to boost the empathy within the team and prove some points with actual words from the candidates;
• Channels you contact the persona through to check whether those are relevant and channels your candidates prefer to use; 
• Touchpoints to consider which one(s) could be optimized or improved.

And anything else that lets you dig deeper and see the fullest possible picture of what’s going on within your candidate’s journey in real life. 

How about learning a bit more about every stage we mentioned above?

At this stage, your persona somehow learns about your company. Maybe your HR contacts them, or maybe they surf through LinkedIn and see that their former colleague has started a new job in your organization, or they stumble upon your company profile at a job portal. Your persona at the Awareness stage can still work somewhere, but now they know you and maybe consider finding out more.  

Think about how widely you are represented in the job-related space. What message carries information that a potential candidate may accidentally read somewhere? What makes you stand out from your competitors? How do you grab future hirees’ attention?

Take into account previous experience the persona might have with you. Did you contact your persona before and how was it? Maybe your candidate is a former employee of yours? 

Pay attention to communication. Do the channels you used to contact candidates fit their preferences? Does your recruiting message hit the persona’s motivations? Do you outreach people when they are clearly on vacation or enjoying the weekend? 

Pro tip: When contacting somebody, mind that they may already have started their journey with you by discussing your company with a friend or reading a review of you as an employer on a job-related website.

Consideration

Here, the persona reads or rereads your vacancy and thinks about whether they’d love to join the team. Or maybe another one. There are so many organizations out there. It’s also research time. Your persona wants to know you better, so they google your social media pages, your reviews on different sites, and ask their friends to share some insights. 

Use the wording of your persona in vacancies to highlight their motivations and smooth the things that may bother them. That way, people will feel that you speak the same language. For instance, some want to climb the career ladder, while some need a health insurance policy, and it would be strange to outreach such people with news about a game console in the office.

Pro tip: Create a candidate’s vocabulary section in the persona profiles to list their vocab and make it accessible across your organizations. Thus, HRs will use it during the interviews and tweak the vacancies’ content. 

It’s clear that at the Consideration stage, many things depend on what criteria the candidate is guided by, but you can always make sure that your website and social media pages are full of content that’s interesting and useful for your persona and provides some insight not only into the work process but also into the team that a new hiree will have to merge.

Be open to questions that a candidate may come with. Clarify that a candidate can reach out to get more details even before they apply. 

Pro tip: When sharing a vacancy, include a list of useful links or maybe a presentation with photos of team members and their feedback on you as the employer and corporate culture. 

Application

Persona expresses their interest in your job by applying for a position opened. 

How convenient is this process? If a person needs to fill out a 100-page questionnaire, most likely, their journey will end here. Why? 60% of candidates exit a page or refuse to go on with too complex application forms. That makes sense. Moreover, a candidate may and does apply for a few jobs at once, and they usually stick with an employer that values their time even before the work starts. 

Do you follow up? Even if the application doesn't impress you, take the time to politely decline and maybe provide some feedback. This is a huge investment in the company's image in the job market. As you never know who the candidate of your dreams will one day ask for advice on whether you’re a good employer. 

Pro tip: Suggest different options to apply. For example, mobile job seekers may find it more convenient to record a short video greeting and attach their CV rather than filling out a questionnaire.

HR specialists know this stage as a Screening or Interview. This stage can be divided into lots of substages, depending on the complexity of the hiring process in your particular case. Substages are more narrow and focused parts of a journey stage. So every interview or test task can be a separate part of the journey and hide pleasant surprises or off-putting factors. 

How optimal is the hiring process in your company? You may have too many selection stages, some of which can be combined or swapped so that the candidate does not spend a lot of effort at first and does not lose motivation.

What about your test tasks? Do they look like a job for an entire department or can you check one’s skills even with a short challenge? Do you pay for test tasks? How long does it take to review and provide feedback when the task is done? 

Pro tip: Just be kind. 73% of people searching for a job say that this process is one of the biggest stresses in their lives. And remember that you can always invite more stakeholders to an interview to reduce the hiring process time and stress involved instead of running 3-4-5 separate calls.   

It’s your shared happily ever after with the persona. If they accept your offer, of course. 

How long does it take to make decisions about candidates in your company? The most qualified candidates aren’t waiting for long in line ( 10 days only, if we may). Sometimes you just can’t fasten the process, but you can clearly articulate how many days or weeks your candidate should be ready to wait for the offer. 

