How You Can Improve Employee Experience (And Lower Turnover)

A positive employee experience attracts and retains talent, fosters collaboration, grows your bottom line, bolsters image and inspires creativity, improves engagement. Everyone wants happy employees, but employee experience reaches far beyond happiness. It’s about building a strong work culture, offering professional development and growth opportunities, and giving your employees a voice.

A positive employee experience attracts and retains talent, fosters collaboration, grows your bottom line, bolsters image and inspires creativity, improves engagement. And employee engagement is the single most important metric for reducing turnover in your workplace. See why in our blog on why employee engagement & company culture matter here.

An employee’s experience begins with their experience as a candidate and runs through their time at your company. A candidate experience that begins with transparent communication and mutual respect will turn into an employee experience with these same values. 

Why Your Candidate Experience Matters

Your candidate experience is every interaction your candidate has with your company before and during the interview process – from filling out their job application to the final interview and review. 65% of candidates say that a bad candidate experience will make them lose interest in a job, and of the 35% who don’t care, you can bet they’re taking the bad impression with them into their new position.

Even as layoffs are becoming more common, the job market remains a candidate’s market. Which means your candidate experience can set your company apart from the rest – for better or for worse. Here are the top things our candidates have said they value in our hiring process:

Simplicity. Simplify it all, from your application process to your interview scheduling process.

A lengthy application process will drop the completion rate from 12.5% to 3.6%.  Add on a headache-inducing back and forth game of, “What time works for you” calendar syncing session and your candidates will be saying adios (or more likely – not saying anything. Welcome to the rise of candidate ghosting).

Adopting interview scheduling technology helps you simplify your scheduling process for one or many positions, and can save up to 84% of the time you would have spent emailing back and forth. In addition, many interview schedulers automate reminders for candidates, just in case you forget to send that reminder email.

Communication and Transparency. 

85% of candidates named consistent communication as the top driver of a positive experience in the recruitment process. Communicate clearly on job title, salary, expectations, timeline, and feedback. If you’re able to automate any part of that process, it will be a massive help. If not – make sure your candidate knows where they stand frequently.

Creating a Meaningful Onboarding Experience

20% of all staff turnover happens in the first 45 days of employment. The building blocks for success lie in the iteration of your values throughout your new employee’s journey. If your company values are (like ours) transparency, authenticity, and accountability, construct your hiring process and onboarding process to reflect them.

My experience onboarding at interviewstream was the best in my professional career. All the sessions were planned out in advance, so by my first day I already knew what the next three weeks would look like. During onboarding, I met with my boss, coworkers, and the executive team. I learned about the values of the company, the mission, what my colleagues responsibilities were, and how I would fit into that picture. 

Having a cohesive vision of the company and carrying that through your interviewing, onboarding, and beyond isn’t the only way to retain your hires. You’ll also need a well structured interviewing and onboarding process, and plans for employee development. 

Prioritize Employee Development To Boost Retention

If you want to retain your top talent, employee development needs to be a priority. Commit money and time to each individual’s professional growth. These could be through courses, online groups (hello ExitFive), webinars, or e-learning tools. Ask your employees what they are interested in doing and allow them to branch out.

As a millennial, the most common complaint I hear from my friends is they’re not engaged in their work. Finding their passion and making it what they’re good at and what makes you money is how you are going to retain a generation notorious for job hopping. Here’s our plan to make sure we nurture employee development and engagement. 

Find your employees passion 

Directly ask your employee what their favorite part of their job is. Set up mentoring sessions (if you are an expert) or ask them to find a course/video to teach them if you aren’t. Allow them to experiment and build their skill.

Check in with your employee regularly on their progress

Use weekly check-ins to keep the line of communication open with your employees. Listening is key and will create empowered employees that feel they have a voice and a place, in turn creating engagement and retention.

Keep your employees accountable to their professional development goals

It’s easy to get bogged down with other responsibilities and put professional development on the back burner. Make sure that doesn’t happen by making quarterly goals and making employees responsible for their own learning. 

Maintain your relationship with past employees 

Your brand is your image and a positive offboarding process will leave a positive lasting impression. If you listen to your employees’ suggestions and reasons for leaving, you can save yourself a lot of problems down the road. Offboarding can be tricky, but is a vital step in the employee experience as a whole. Be sure to:

• Communicate your appreciation. Research shows that the number one reason employees leave is because they feel underappreciated. It may be too late for retention but it is still important to acknowledge your appreciation.

• Conduct an exit interview. Exit interviews collect valuable data and gather the feedback you need to retain employees in the future. Listen to your ex-employees’ concerns and complaints and use these to make any necessary changes. 

• Keep in contact. If you’ve had a generally good relationship with your employee, keep in contact with them. Maintaining a large network of connections helps you in the long run.

Start employee experience off right by giving your candidates a great candidate experience with interviewstream video interviewing & scheduling

We all know that we are living in a candidate-driven, competitive job market. It is more important now than ever to successfully attract and retain top talent. Your employee experience as a whole plays a large role in that success. 

Talk to an interviewstream expert today to start leveraging our tools to give your candidates and your employees the experience you both need for success. 

About The Author

Caroline Chessia is the Marketing Operations Specialist at interviewstream. She loves color-coordinated graphs, hiking in the mountains, and every dog she meets—especially the Golden Retrievers.