• However, with the right tools and strategies in place, you can attract top talent without breaking the bank. The answer lies in a strategic hiring approach that focuses on cost-effective strategies. Here are some tips to get you started.

#1. Build Your Employer Brand

Your employer brand is what sets your company apart from the competition and represents your company’s reputation in the market. It’s the way you communicate your values, culture, and mission to potential candidates. To build a strong employer brand, start by defining your company’s mission and values. Then, make sure your website, social media profiles, online engagement, and job listings reflect those values. 

Showcasing your company culture with pictures and testimonials from current employees doesn’t cost a thing. But the more you can show candidates what it’s like to work at your company, the more likely they are to imagine themselves joining and thriving on your team.

#2. Leverage Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool for attracting top talent and promoting your job openings to a wider audience. Even better, it’s free. Use platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and more to share job listings, company updates, and employee stories. You can also use social media to connect with potential candidates and build relationships with them before they even apply. You may even be familiar with this strategy to engage new clients.

#3. Write Compelling Job Descriptions

Your job descriptions are one of the first impressions candidates have of your company, so it’s important to make them count. Make sure your job descriptions are detailed, accurate, and engaging.

Use language that reflects your company culture and mission. Be clear about the responsibilities of the role and the qualifications you’re looking for. And don’t forget to highlight the benefits of working at your company, such as flexible hours, stipends, professional development opportunities, or examples of a fun company culture.

#4. Streamline Your Recruitment Process

A long, complicated application process can repel top candidates. To keep them engaged until you can determine whether they’re your next great hire, make sure your recruitment process is streamlined and easy to navigate.

#5. Leverage Affordable Recruitment Software Built for SMBs

JazzHR is a powerful recruiting software that’s perfect for small businesses on a budget. With plans starting at just $75 per month, JazzHR gives you all the tools you need to attract and manage top talent. From customizable job listings to automated interview scheduling, JazzHR makes it easy to streamline your recruitment process and find the right candidates for your team.

With JazzHR’s recruiting software for SMBs, you gain access to:

• Mobile Friendly Job Boards
• Customizable Job Applications
• Posting Jobs to Free Job Boards
• Purchasing Premium Job Listings
• Searchable Resume Database
• Custom Job Workflow Stages
• Email Messaging Templates
• LinkedIn Recruiter Integration
• And so much more

Start your free trial today and see how JazzHR can help you build your dream team in your small business. 

• One business area some small business owners likely don’t spend enough time, resources, and energy on as they could is their hiring team’s recruiting technology stack.

“There are so many innovative tools and techniques that can advance recruiters through every step of the hiring process, yet I still come across so many manual processes,” Boston Consulting Group Global Head of Talent & Recruiting Amber Grewal shared with People Managing People.

Aside from putting the right people in place to own their recruitment processes, the best way small business leaders can empower hiring team members to work smarter is to give them a best-in-class hiring solution that can replace manual spreadsheets and disconnected tools.

5 ways to empower your small business hiring team today

Providing your hiring team with the right technology is just one of several ways your small business leadership can set your HR personnel and hiring managers up for success daily.

Here are five expert tips and tricks that can ensure your hiring team has everything they need to attract, engage, and interview top talent for open positions quickly and efficiently.

1) Define clear roles and responsibilities for the entire hiring team

You may have one or two dedicated human resources team members to handle hiring tasks. Or maybe you have HR generalists who divide and conquer all recruiting activities.

Regardless of your specific hiring team setup, you can ensure everyone on the hiring team knows their distinct duties and what success looks like in their day-to-day and long-term by:

• Designating a hiring team leader who can assign roles based on other recruiters’ experience
• Providing training to help team members better understand the ins and outs of recruiting
• Encourage knowledge sharing so everyone can write interview questions and job descriptions

As an SMB leader, you can’t be everywhere all the time. That makes delegation vital to recruitment success.

Finding the right, long-term hiring team leader can be the difference between regularly hitting headcount goals and losing out on top talent due to inefficient processes and management.

2) Set aside budget for a leading applicant tracking system (ATS)

Before your hiring team starts to research ATS options, they need to know how much they can spend on the solution. This can prevent them from considering options that are outside your budget.

The best way to decide on the ideal price point for a small business applicant tracking system is to factor the investment in your annual business plan and audit your current recruiting tech.

To learn which existing recruiting tools you should get rid of in favor of an ATS, ask yourself whether given solutions in your tech stack save your team time or prevent them from moving quickly.