By the way, check what you usually offer to successful candidates. Is your offer too formal? Does it lack a taste of personalization? Is there anything that can hook a candidate and make them accept? Something like a relocation package or laptop for a remote hiree. 

Pro tip: Think about introductory events for a newbie in your company, such as a joint Zoom meeting to congratulate them or an excursion to the office. Prior engagement will soothe the first days of a new employee's work and totally enhance their experience. 

Do not overlook this stage when doing journey mapping in recruiting. A new hiree will become a full-fledged employee only after the probation period, so it is only fair to consider the Onboarding stage as a part of the recruitment process. After all, if the person doesn’t pass it, it’s game over and the search begins again. 

Do you leave newcomers to the mercy of fate? Do you have a buddy program? When a candidate that got the offer joins your team, they still need to adjust, understand all the dynamics, and finally fit. You can always try to predict how this or that person will interact with their future colleagues. But who says you can’t cushion a shock? Just in case. 

How often do you have meetings with a newbie during onboarding? Are you clear about a probation plan and your expectations? To succeed, people must know what you are waiting for from their side. And they want to be encouraged on the way. 

Pro tip: If suddenly, at the onboarding stage, you or a new hiree realize that your match was a mistake, do not be afraid to admit it. A well-timed ended candidate journey will save a lot of resources for both parties and free up space for something new.

That’s it. And when you’re done with the stages, tailoring those to your case, the candidate journey may look like this:

Pro tip: Illustrate your candidate journey map with Storyboards that tell a persona’s story without words. That always takes a map to the next visual level, deepens the empathy for a candidate, and saves time during strategic workshops. 

How to act when a journey mapping in recruiting is done

Very often, all the energy is spent on the journey mapping, and there is no energy left for the next steps, or some don’t even suspect that these steps exist. 

Don’t let your efforts gather dust on the shelf, reap all the benefits of the initiative. A finished map is never really finished, it's just an instrument set for further work. And by further work, we mean:

• Brainstorming and strategic workshops. Invite your team and people involved in the candidate journey to come up with ideas and action plans based on the candidate's story you mapped. 
• After implementing an idea or two, mark it on the journey map and reflect on the changes it ignited.
• Set up the feedback collection process and regularly collect it to match the data received with the journey built. Maybe you’ll identify a new candidate's experience flaw or see that a goal of your persona is not relevant anymore. For example, back in the pandemic time, people wanted to stay home, but nowadays their goal may be quite the opposite. 

Keeping your candidate journey map and persona profile evergreen, you’ll see how it changes your recruiting process day by day.  

Leran more on what to do after you employee journey map is done from Paul Lopushinsky, the founder of Playficient:

Any business is a living and breathing creature whose cells are employees, and these cells are constantly updated. Each has its own life cycle, purpose, and path. And if you know what cells are needed, you can bring internal processes to perfection and become a powerful and strong being for which there are no barriers in any market.

Journey mapping in recruiting is a great tool to better understand both your organization's human resource needs and more effectively find the right people among the billions of people on the planet. And not only find but also turn their path in your company into an example that candidates will infect your future and current employees with. This is the same butterfly effect, only you can control it by taking care of the experience of your candidates.

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Journey mapping in recruiting is really a game-changer. There was no way I could convince my colleagues to tweak our vacancies’ content so that more suitable candidates came to us. And optimize the number of interviews! After collecting enough feedback, it became obvious to everyone.

What is the candidate journey and how to successfully recruit with journey maps

Recruiters know: The candidate has moved into a powerful position and has changed our game. It’s not only on the candidate to apply and perform, but also on us recruiters to convince the candidate to become part of our organization. It’s on us to leave a good impression and to provide a great candidate experience in order to stand out and compete with other organizations. 

In this article, we'll discuss:

• Journey mapping in the context of recruiting
• Questions to solve in recruiting
• How to create a recruiting journey map
• Example journey map: application experience
• Challenges of journey mapping in recruiting

What are candidate journey maps for?

Just as we look closely at how candidates present themselves and make decisions against them at certain moments; they do the same thing to us: they judge us as an employer. Both parties try to present their best sides and at the same time evaluate one another, not only during the interview, but throughout the recruitment process. For a candidate many questions can arise; is the answer to my last email long missing? Is my time being treated respectfully and my effort appreciated? How rigid are the assessment methods in place that I have to go through?

