Build a superior recruitment funnel with an all-in-one ATS on Salesforce

53% of job seekers have had at least one negative experience in the hiring process in the past 12 months. And 52% of job seekers had declined a job offer due to poor experience”. – CareerPlug, 2024

Candidate experience matters. And for recruitment and staffing agencies, the stakes are especially high. Not only must they be able to match their customer company’s need with the best candidate. They must also protect the customer company’s employee brand by ensuring the best possible candidate experience.  

Failure here may result in damage to the customer’s reputation – and the agency’s brand and business. 

In this article, I will explain 

• What makes the candidate experience so important  
• How hiring organizations can keep track of the candidate experience 
• Why an all-in-one technology solution serves recruitment and staffing agencies best  
• What is document automation’s role in creating a superior candidate experience. 

Why is candidate experience so important?

Candidate experience means simply the experience a job candidate has throughout the recruitment cycle with a recruiter and the potential employer. It starts with a job posting and ends in a job offer or decline. 

A bad candidate experience often has severe consequences – and the following are the worst. 

It impacts a candidate’s decision to accept or decline a job offer. A whopping 52% of job seekers had declined a job offer because of a poor experience, according to Career Builder. Ensuring a good experience really matters in attracting new talent to organizations. 

It impacts a candidate’s willingness to reapply to a company. According to Career Builder, nearly 4 in 5 candidates (precisely 78%) see the candidate experience in general as an indicator of how much a hiring organization puts value in its people. 

It makes candidates also unwilling to refer other candidates. In the U.S., Zippia found that 30 to 40% of an employer’s new hires come from candidates referred to them by other employees. However, a minimal 6% of an employer’s candidate pool comes from employee referrals. These candidates make a vital minority that recruiters should not risk losing. 

It impacts a candidate’s brand loyalty or purchasing habits. For most applicants, the candidate journey ends in rejection. According to Career Builder, 65% of applicants would be less likely to buy from a company if they did not hear back after an interview.

65% of applicants would be less likely to buy from a company if they did not hear back after an interview”.

Declined candidates have power, too 

It goes without saying that the impression given to those candidates who proceed to the interview rounds is paramount. It plays a big role in how a candidate sees the hiring organization and their potential role in it. 

But it doesn’t end there. What about the rejected talent? They are four times more likely to consider reapplying to a company in the future if they get constructive feedback, says Lever.  

Declined candidates would like to know, why they were not chosen. When they learn, what led to the decision to reject, they get an idea of what to do better with their next application – and which skills they should yet develop. 

And remember, the best talent has a way of learning fast. In just a year or two, they may apply again to a position in the same company – and qualify as the winner. 

But most important: timely good communication 

However, whether a candidate made it or not, keeping them promptly informed throughout the application cycle is especially important for a hiring organization. 

4 in 5 jobseekers would not reapply to a company that didn’t keep them up to date on their application status, said Lever a few years back. But it goes the opposite way, too: Forbes found that equally many declined job applicants were more likely to apply again if they got a positive impression of the hiring organization. 

So, staffing agencies and companies gain from treating also declined candidates with delicacy and respect. But sadly, Lever found that 65% of job seekers say they never or rarely receive notice of their application status. A lot to improve here, it seems!

How to measure the experience? 

Eye on online reviews 

With technology, word spreads quickly and in the worst case, fatally. As recruiting has moved online, reviews on sites like Glassdoor certainly play a big role in defining the employer brand and reputation of a business. 

It is often said that bad word goes around far more often than good but luckily that doesn’t necessarily apply to candidate reviews. At least according to CareerPlug, 60% of candidates said they had left a positive review online after having had a positive experience.  

Who wouldn’t want this kind of endorsement?

Far fewer, just 35%, had left a negative review online due to having a negative experience. 

Feedback from throughout the recruitment cycle

Forbes points out that collecting feedback throughout the recruitment cycle is possible and, indeed, vital. Offering applicants a chance to leave feedback can give agencies more refined information about what works and what does not. And this can be done at every step of the recruitment cycle: 

• applicants’ job views 
• application submissions 
• after candidate selection 

• after each interview  
• after selection (feedback on the whole process). 