Any system that streamlines your hiring process can stay. Any platform that slows you down can likely go. 

3) Help your hiring team connect critical tools to the ATS solution

Your hiring team has shortlisted ATS options and spoken with you and other decision-makers at your SMB. A top-rated, easy-to-use applicant tracking system is now included in your HR tech stack.

If you’ve invested in a powerful small business recruiting software provider, like JazzHR, you know you can connect other popular hiring tech you keep directly to the ATS in minutes. For example, with our solution you can help your hiring team sync core HR tools included in the JazzHR Marketplace.

That means you can integrate tech that helps you carry out background and reference checks, share pre-employment assessments, conduct video interviews, and execute several other daily tasks.

• Just as importantly, you can connect popular job boards and aggregators to JazzHR.

Once set up, your hiring team can use our one-click posting functionality to streamline posting publication and promotion — an activity that typically takes a lot of time to complete for each open role.

4) Check on recruiting and hiring progress, and ask about concerns

Make sure to touch base with your hiring team regularly to see what they’re working on. Learn about big wins and opportunities tied to their daily work.

A great way to catch up on the progress they make every week or two and with specific requisitions is to request and review the latest recruiting performance data.

• With JazzHR, recruiters and hiring managers can create custom HR reports featuring insights tied to their sourcing efforts, hiring speed, recruiting workflows.

You can also connect JazzHR to workforce management technology so you can track quality-of-hire data that shows how productive new hires have been.

JazzHR reports can be scheduled to be sent to your inbox on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. After analyzing them, you can see if your recruiters and hiring managers need any support.

5) Ask each hiring team member how you can better support them

Speaking of support, this tip is fairly simple. Just be there to assist your hiring team as needed.

You may not be able to check in with HR specialists and hiring managers daily. However, connecting with them weekly can show you’re committed to providing them with the resources and technology they need to attract and engage top talent effectively and streamline repetitive and manual tasks.

Make smarter and faster hiring decisions with JazzHR, purpose-built small business recruitment software. Schedule a custom demo today to discover the power of our applicant tracking system.

By doing so, they can make sure only the most applicable candidates (i.e., those with the “matching” skill sets and experience levels) advance from one funnel stage to the next — and prospects the hiring team collectively agrees is best get job offers.

• It may seem obvious, but it’s worth saying: High-quality hires are vital to your company’s long-term success.

Only when your workforce is comprised of top-tier professionals who have the requisite knowledge and drive to succeed in their respective roles can you realize a healthy and productive work environment and ensure substantial employee satisfaction, both with their jobs and the company.

And the key to effectively measure and gradually improve quality of hire starts and ends with utilizing your talent data sets.

What is quality of hire, and why does it matter?

Quality of hire is a recruiting metric that measures the value new employees bring to an organization.

• A high-quality hire contributes positively to the workplace with strong performance, innovation, and lasting retention. In other words, they help “move the needle” for their employers by directly or indirectly aiding bottom-line growth.
• In contrast, a worker with a low quality-of-hire score doesn’t thrive in their day-to-day role, often requires regular assistance to complete their core tasks, and has a limited (if any) positive impact on team and organizational KPIs.

Quality of hire metrics encompasses a variety of factors. These range from hiring manager satisfaction, to performance reviews, to employee longevity.

By determining a quality-of-hire score, your HR and recruiting teams can analyze and refine their joint hiring processes to optimize overall TA costs and ensure all new hires align with your org’s strategic vision, mission, and goals.

Talent data’s role in measuring quality of hire

Talent data is crucial to enhancing the quality of hire in your org, which is vital to the company’s overall success. By leveraging data from various sources — including your HR team’s HCM/HRIS systems — your hiring managers can capably monitor and improve their recruiting processes.

Some of the most critical sources of pre-hire and post-hire talent data sets include:

• Employee performance: Quantitative insights tied to workers’ efforts to achieve assigned OKRs
• Hiring manager satisfaction: Qualitative insights from people managers regarding reports’ production
• Employee retention: Literally how long each individual at your small business remains at your company
• Employee engagement: Denotes how often workers proactively participate in organizational activities

By factoring in all these specific data points, your talent and human resources teams can discern the strength of historical hires. (Giving them at least six months or so to prove themselves on the job, of course.)

Through this analysis, they can then work with hiring managers to identify traits of high- and low-quality workers. Moreover, they can make data-backed changes to their recruitment model to ensure only top-tier talent is hired.