During the recruitment process the way a candidate presents themselves can leave a negative impression of them as an employee, and likewise when we present ourselves poorly, we risk giving candidates a bad impression of us as an employer. Thus, to improve outcomes for both parties, it is important to shift our focus, understand our prospective employees' situation and take their experience during our recruitment process more seriously.

We need to become aware of the critical and frustrating moments that our candidates go through, so that we are able to actively identify and improve them.

We need to look out for opportunities to motivate, excite and convince candidates that we are an interesting employer to work for so that they opt for us instead of a different organization.

Customer journey maps – applied to candidate journey mapping– help us slip into the candidate’s shoes, understand their experience from their perspectives, get to know their pain points and find solutions for improvement.

How can candidate journey mapping improve recruitment?

Every stage in the recruitment process, from raising awareness about the job opportunity through to the final job offer harbours different challenges for the recruiter, and different frustrations and expectations for the candidates. Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself when designing recruitment process in your organization.

Who are the candidates?

We often differentiate candidates between their profession, background, experience level, skill-set, cultural requirements etc. However, our work life and our outside-of-work life are increasingly becoming merged and no longer have clear boundaries. The job is not only about how we make a living, but connects with many other factors in our lives, e.g. who we are as a person, the people we hang out with and what lifestyle we want to have etc.

Thus, going beyond resumes, thinking more holistically and understanding the relationship we have with our candidates as human beings, will help us understand their needs, interests and frustrations better. Creating a journey map and developing a persona help us understand:

• What does the candidates’ current work/life situation look like?
• What are the candidates’ expectations towards the new job?  
• What do they enjoy, what frustrates them at work?
• In what work environment do they feel comfortable?
• What stakeholders and factors are involved in their decision making?

How do applicants become aware of the job offer?

When we are looking for highly skilled and experienced candidates, we often don’t find them in our application pool. These folks are usually not active job seekers but already employed, involved in other projects, or not involved in thinning out the endless amount of positions on job platforms. So how can we make them aware of our job offer?

The range of places where we can reach suitable candidates is vast, from private networks and informal recommendations, to an endless number of different social networking sites. Depending on the persona, it is crucial to choose which communication channels will be most suitable and how we can best use them to make potential candidates aware of the  job we have on offer.

Journey maps have many benefits and provide us with answer to the following questions:

• What channels and platforms do the candidates use and for what purpose are they using them?
• What do I need to be aware of when using a specific channel?
• What communication styles do candidates expect on different channels?
• How do they want to be approached?

What information are candidates looking for along the application journey?

In order to take a job opportunity into consideration, candidates need to know how they can benefit from it. The details about the job they receive, directly or indirectly will affect their decision making e.g. in the job description, on the career page, in our private messages etc.

Strict requirements or inflexible job conditions can exclude certain groups of people, for example, people who are parents, groups of people with disabilities, or those who are only able to work specific hours.

If we want candidates to take our job opportunity into consideration, we need to understand what they are looking for and what we can offer in order to meet those needs and wishes.

Candidate journey mapping helps us answer these questions:

• What’s the next step the applicants want to take and how can we support them?
• Do applicants receive all the information they need so they get a clear picture of the job and context?
• Do they get appropriate and timely feedback along the application journey?
• If we want to attract more diversity, e.g. parents, does this job allow for what they are looking for, e.g.part-time and/or flextime?

What makes candidates drop out along the application process?

A cumbersome, energy-consuming application process is harmful in many different ways.

It can be disrespectful to a candidate's time; hurt an applicant's first impression of our company; or be stressful and frustrating to complete. As a consequence it can prevent a candidate from submitting an application, or worse it could be the reason for someone withdrawing their application, as they receive an equally interesting offer from a different employer.

We need to see the hiring process as a reciprocal process between the employer and the candidate: where a good balance is found between collecting all the information we need to understand candidate's, while also providing them with enough insight about who we are and opportunities to present themselves authentically and in their preferred way.

Frustrations and questions that mapping candidate journey can solve:

• What are the moments that are frustrating for the candidates?
• How effortful or time-consuming is the process for them?
• Can they rely on the application process being clear, transparent and fair in every moment?
• Do they get to know the team and the company culture and how do they perceive it?

How do candidates decide about the job offer?

In the end, it is not so much the final job offer that affects the candidate’s decision making, but all previous stages that set the foundation beforehand.