How does technology help? What is available? 

Achieving a good candidate experience takes openness, effort and knowledge. While openness is something we can primarily practice and develop in our own little minds and the ways we work, technology helps us win time and save us effort. It also helps us use better the information we have and deepen our understanding. 

But how can recruiters ensure a positive customer experience or improve it? Well-defined processes are crucial. And they become much more effective when coupled with and guided by the latest digital technology. There is already a lot of it available, the key components being: 

• Applicant Tracking System (ATS): this is for managing the entire recruitment funnel, in other words, collecting and sorting thousands of resumes from candidates for hiring agents and managers to screen. 
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM), for managing customer acquisition and relationships.   
• back-office layer, which provides support and processing for serving the customers and applicants. 
• middle-office layer, to bridge the gap between the front and back office by organizing risk and estimating profits and losses.   

Managing such a hybrid IT environment can be daunting, and often is. To simplify and improve operations throughout the recruitment funnel, agencies have longed for tightly integrated solutions.  

There are also economic drivers. Uncertainty over the economy, pressure on pricing and a decline in job orders are all forcing the staffing and recruitment industry to streamline internal operations as much as and as soon as possible. 

Salesforce ATS & CRM: everybody working together with a 360° view 

We are now often hearing about “360° view” or “360° insights”. These terms mean that all data on hiring customers and applicants is brought together for deeper insights and faster processing.  

They reflect the fact that many agencies have chosen to centralize all recruitment activity on a single platform to use their time and data more efficiently. Companies like Byner and Bullhorn have built such all-in-one solutions for staffing agencies on top of the Salesforce CRM.  

These combine all the components described above: the front-office part (Salesforce ATS and CRM), the middle-office and back-office layers. The platform is tightly integrated with communication tools such as Outlook and Slack for fluent communications.  

What makes Byner unique, is that we offer an end-to-end platform for customer and talent engagement, built entirely on the Salesforce platform. The app automates the core processes of organizations in staffing, secondment, temporary employment and consultancy”. – Martijn Brandse, CTO & Co-Founder of Byner

With Byner, also time registration and invoicing can be automated. 

Bullhorn, in turn, recently bought Mployee (another one of our partners) to complement its offering. The company says it will be able to offer a complete end-to-end solution for staffing agencies. 

With such a solution, everyone in the team collaborates in the same environment. That 360° view on the customers and talent is achieved, which enables engaging with them on a durable and personal basis.” – Matt Fischer, President and Chief Operating Officer, Bullhorn

Making the best use of that 360° view: don’t forget document automation 

So you got those 360° insights. But what to do with all the data brought together? Such an end-to-end solution offers wide possibilities to automate repetitive routine tasks.  

In the Salesforce environment, document automation is an obvious choice. Apps that streamline document creation and management are the darlings of Salesforce admins and users. As with any CRM automation, the benefits of document automation are in a nutshell: 

• time saved considerably for more important work, like communicating with customers and candidates 
• human errors eliminated 
• timely delivery of documents, also emails. 

In the recruitment cycle, the most obvious use cases for document automation are the creation of  

• CVs from Salesforce data 
• personalized rejection letters 
• Job descriptions 

• employment contracts (complete with esigning).  

Then, there are items like employee compensation documents, which outline the components of employee compensation, for example, the fringe benefits and possible bonus structures. 

If we look at the duration of the whole employment from application to termination, as many as 41 different documents can be singled out, all good and ripe for automation. And that is not all. 

There is the CRM side, too, towards the hiring companies. Automating the sales documents saves sweat and trouble also from the salespeople: 

• offers 
• contracts 
• and so on…

Flexible app for both Salesforce ATS and CRM layers

Indeed, we at Documill have supplied both Byner’s and Bullhorn’s customers with document automation solutions apps – for both the Salesforce ATS and CRM layers. Byner singles out Documill as its best-in-breed go-to document automation solution. So does the Bullhorn-acquired Mployee. 

We certainly know our way around delivering these solutions and developing new bespoke use cases for them. And we have a five-star customer service to get you started and support you from then on. 

Why not book a demo and see, how we can really make a difference?