And yet, a recent JazzHR survey of 5,000+ small business talent pros and leaders found only about half calculated the quality of hire for their workforce and made efforts to improve their hiring quality.

As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

The benefits of leveraging data for talent success

Time to hire. Pipeline speed. Offer acceptance rate. There are countless recruiting metrics you and your team must track daily to ensure you make steady progress toward your org’s defined hiring objectives.

But, don’t forget about monitoring quality of hire. A metric that, when addressed over time (whether monthly or quarterly) by your hiring stakeholders can lead to a stronger workforce and better business results.

Put plainly, the pros of calculating your hiring quality — and regularly modifying your recruiting approach at large to elevate said metrics — are many. The top benefits of improving your quality-of-hire metrics include:

Optimizing your sourcing strategies

Your talent acquisition data sets stored (and, ideally, dynamically updated) in your ATS can pinpoint which sourcing channels are most effective, based on how many quality, long-term hires come from said avenues.

“Because of the ever-increasing power of data analytics … hiring managers and recruiters are gaining a more accurate snapshot of the key components that connect data from the hiring process with post-hire business outcomes,” SHRM’s Roy Maurer recently wrote.

And that includes sourcing insights that reveal the best and worst channels to find premier employees.

Signing more strong-fit candidates

Analyzing talent data helps talent teams identify patterns within the candidate pool that indicate high potential for success within the org. This can range from project completion rates for software engineers, to the success of integrated campaigns for marketing team members.

By comparing the performance of new hires against the profiles of previously successful employees, you can adjust your recruitment strategy to find, engage, advance, and extend offers to only “proven” talent whose characteristics and approaches to work align with those of top performers.

Better aligning with business goals

The typical job performance ramp-up time varies by role and team. That said, after a few months, your hiring managers should be able to gauge how well recent hires are contributing to your org’s objectives.

That makes it vital for your talent team to check in with people managers 90 days after each hire is made to get their thoughts on their work performance. These anecdotal insights can inform changes to the types of talent TA specialists engage and screening questions they ask candidates.

Elevating workforce retention rates

Retention is harder to measure, when it comes to tying it into your overall quality of hire. That’s because employees can leave or are let go for any number of reasons, many of which don’t relate to the work quality.

That said, by diving deep into your org’s workforce retention data and speaking with HR, you can uncover patterns and trends that could enlighten you as to ideal recruitment alterations to make team-wide (e.g., where you source passive candidates).

Improving job-matching for hires

Through talent analytics, companies can identify the key attributes of high-performing employees in specific roles. This knowledge can inform the creation of more accurate job descriptions and requirements for future leads. In turn, this can (and should) lead to better job-matching.

Social job-matching tech “provide[s] an easy way to incrementally increase the value of traditional [candidate] assessments in driving quality of hire,” business advisor Dr. Charles Handler recently wrote for ERE.

Bolstering your employer branding

Your employer brand is crucial for attracting and retaining top talent. It’s a key piece of the employee value proposition and encompasses everything your org communicates as its identity to potential employees. 

The clearer and more compelling your employer branding, the more likely you attract the “right” candidates. (That is, those who deem your business model, company culture, and organizational mission one that aligns with their career aspirations.)

Need a better applicant tracking system to enhance your small business recruitment efforts — and help you improve your quality of hire over time? Look no further than JazzHR. Schedule a custom demo with our team today.

In short, to adapt to the disruptive hiring landscape, your small business’s talent acquisition team must adapt their TA approaches to better identify, engage, interview, and evaluate suitable candidates. And arguably best place to start improvement-wise is with candidate screening.

• Recruiters can spend hours on phone interviews manually screening dozens of job applicants just for one requisition (job seekers they may never see or interact with) and still not find the right person.

Multiply that by the number of open roles across your company, and screening job candidates becomes a time-consuming, repetitive task that prevents your recruiting staff from tackling other important tasks — primarily those associated with their applicant tracking system (ATS).

To get right to the point: Reviewing resumes and conducting phone screens is a laborious endeavor for all recruiters today. But, there is a way to make evaluating candidates based on initial phone (or Zoom) chats a little less painful, a lot more streamlined, and considerably quicker for TA teams.

How to strengthen your candidate screening process

The tight labor market has made it harder than ever for recruiters to help hire high-performing talent. Employers are hard-pressed, though, to rectify inefficiencies with their recruiting orgs’ approaches to ensure they can compete for top candidates and hire premier prospects quickly and efficiently.