Giving our candidates the chance to get the right information about the job opportunity during the whole process helps set the right expectations, minimizing the risk of rejection at the end of the process and ensuring the recruiter’s time and effort was not wasted.

Being transparent about what the company has to offer also helps identify a long-term fit and reduce the turnover rate in the long run.

When it comes to final decision making about candidates it is important to be aware that they might have stakeholders influencing their decision. For example, parents are strongly influenced by their family’s interests. Therefore, analyzing stakeholder relations can provide  us with relevant insights that will help us support their decision making.

Future candidate journey mapping in recruitment process can answer the following questions:

• What information does the candidate need in order to weigh their options and make a decision?
• What other people influence and are involved in the candidate’s decision making?
• How can we help them build up trust towards us as their new employer?
• How can we support them in their onboarding and foster loyalty during the recruitment process?

How to create a candidate journey map to use in recruiting?

To fill the applicant journey map with a variety of meaningful insights, we can use different types of journey mapping tools for candidate experience mapping. Let's see what information, besides the classic satisfaction score, is useful for a candidate journey map.

Dramatic arc

A dramatic arc visualizes the engagement level of a candidate at each step of their journey. It reveals when the candidates are very involved or more detached from the process. We can also use terms like involvement, motivation or excitement to describe the engagement level. During the application stage, candidates might be more engaged when being interviewed than when submitting their application. During interviews face-to-face interactions might be more engaging than digital ones.

Combined with the emotional journey, a dramatic arc helps us reveal the critical pain points of a candidate’s journey. A step that has a high engagement level but triggers negative emotions needs to get attention urgently: these are moments when candidates are likely to drop out of the process.

Channels of communication

Adding an overview of the channels that are used and touched along the journey helps us understand on what occasion candidates use which channel and how this influences the candidate experience. The ultimate goal of analyzing channels is to make the process as convenient as possible for the candidate, and taking the chance to communicate with them in methods that are both effective and enjoyable.

The way we use communication channels can negatively affect our relationship with a potential candidate, for example, when candidates are confronted with digital tools for long periods of time instead of having real conversations, their engagement level might sink and make them withdraw their application.

Or, if we find out that our candidates find emails painful because usually they only use slack and there they are highly responsive, we might consider providing communication on additional channels.

Depending on our recruitment process we can split the journey in different stages. Each stage summarizes certain steps of the candidate’s journey, as e.g. the awareness stage, consideration stage, etc. Bigger companies might have more or certainly different stages than smaller companies, as e.g. assessment centers.

These stages help us keep an overview of the candidate’s journey and also break it down into sub journeys. Within a sub journey we can then focus on the steps in more detail and elaborate on specific events within a stage, as e.g. the application stage.

Candidate journey map example: application experience

Candidate journey map template

For a free candidate journey template for recruiting efforts, sign up for free on Smaply and use the EX template that you find in-app.

Challenges when introducing candidate journey mapping

Although there is already an increased focus on the job seeker's experience in recruiting, there are still challenges that need to be overcome when introducing journey mapping.

Clustering candidates into personas

The premise of good recruiting is to continuously question our unconscious biases and make as many unprejudiced and fair decisions as possible. Enforcing stereotypes, clustering people and making decisions based on demographics is definitely not the way to go and recruiters righly have a strong voice against this. But aren’t personas just about that?

No, they are not.

Personas are boundary objects. They can help us understand what candidates we are talking to, what they feel, need, experience.

However, there are certain factors that are less relevant for us to consider and which can restrict our ability to make good insights and cause our decision making ability to be rigid.

For example, is it really relevant if a candidate is 35 or 40 years old? If they live in the same city, or abroad? If they are native english speakers or just proficient? When we want to empathize with people, we need to find the sweet spot between the similarities and differences of our candidates, between the details and the high-level view.

Following a clear approach when developing personas will help us prevent building superficial personas and when basing them on real research data it will actually help us break prejudices.

Multiple candidate personas

Depending on the vacancies we are trying to fill, and the relevant requirements of those roles, the candidates we’re working with will be pretty different. For example there will be great diversity when we look at their area of work (like marketing, development, sales, R&D), seniority level (like junior, mid-level, senior, lead), experience (like different industries, different types of products) and job environment (like travelling. remote, onsite).

The larger the recruiting team grows and the more specialized they are in different areas, the more sense it will make for them to break personas down into more detailed ones.

