You may be thinking, I don’t use ORC. That’s ok! Many of the tips below will easily translate to other platforms and tools. Use what you can.
Over the last few years, I have grown to enjoy the challenges that ORC puts forth and find myself often pushing back on its engineering team for functionality misses – and hits. For as much as the tool can be a beast, it serves a purpose and within that purpose, there are ways we can adapt and customize it for the best overall experience across the board.
We’ve all been there. We’re given a tool because a business decision was made and that tool just isn’t cutting it for our very specific needs. With a company as large as Oracle, the tools are meant to be more of a one-size-fits-all approach rather than a custom software solution. And that is OK.
While there is not one single tool that has it all (and I’d argue there shouldn’t be), there are simple ways you can improve upon your candidate experience without costly addons or new software. With these tweaks, the business is happy because they keep their all-in-one platform and you’re happy because you’ve been able to successfully use the platform for attracting quality candidates. A win-win if you ask me.
I thought it may be helpful to share some of the ways I have found helpful in improving the candidate experience in Oracle Recruiting Cloud. As I am sure, there are many others out there struggling in the same way.
1. Map The Candidate Journey
Create a flow chart of each step a candidate goes through from the point of knowing of your company as an employer to day one onboarding.
Until you take the time to map the entire candidate’s journey, you simply cannot begin to understand the barrage of information coming at your candidates from all sides. From automated system emails and campaign messages to social media and website content, there is a lot of content from a wide range of voices. Sometimes the information being shared is clear, other times it leaves significant room for interpretation. Every touch point is an opportunity for you to build a crystal clear image of your EVP in the mind of your potential candidate.
Creating a flowchart of the candidate experience is one way to get ahold of the big picture. Depending on how granular you get, this flowchart could get quite large with multiple entrances and exit points. That’s ok. The more you can see, the better prepared you’ll be to customize that journey.
As you look through this flow, you’ll begin to understand the full scope of what your candidate goes through.
Throughout this process be sure to document the current content and materials for each of these touch points. Populating WIP documents with this information will set you up for later work.
Tip: Your HRIS team should be able to help you export current versions of emails and notifications from the Oracle Recruiting Content Library. This library will be instrumental in getting your process started.
2. Personalize Your Recruitment Library
What we say and what we do aren’t always the same but they should be.
Create New Templates
Using the flowchart from step one, create a document for each step. Copy and paste each email or on-screen notification into its own document as it stands in its current state and label it with the correlating process step from your flowchart. Now you’re ready to get to work.
Now that you have mapped the journey and have working documents, consider the following:
- What steps can I remove? Remove anything that is not necessary for a quality experience. Less is more.
- What steps are redundant? Anything that is sent in two different ways, handled outside the ATS, doesn’t include helpful info, or in general is just duplicated elsewhere can be disabled and removed from the candidate process.
- At what stage am I speaking to the candidates about our EVP and benefits? Remember your candidate funnel. When and where we talk to candidates about why they should come to our company is just as important as telling them what the next steps are – if not more important.
- Am I providing clear expectations to the candidate at each step of the way? The candidate should never be left wondering what’s next. Give clearly defined instructions on process flow at each step.
- Are the messages a candidate is receiving building upon each other? Each message is a chance to broaden the impact of your employer brand message. Build upon the candidate’s knowledge of you as an employer as they move through the process. Use each step to introduce them a little more to what life is like at your organization. We don’t want to inundate candidates with information but little bite-size pieces can make a huge impact together.
Connecting The Dots
While you work through these questions, use the answers to design notification templates and messages that align with your EVP and employer brand language. Use custom tagging to create templates that use a candidate’s name (where appropriate – don’t make it creepy!) and add rich text editing to the templates to bold, highlight, italicize and add graphics where appropriate. No one wants to open a plain text email that says nothing more than “Your application has been received. Thank you.”.
The more of the company culture and personality you can inject into each of your automated messages and recruiter templates, the more you’re going to impact the candidate experience – hopefully in a good way!
Once you’ve created a file of all the new templates, have your marketing and brand team look through it. They will have insights on how to connect to the broader brand, can help with an extra layer of proofreading, and may have some ideas that you never thought of. Plus, this is a great way to bridge the gap between corporate marketing and TA. You’ll get some strong credibility just by including them in the process.
