An Insider View: Candidate Experience Best Practices
Learn what helps UK employers stand out with candidate experience best practices and tips to compete for top talent.
Hiring went from a recruiting priority to an operational priority in the last year for 7 in 10 talent leaders.
We sat down with Team Harri UK to get their insider view about what they see employers are doing today to attract and hire great staff. Consider this your cheat sheet into their perspectives and insights gained from work with leading UK organisations.
The Key Takeaway: Candidate Experience Remains Vital
When we sat down for our chat, we expected candidate experience to play a significant role in the conversation. What stood out was how quickly the definition of a high-quality experience for modern UK hospitality talent evolved.
Why is Candidate Experience Important to Continuously Revisit?
Talented hospitality workers have numerous options for where to work in today’s competitive job market. That adds pressure on employers to catch their attention quickly, keep it, and delight them with personalised engagement opportunities to ultimately win their loyalty at the point of an employment offer.
Competitive candidate experiences continuously evolve with the sentiment of today’s talent, but that doesn’t mean they are harder to achieve. Harri’s Transforming The Employee Experience In Hospitality report combined Harri’s extensive experience in hospitality and CGA’s expert market analysis to showcase what elements of the candidate experience matter most:
- 30% of employees say a top challenge in hospitality is communication
- 64% of employees say emotional support is more important now at work than pre-COVID
- 88% would like to see technology in the hospitality sector improve
Our team members echoed the theme of intentional touchpoints and detail as they reflected on work with successful UK organisations. You might be pleasantly surprised at how simple the game-changing approaches we talked about are and the clear action items our discussion leads to. Let’s dig in.
An Inside Look at Trends in Candidate Experience
Pull up your front-row seat to your Q&A session with Harri team members who work hand-in-hand with creative hospitality organisations in the UK.
Q: Which changes in candidate expectations and behaviour do employers use to inform their talent acquisition strategies?
Key Takeaways for UK Hospitality Employers:
- See candidates as human beings and adapt to their emotions and preferences from the very first impression
- Create a mobile-first experience from career sites to job listings and the application to make things easier to complete and come back to
- Offer chat functionality to answer questions and provide information to avoid roadblocks that would cause someone to abandon the process.
Q: What area of the candidate experience is the most impactful for today’s employers to focus on?
Key Takeaways for UK Hospitality Employers:
- Empower talent with clear and detailed job descriptions that accurately outline the responsibilities, requirements, and benefits of the position
- Keep applications brief but with essential qualifiers that naturally drive quality talent to continue with clear expectations
- Watch time-to-hire and quality-of-hire improve with high-calibre applicants to fuel your talent pools and impact every other stage of the hiring process.
Q: How can employers tie together every aspect of the hiring process, from a candidate’s first impression to their first day?
Key Takeaways for UK Hospitality Employers:
- Take a new lens to your hiring process from your candidates’ point of view to become clear on areas of focus
- Think about frequent communication that contains quality detail and intention, even if a candidate is ending their process with you
- Always provide candidates with a clear next step to keep their energy high.
Q: Which aspect of talent acquisition do you see being the most important heading into 2024?
Key Takeaways for UK Hospitality Employers:
- Bring the human touch that candidates connect with into your strategy, then use technology to automate your workflows
- Look for a talent acquisition solution built to scale with future evolution in the candidate experience.
Next Step: Attract and Retain Your Ideal Workforce
Hospitality candidates in the UK want to find employers who genuinely care about their well-being and professional growth to enter a work experience that fulfils them. Our team and the organisations they work alongside are focused on technology, but not without the human side of talent acquisition that can’t be replaced. The findings we heard show the impact of smart strategies that start with intention and lean on tools that make the experience better for everyone involved.
If you feel inspired to take a closer look at your hiring approach, we’ve compiled a quick talent acquisition audit worksheet to bring back to your team. Curious about how Harri can help you along the way? Chat with our team today to learn how our unparalleled employee experiences drive business performance for over 20,000 restaurant and hotel locations globally.