Thus, a larger recruitment team might develop multiple sets of personas under the category development candidates, and another set of personas for sales candidates.

For smaller teams, segmenting personas in ways that are too detailed can be challenging and in the end prevent them from working with the personas. Therefore, they rather might prefer to simplify and work with one persona for development candidates, and another persona for sales candidates.

Aligning applicant's experience and employee experience

It is not only the recruiter and the candidates that are involved in the recruiting process but also team leads, co-workers and other stakeholders. This team effort occurs during the initial CV review processes, interviews, meet-and-greets and more. Providing a great candidate experience means actively involving these stakeholders and priming them for a more candidate focused mind-set.

Getting the hiring managers aboard a journey mapping approach is essential, but can be challenging sometimes. They don’t deal with recruiting and candidates on a daily basis and recruiting new people for them means an additional task that they need to juggle amongst an already busy schedule.  

So how do we get buy-in and make the process beneficial for all parties?

A great way to tackle this is by including both the candidate and the hiring manager in mapping candidate's journey. What are their shared pain points and how can we tackle them?

Fixing the hiring manager’s pain points proves the benefits of journey mapping and improves their motivation and engagement in the recruiting process.

This is one way of many to get buy-in – in our article about embedding and scaling journey mapping in organizations we have collected more of these tips to help us get going.

Candidates use the recruitment process to evaluate the employer and to make a thoughtful decision on their next career step. There are many factors that can positively, or negatively influence a potential candidates decision making process as they navigate this process.

Thus, as recruiters, we need to take our understanding of our candidate’s experience and place it at the center of our recruitment process. By doing this we are better able to understand and optimize the candidate’s experience along the entire application process, providing a more seamless experience that will help us hire the best folks, instead of losing them towards other companies.

And now, what's next?

Now you have all the knowledge you need to improve your recruitment process.

Use Smaply to visualize the recruitment process, find pain points of your applicant or team, and innovate the hiring journey.

Creating recruiting maps with Smaply is available for free.

Melina Savvidis

Melina has a background in organization studies. She has practical experience as an employee experience manager covering the entire journey from talent acquisition to onboarding and offboarding. Ultimately, her main focus is building a positive and innovative organizational culture.

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How to Boost Your Talent Acquisition Practices › Candidate Experience & Engagement › Candidate Journey Mapping

Map Your Candidates’ Journey to Tackle Existing Pain Points

Mapping your candidates’ journey is about gaining an in-depth view of their feelings, expectations and thoughts as they go through your recruiting process, just as if they were consumers and you analyzed how they interact with a service you provide. Candidate journeys are experience-based, shedding light on pain points such as feeling neglected, not seen or not valued.

Despite the uniqueness of each organization’s recruiting process, let alone the intricacies that may arise as we delve into specific roles, there are two starting steps to creating and improving your candidate experience journey map.

Get in your candidates’ shoes. Try to anticipate what they may expect from the moment they first come into contact with your employer brand to when they become new hires or are informed of the decision to not move forward with their application.

• Do they need more visibility, clearer information or quicker response times?
• Were the information requests too many, not relevant or very time-consuming?
• Are your candidates free from the hassle of back-and-forth interview scheduling?
• Do your candidates undergo a positive, bias-free interview process?

Next, ideate how to meet their needs and expectations and bring those ideas to life. Schedule automated emails and make sure to include an update on the application status. Combine the information requests to minimize them and use gamification when possible. Empower your candidates to schedule their own interviews with self-scheduling tools. Train your recruiting team, implement automatic pre-qualification, work with anonymized profiles if possible and rely on dashboards and reports to develop an inclusive recruiting experience.

Mapping your candidates’ journey is not a one-off initiative but an ongoing task. As your business and recruiting objectives evolve, you should revisit your processes, remap your journey and iterate as needed to reduce your candidates’ pain points and ensure a positive experience.

Avature Advantage

• Sending personalized, automated emails or SMS provides visibility to your candidates into their application status while keeping your brand front of their minds. Configure the steps in your Avature workflow and schedule communications to keep your candidates in the loop at all times.
• Avature self-scheduling functionalities help reduce the back-and-forth and simplify interview planning as you can provide your candidates with pre-set time slots for them to choose a convenient interview time.
• Include scoring fields related to the minimum requirements of the requisition you’re trying to fill in order to automatize pre-qualification.
• Leverage dashboards and reports to visualize the number of candidates from underrepresented minorities in the different stages of your recruitment funnel.
• Work with anonymized profiles in the Hiring Manager portal to ensure bias-free candidate screening.

