Over the last two years, we’ve learned that candidate experience is critical to successful hiring and employee retention. With the Great Resignation affecting all industries, marine employers need to make their hiring process easy to navigate and provide valuable onboarding to retain top talent.
Here are the three most common mistakes that can disrupt the candidate experience and how to avoid them.
An Overly Involved Screening Process
If you’re handling your internal hiring, you know it can be a lot of work. You post a job and receive hundreds if not thousands of resumes. How do you narrow them down? So often, companies will employ an initial screening process, but conducting dozens of phone screens doesn’t save time.
There are easier ways to narrow down candidates, and most of that involves automating processes through your resume system or staffing partnerships. But it’s important to note how the involved screening processes can cause you to lose qualified candidates. Adding a step in the hiring process lengthens it, and your candidates will be looking to start a position sooner than later. The more you extend the time frame for hiring, the fewer candidates will still be available when you’re ready to bring someone on board.
Doing it All Yourself
To that end, doing all aspects of the hiring process is not just time-consuming; it takes away from your efficiency in running your shipyard. And your candidates will begin to notice that as well. It’s not uncommon for the hiring process to take longer and for candidate communication to be more sparse, which will impact the impression qualified potential employees have of your organization.
The good news is, you don’t have to do it alone. Working with a staffing partner specializing in shipyard placements can help you focus on your day-to-day work and know that great candidates are considered for your open positions. Your recruiter will facilitate communication between you and your candidates and work with you to place qualified, vetted, skilled employees.
Inefficient Hiring Experience
For the candidates, it all boils down to one thing. Do they feel confident that your company will communicate efficiently and provide them with the information and tools they need to do their job once they begin? Even candidates who don’t get a job offer still need to be handled professionally, as you never know if there might be a place for them in the future.
The candidate experience is all about your reputation as an employer. It starts with your hiring process and your employer brand, and the satisfaction of your current team of employees.
All of that, together with a recruitment partner to source and hire top talent, you can develop a great candidate experience.
Do you want to improve your candidate experience? Hutco is your marine staffing partner.