Yet, the most agile talent acquisition teams — including and especially those at small businesses like yours — have found ways to save time and find more qualified remote candidates at the same time.

“In the current hiring market, organizations cannot afford long hiring processes, but they also cannot afford to hire indiscriminately,” Employ SVP People & Talent Corey Berkey recently wrote. Sometimes, the wrong hiring decision is worse than letting a position stay open longer. [That’s why] employers need screening processes that identify high-quality candidates quickly.”

• And Corey’s right, of course.

The faster your recruiters assess applicants (not just their resumes and cover letters, but also things like their communication and writing skills and ability to take on certain tasks and projects), the faster they can archive poor-fit prospects and move candidates of interest to the next hiring cycle stage.

Simply put, the below best practices can empower your recruiting staff to deliver more predictable hiring results by enhancing a critical component of your TA efforts: screening candidates.

1) Let your candidates help you screen

A favorite time-saving screening tool of recruiters is asynchronous video. This kind of software lets hiring teams like yours send interview prompts to remote candidates where they can record and submit their answers on their own schedule.

• Live video conference calls are obviously still a must in many instances for your recruiting team, but this asynchronous tech offers another screening avenue.

With an asynchronous video tool in place, there’s no longer a need to spend days aligning hiring manager and candidate schedules for a screening call. Your TA team can even provide a deadline for completing the video screening, allowing the automated system to send out reminders.

2) Limit the deal-breakers for hiring

With today’s highly competitive labor market, candidates have their pick when it comes to employers and job offers. Long gone are the days when recruiters could screen out hundreds of applicants with a job description’s wording or long lists of required skills for a role.

So, encourage hiring managers to limit their list of “essential” skills that they list under requirements when screening candidates. This helps keep the candidate pool larger and more diverse past the screening stage and all the way through to the offer, background check, and onboarding stages.

3) Save time with skill-matching

Candidate skill-matching is an increasingly popular assessment strategy that helps companies to find the right qualified talent without eliminating too many prospective hires early in the TA process.

It’s an efficient way to ensure applicants have the necessary skills or certifications for a role — and recruiters are focusing more than ever on hiring for soft skills like leadership and communication.

• “[Human resources] should partner with the business to discuss critical skills required to be successful based on the jobs to be done and then define the assessment approach to match candidates to the role,” a quartet of talent management experts wrote for McKinsey & Co.

Aside from partnering with your executive staff on developing a skills-matching process, you also need to ensure your talent team has the requisite software to compile and analyze prospects’ skills.

Leading recruitment software (i.e., an ATS that was intentionally built for SMBs such as yours) enables hiring teams to screen this way, while reducing unconscious bias in the process too.

4) Use automated sourcing in candidate screening

Imagine opening your laptop in the morning and having dozens of applications ready to review. Employers looking to streamline candidate screening do this with automated sourcing software.

• The top ATS with automated sourcing capabilities make it easy to scan a list of job requirements and actively recruit qualified candidates in the background, so to speak.

These platforms can save recruiters countless hours per requisition, leading to improved recruiting metrics tied to speed and efficiency — and the advancing of only high-quality prospects in one’s hiring process.

5) Remember to stay engaged with passive talent

The first kind of candidate screening approach that may come to mind for your and your talent team is active job seekers who submit applications via your career site or a job board like LinkedIn.

However, chances are some of the best candidates in your talent pool and network at large are ones who haven’t previously interacted with your company. That is to say, passive candidates whose backgrounds, skill sets, and experience match those in job descriptions for open roles.

• Knowing that, make sure to keep interacting with these individuals along with previous applicants or prior talent you engaged and interviewed for past positions.

These candidates’ resumes and cover letters may not have resonated with your hiring team for the initial roles they applied or were sourced for. However, today, they may ultimately be a more ideal fit for a completely different job.

This is another use case for recruitment automation. You can send automated email and/or text messages to communicate with these leads (e.g., set up phone screens and eventual video and/or in-person interviews) in addition to automating the resume screening for them, as mentioned above.

Outside of leveraging automation, you can also send manual messages to “passives” via various career communities and social media channels on which they have profiles. (Think LinkedIn InMail).

Enhance your candidate screening process — along with the rest of your recruiting strategy — with JazzHR’s purpose-built ATS for small businesses. Schedule a demo with our team today.