One way that we work to stand out is through our recruitment process. Avature has helped us make it personalized, seamless and also fast.

Jeff Sonntag

Recruiter and Recruiting Systems Administrator

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100% response rate to all candidates

Thanks to Avature automated email functionalities, L’Oréal is able to respond to all of its candidates , helping them feel valued and cared for throughout the hiring process.

36% Improvement in candidate experience

CBRE tracked their candidates’ satisfaction at specific key points of the hiring process and turned that data into an actual improvement in their experience.

10 million candidates engaged

Bankers Life tapped into Avature to stay close to 10 million candidates through scheduled, personalized emails .

Map Your Candidates’ Journey With Avature!

Navigating the Candidate Landscape: How Analytics Enhance Journey Mapping

Elizabeth Parker

• August 15, 2023
• Reporting and Analytics

In the dynamic realm of talent acquisition , understanding and optimizing the candidate journey has become paramount. As organizations vie for top-tier talent, the intricacies of attracting, engaging, and retaining candidates necessitate a comprehensive approach.

This is where the concept of candidate journey mapping comes into play, illuminating the path candidates tread from initial awareness to eventual onboarding. The journey mapping process enables companies to identify pain points, seize opportunities, and fortify their employer branding. However, to truly unlock its potential, the infusion of analytics is essential .

Hirebee allows you to find the best candidates for your specific needs through recruitment marketing and job distribution features.

Analytics not only provide a panoramic view of candidate behaviors and preferences but also empower data-driven decision-making. This exploration delves into the symbiotic relationship between candidate journey mapping and analytics, elucidating how harnessing data-driven insights can augment the candidate experience, foster strategic refinement, and ultimately sculpt a talent acquisition strategy that resonates in the modern landscape.

Table of Contents

The Candidate Journey Mapping Process

The candidate journey is a multi-faceted process that encompasses various stages, each playing a crucial role in shaping the overall candidate experience. By comprehensively understanding and mapping this journey, organizations can gain valuable insights into candidate behaviors, preferences, and pain points. This section delves into the stages of the candidate journey and highlights the benefits that stem from a well-executed journey mapping process.

Stages of the Candidate Journey

The candidate journey can be divided into distinct stages, each representing a pivotal phase in the candidate’s interaction with the organization. These stages include:

• Awareness : The candidate becomes aware of the organization’s existence through various channels, such as social media, job boards, or networking events.
• Consideration : Candidates start exploring the organization further, researching its values, culture, and available job opportunities.
• Application : Candidates decide to apply for a specific role, filling out application forms and submitting their resumes.
• Interview and Assessment : Candidates who pass the initial screening are invited for interviews or assessments, where their skills and qualifications are evaluated.
• Selection and Offer : The organization selects the most suitable candidate and extends a job offer, marking a critical turning point in the journey.
• Onboarding : The candidate transitions into an employee, going through the onboarding process and becoming integrated into the organization.

Benefits of Comprehensive Journey Mapping

A well-defined candidate journey mapping process offers a range of benefits that extend beyond mere understanding. It paves the way for a more efficient and personalized candidate experience, informs strategic decision-making, and enhances the organization’s employer branding.

• Improved Candidate Experience : By tracing the candidate’s path from awareness to onboarding, organizations can identify pain points and friction areas. This insight enables them to streamline processes, remove obstacles, and create a smoother, more engaging candidate experience.
• Informed Decision-Making : A comprehensive journey map provides data-driven insights into candidate behaviors and preferences at each stage. This information empowers organizations to make informed adjustments to their recruitment strategies, ensuring alignment with candidate expectations.
• Enhanced Employer Branding : A positive candidate experience, fostered through journey mapping, contributes to an organization’s reputation as an attractive employer. Candidates who feel valued and respected are more likely to share positive feedback, amplifying the organization’s employer branding efforts.

In essence, a thorough understanding of the candidate journey and its intricate stages, coupled with the benefits derived from effective journey mapping, underscores the significance of this process in modern talent acquisition. By recognizing the value of each phase and leveraging analytics to enrich the journey, organizations can elevate their recruitment practices and cultivate meaningful connections with potential candidates.