Use a Real Reply-To Email
When candidates apply, they want to know they are speaking to and working with a real person. By having notifications and systems come from a monitored inbox, you’re giving the candidates the ability to have real interactions and conversations rather than sending their information into the internet void. If you have multiple recruiters, I recommend a new shared inbox that is monitored daily.
Tip: Adapt a more casual fun language in your ATS communications. Remove the formal titles, salutations, and business talk. Speak like you’re talking to a peer. You’ll get much more engagement from “Hi Lisa, I’m so excited to offer you this role!” thank you will from “Greetings Ms. Johnson, We are pleased to offer you a role within our organization”. Your candidates are human, talk to them like they are.
3. Customize Your Career Website
Your career website should be the gateway to your recruiting team. All applicants should be directed to that site for more information and details about working with your organization. If your career website is blank, lacking details, or otherwise missing personality you’re going to leave an impression on the visitors that is less than ideal.
Engage a Graphic Designer
The basic ORC Site Minimal Template allows for block designing of the home page. You’ll have the ability to have up to 6 columns wide in each section of the site. Engage a graphic designer to help you customize this page by horizontal rows divided by columns. A graphic designer accustomed to HTML site design should have a strong understanding of how this flows.
Tip: Images must be hosted publicly to show on your career website. Meaning that you must host them on your main company website or other public hosting platform and then link them on the ORC website. You cannot upload them directly on the ORC website platform.
Create Custom Sites
Have more than one brand under an umbrella company? Have a special team that is completely unique from the rest of the organization? Create a custom site for them and provide links back to your main site to learn more about the larger organization. This is especially helpful if you have a tech division in a largely non-tech-based business. The two cultures should be highlighted and giving the unique team a tool to better communicate their specific culture will go miles in helping you grow!
You can create dozens of custom pages and custom sites. Don’t go overboard but consider how each team operates and if there is value in enabling a custom site for separate divisions, brands or teams. If there is enough information to share that is separate, it is worth the conversation.
You can see some examples of how I did this for Caesars:
- Main Website – Contains ALL jobs in all departments/regions/brands
- Custom Page for Regions – Has a map with links to custom pages for each of the sub-brands
- Job Category Pages – A page for a job type to help candidates filter roles they may be interested in
- Caesars Sportsbook (digital) Website – is a completely separate site for a subculture and team that runs under the brand but also does not operate the same as the rest of the brand. All of these jobs are also listed on the main website for accessibility.
Tip: There is an important distinction here: job categories and departments are NOT the same. Candidates who come to the site are looking for a type of role, giving a page that can be shared with a type of job will be much more effective than giving departments custom pages. A candidate is much more likely to understand where they fit with titles such as “software development” or “IT – Help Desk” rather than “Internal CS Team”.
Customize Metadata
If you’re not familiar with Metadata and its importance please take a moment to learn more here. Bottom line, without Metadata, when your website is shared it will lack the image, headline, and summary that are typically shown – which can result in the website looking like spam.
Customize the metadata on each of your custom pages plus the splash page.
On custom pages, you can do this by clicking settings (gear icon) on the top right of the screen.
- Add an image, title, and page summary to each custom page you have created for the best experience.
For the splash page, you actually do this in the theme. You’ll want to add the following:
- “Title” – this will be displayed as “Title Careers” in your browser, you do NOT need to add the word Careers to your title section.
- “Branding Text” – this will be your website summary shown on Google results or social media posts
- “Image URL” – this is the image that is shown in previews of the website on social media networks
Tip: No one wants to see boring stock images or corporate language. Use something dynamic and go beyond just describing the page. Describe what they will find on the page and why they would want to find it. Example: “Check out the latest career opportunities from XYZ!” is better than “Search results for open jobs at XYZ”. Seriously consider what would make you open the link.
Enable a Vanity URL
A website that is from a verifiable domain name will have more credibility not only with candidates but also with Google for Jobs. Enabling a vanity URL in Oracle is a fairly straightforward process but you will need to work closely with both your HRIS team and your web host.
Tip: Enabling a vanity URL in ORC disables the metadata.
To bypass this, you will need to manually code the metadata into the Custom Header under the site theme. This will make all pages share the same preview images, summary, and title. It’ll be up to you to decide which is more important until Oracle comes out with a solution to this issue. Some of this can be mitigated by enabling the Social Sharing for External Career Websites tool that was launched in 22A.
Want to learn more? Check out my presentation at Ascend with David Mansfield from Arclight Consulting on leveraging ORC campaign tools. Click here.
Ready to learn more?