• Thankfully, those numbers can be improved with the right onboarding strategy.

More specifically, by implementing more effective new hire orientation ideas that ensure new team members feel apart of the company culture and fully understand the company mission from day one.

You don’t have to take a trial-and-error approach with refining your employee onboarding process. That’s because many other businesses have already done the dirty work for you, so to speak.

7 proven new hire orientation ideas

With that in mind, here are employee orientation ideas to help the latest members of your workforce who are starting a new job at your organization feel right at home in their new work environment.

1) Use the buddy system in the orientation process

You’ve probably heard of the buddy system, and may already have used it. Pairing new hires with a single, dedicated point-of-contact reduces confusion and encourages productivity.

Whether you hire remote employees, in-office workers, a hybrid approach of both, assigning a buddy to each new employee can put them at ease during what is likely a stressful period for them. (Yes, they got the job, but remember they want to make a great first impression at the company.)

Having your onboarding buddies give new hires branded coffee mugs and other swag, take part in fun scavenger hunts to break up the in-person or virtual orientation process, and even providing an office tour can make the transition from candidate to employee far easier.

2) Implement a “development-first” approach 

The onboarding process is, at its core, a professional development process. Find out where new hires see themselves in a few years and arrange a meeting with the person in that role.

It’ll pay off: a LinkedIn Learning report found that 94% of hires would stay with a company longer if they felt the business was investing in their career. A great place to relay your success with training and developing new workers is in the employee handbook.

This typically features all info related to the business, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to share “success stories” of existing staff members who’ve grown their careers at your org too.

3) Contextualize new hires’ role right from the start

Introduce new employees to staff in different departments, even if you’re onboarding remotely. They may not be working with these people on a daily basis, but it’s a useful way to welcome them to the wider business and to show them where their work fits into the bigger picture.  

It also affords them the change to explore potential areas for development. In the same spirit, make sure the company’s values, mission and purpose are clearly communicated and reiterated during onboarding. Alignment from the get-go is a great way to make employees feel invested.

4) Regardless of how small your team is, get social 

Research suggests that the more “authentic” employees feel at work, the more engaged, productive, and satisfied they were. Encourage new hires to feel comfortable being themselves. Organize social calls, happy hours (virtual or in-person), and lunches in their first few weeks.  

Colene Rogers, an HR professional at Syntech Systems, found that the simple act of asking a new hire to lunch on their first day proved to be one of their “fondest onboarding memories.” 

5) Prepare appropriately for new employees’ arrival 

Remove as many hurdles as possible by preparing paperwork, software, and workspaces ahead of time for new hires. They’ll arrive to find that they’ve already been thought about.  

• If it’s possible, it’s a great idea to surprise them with a gift.

A company Kindle or iPad loaded with useful onboarding resources is a creative way to let new hires know that they’re being invested in, and to make the process a bit more memorable. Something as simple as a care package full of company merchandise has worked wonders for many employers today.

And don’t let the remote environment stop you from nailing this part of the process. Schedule delivery of each employee’s materials, along with a welcome kit, to arrive before or on their first day.

6) Don’t put too much emphasis on hierarchy 

If it makes sense, consider breaking up the hierarchy a bit in the early stages of a new hire’s time with you. Ask them, for example, to give feedback on a manager’s work, and receive it graciously and constructively. It communicates that their opinion is valued in the business, and studies have suggested that egalitarian teams are generally more effective. 

Onboarding isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some of these strategies will make sense for your business and the new hires involved, and others won’t. We haven’t mentioned the most important strategy, which should underly all of the above: 

7) Ask for new hires’ feedback, iterate, and improve 

You might not get onboarding right for every employee. The strategies above need to be tailored to your org and to individual roles. It may not be as smooth as you’d like right off the bat. That’s fine!  

What’s important is you find out what worked, what didn’t, and improve your process regularly.

Even if things could have gone better, new hires will know that their voice is being heard when you ask for — and act on — their feedback. Just as your talent team does with candidate feedback.

You can ensure your talent team’s “handoff” of new hires to your HR department is seamless by using the onboarding capabilities in JazzHR. Book a demo today to learn more about our ATS.

With that in mind, we reached out to several hiring managers at small businesses across industries today to see if anyone had ever experienced a hiring nightmare. Their responses did not disappoint.