The Role of Analytics in Journey Mapping

In today’s dynamic and competitive talent acquisition landscape, understanding and optimizing the candidate journey has become a strategic imperative for organizations seeking to attract and retain top talent. This is where analytics emerges as a powerful ally, offering insights and data-driven intelligence that elevate the effectiveness of candidate journey mapping.

Data Collection and Integration:

To construct a comprehensive view of the candidate journey, organizations must gather and synthesize data from diverse sources. Analytics facilitates this process by seamlessly integrating data from applicant tracking systems, recruitment platforms, website interactions, and feedback surveys. By amalgamating these disparate data points, organizations can gain a holistic understanding of candidate behavior, preferences, and pain points.

Data Analysis Techniques:

Analytics equips HR professionals and talent acquisition teams with an arsenal of data analysis techniques. Quantitative analysis tracks key metrics such as conversion rates, drop-offs at various stages, and time-to-hire , enabling organizations to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

Qualitative analysis, on the other hand, delves into sentiment analysis and candidate feedback, shedding light on the emotional aspects of the candidate journey. Furthermore, predictive analytics enables organizations to forecast candidate behavior, facilitating proactive decision-making and personalized engagement strategies.

Visualization Tools and Techniques:

Transforming raw data into meaningful insights requires effective visualization. Analytics empowers organizations with visualization tools and techniques that simplify complex data into easy-to-understand visuals. Interactive dashboards and reports provide real-time insights, enabling stakeholders to quickly grasp the candidate journey’s intricacies. These visual representations serve as a compass, guiding decision-makers toward strategic adjustments and improvements.

In essence, analytics is the compass that guides organizations through the intricate terrain of the candidate journey. By harnessing data collection, analysis, and visualization, analytics enhances the precision and depth of journey mapping. This analytical approach enables organizations to adapt their strategies, personalize experiences, and optimize touchpoints along the candidate journey. However, the effective use of analytics in journey mapping also raises ethical considerations, such as data privacy, transparency, and fairness, which organizations must conscientiously address. As the talent acquisition landscape continues to evolve, analytics will play an increasingly pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of candidate interactions, ultimately driving the success of organizations in acquiring and retaining top-tier talent.

Enhancing Candidate Journey Mapping with Analytics

Enhancing the candidate journey mapping process through analytics revolutionizes the way organizations attract and engage top talent. By harnessing the power of data-driven insights, employers can strategically navigate the complex landscape of candidate interactions, resulting in a more seamless, personalized, and efficient recruitment experience.

Personalization and Customization:

Analytics play a pivotal role in tailoring candidate experiences to individual preferences. By analyzing candidate data, organizations gain a comprehensive understanding of each candidate’s journey. This enables the creation of personalized touchpoints, from targeted communications that align with candidates’ interests and skills to customized content that resonates with their career aspirations. Through analytics, recruiters can effectively anticipate candidate needs, optimizing engagement and fostering a sense of connection throughout the journey.

Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities:

The application of analytics unveils critical insights into the candidate journey, revealing potential pain points and areas for improvement. By tracking metrics such as application completion rates, drop-offs, and time spent at each stage, organizations can pinpoint bottlenecks that hinder progress. Analytics-driven identification of these obstacles empowers recruiters to streamline processes, refine communication strategies, and optimize the candidate experience. Moreover, uncovering opportunities for enhancement ensures that candidates are more likely to progress smoothly through the recruitment funnel .

Real-time Tracking and Adjustments:

In a dynamic and rapidly evolving recruitment landscape, real-time insights are invaluable. Analytics enable organizations to monitor candidate interactions in real time, granting recruiters the ability to respond promptly and adapt strategies accordingly. By leveraging real-time data, recruiters can identify candidate behavior patterns, allowing for agile adjustments that ensure consistent engagement and an improved journey. This dynamic approach enhances candidate satisfaction by addressing their needs as they arise, creating a positive and lasting impression.

In conclusion, enhancing candidate journey mapping with analytics empowers organizations to transform their recruitment strategies. Personalization and customization drive engagement, identifying pain points and opportunities ensures continuous improvement, and real-time tracking facilitates agile adjustments. By leveraging the wealth of data at their disposal, organizations can navigate the candidate landscape with precision, delivering an exceptional experience that not only attracts top talent but also fosters lasting relationships. As technology advances and candidate expectations evolve, analytics-driven journey mapping remains a cornerstone of successful talent acquisition, enabling organizations to stay ahead in the competitive race for exceptional candidates.

Case Studies and Examples

In this section, we delve into real-world case studies and examples that illustrate the practical application of analytics in enhancing candidate journey mapping. These instances underscore how organizations have effectively utilized data-driven insights to optimize their recruitment processes and elevate the overall candidate experience.

Company A: Using Analytics to Reduce Application Abandonment

Company A, a forward-thinking tech firm, faced a challenge with high application form abandonment rates. By leveraging analytics, they conducted an in-depth analysis of the application process. Metrics such as completion time, drop-off points, and user interactions were meticulously examined. The insights revealed that a lengthy and complex application form discouraged potential candidates.

Armed with this knowledge, Company A made data-driven adjustments. They streamlined the application form, reducing unnecessary fields and optimizing the user interface. Through A/B testing, they assessed the impact of these changes, with analytics providing clear comparisons of conversion rates before and after modifications. Consequently, application abandonment rates notably decreased, resulting in a larger and more engaged pool of applicants.

Company B: Leveraging Predictive Analytics for Proactive Engagement

Company B, a leading multinational corporation, sought to enhance its candidate engagement strategy. They turned to predictive analytics to identify high-potential candidates and tailor their communication approach. By analyzing historical data on successful hires, candidate interactions, and engagement patterns, Company B developed a predictive model.

This model enabled Company B to pinpoint candidates who exhibited characteristics similar to their top-performing employees. Leveraging this insight, they personalized their outreach efforts and communication channels. This data-driven approach not only increased the likelihood of capturing the attention of potential candidates but also facilitated more meaningful interactions. As a result, Company B witnessed an uptick in application quality and a reduction in time-to-hire.

These case studies underscore the transformative power of analytics in shaping the candidate journey. By harnessing data-driven insights, organizations can address pain points, optimize processes, and deliver a more personalized and engaging experience to candidates. The success of Company A’s application form refinement and Company B’s predictive engagement strategy underscores the tangible benefits of integrating analytics into candidate journey mapping. As we move forward, it’s clear that such innovative approaches will continue to redefine how organizations attract and engage top talent in an increasingly competitive job market.

In conclusion, the integration of analytics into candidate journey mapping is a pivotal strategy for optimizing the recruitment process. By harnessing data-driven insights, organizations can fine-tune every stage of the candidate experience, from initial awareness to successful onboarding.

This synergy empowers personalized interactions, uncovers pain points, and drives informed decisions. As the landscape of talent acquisition evolves, the ability to navigate it with analytics becomes an indispensable asset, enhancing both employer branding and candidate satisfaction. Embracing this approach not only ensures competitive advantage but also underscores a commitment to delivering exceptional candidate journeys in a dynamic and evolving job market.

Hirebee offers multiple recruiting solutions to businesses with job distribution features and very effective recruitment automation, which can make hiring much easier.

What is candidate journey mapping, and why is it important?

Candidate journey mapping is a strategic process that involves visualizing and understanding the various stages a candidate goes through during their interaction with an organization, from initial awareness to onboarding. It helps organizations gain insights into the candidate experience, identify pain points, and enhance their recruitment processes for better outcomes.

How do analytics enhance candidate journey mapping?

Analytics play a pivotal role in candidate journey mapping by providing data-driven insights into candidate behavior, preferences, and interactions at each stage of the journey. By analyzing metrics, trends, and patterns, organizations can make informed decisions, personalize candidate experiences, and optimize their recruitment strategies for improved results.

What types of data are typically used in candidate journey analytics?

Candidate journey analytics involve collecting and analyzing various types of data, including website interactions, application metrics, social media engagement, survey responses, and communication history. This diverse dataset helps create a comprehensive understanding of candidate behaviors and motivations.

How can analytics help improve the candidate experience?

Analytics allow organizations to identify pain points and bottlenecks in the candidate journey, enabling them to make targeted improvements. By understanding candidate preferences and behaviors, organizations can tailor their communication, streamline application processes, and create a more seamless and engaging experience for candidates.

Can analytics help predict candidate behavior?

Yes, analytics can utilize predictive modeling techniques to forecast candidate behavior. By analyzing historical data and patterns, organizations can make educated predictions about candidate actions, such as identifying high-potential candidates or anticipating the likelihood of application abandonment.

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