13 interview red flags from today’s hiring managers

1) “Years back, after hiring a new staffing specialist, and conducting training with her over her first 30 days, it was becoming evident that she wasn’t able to do the basic functions of the position, and she had poor judgment when interacting with our clients. About this same time, she approached several of her co-workers about where she could procure various illegal drugs, and then asked about networking to hire a hitman to take care of her current husband’s ex-wife, as evidently the alimony thing was a problem for her. She also told her co-workers how she had manipulated her hiring references in order to get the position. I called the police about the inquiries she made about the hitman, and they responded. At the same time I let her go as she was still in a trial period, citing to her that she was unable to perform the basic functions of her position. The day I let her go, I drove a relative’s car to work knowing she wouldn’t recognize the car, and fearing she could retaliate in some way. Although we couldn’t prove it, unfortunately two of the coworkers’ cars were left with flat tires, which we also reported to the police. They investigated and said the tires were ice-picked through the sidewall, and were not repairable. To my knowledge she was never arrested, and moved out of state shortly thereafter.”

2) “We had a new hire who was provided a company direct billed credit card to pay for food and lodging when attending new hire training in another office location. When the bill arrived, there were a number of charges on the card from an adult novelty store located close to the hotel in which the employee was staying. When asked why there were charges unrelated to the food and lodging expenses, the employee stated he did not want his wife to find out about the adult novelty items he purchased because they were for her birthday.”

3) “I was in the middle of an interview and the candidate said he had to make a quick phone call. They didn’t come back for an hour and still wanted to proceed with the interview!”

4) “I have had several past candidates start to look extremely confused mid-interview. When I would ask them what the problem was, they would ask me to tell me who I was and what the company was they were at. Apparently they had applied to multiple jobs and could not keep them straight — they had no idea what company they were interviewing with!”

5) “Shortly after I hired what I though was a top-rated candidate, they began arriving for work later and later each day; up to 4:30 p.m. Their work suffered, as well.”

6) “We hired an employee who seemed like he would be a great fit. Two days before his agreed on start date, he called and asked if his start date could be moved back a week. We agreed. His new start date arrived, but the employee did not. We called, left messages and sent e-mails with no response. We waited an additional week, thinking maybe he miscommunicated, and meant the following Monday. Still no employee. Again, calls, messages, emails with no response. We moved on, interviewed again, hired someone else. Two months later, the no-show candidate called and asked if he could start now, he had to leave the country for an emergency, and wanted to start. He did not, however, have an answer to “Was the destination without cell coverage entirely?” Phantom candidate.”

7) “A recently hired team member insisted they move the desk in their cubicle. Of course, there is only one way for the desk to fit comfortably in the space. So, he blocked the entrance and had to climb under his desk anytime he needed to leave his cube.”

8) “Recently hired team member decided they were allergic to carpets, air system, and their desk. They asked multiple times for everything to be replaced.”

9) “While recruiting for a medical group in a Health System, I once recruited the son of a well-known Physician within our Health System. Although this candidate didn’t quite have the hands on experience we were looking for, it was one of those hires that we had to handle carefully. Long story short, the gentleman interviewed really well and appeared to be very coachable so we found a home for him within the medical group. After conducting a drug test, we found traces of marijuana in his system. While this may be normal in some states, it is not permitted in ours and a certainly not permitted within a health system. I’m sure you can imagine how awkward it was trying to explain to a physician why we could no longer hire his son.”

10) “Mid-interview I thought I had the perfect candidate for the position. As I was about to extend the job offer, he began to sweat profusely. I offered water, turned the air conditioner to a lower temperature as he began to mumble. I thought,Oh No, I’ve got a medical emergency on my hands.” He excused himself to go to the restroom but didn’t return after 15 minutes. I asked a male staff member to enter the men’s restroom to check on him. The door was somehow locked and barricaded. The applicant wouldn’t answer our calls to open the door but began rambling aloud. I called the fire department and after another 20 minutes the applicant emerged totally intoxicated (empty bottle in hand) and possibly under the influence of “something” else. The next day his wife called me requesting to know when his start date would be… no job offer was extended to this candidate!”

11) “Spooked by an assistant in the dark. I had obtain a temporary Administrative Assistant with the intent to eventually hire her. I was in my office and I knew she was in the leasing office. I needed something in the filing cabinet in the leasing office, when I entered the office the lights were off, it was before lunch, so I thought it was rather odd that she was nowhere around and the light was off since I didn’t see her leave. I proceeded to turn the light on and walked towards the filing cabinet, when ALL OF A SUDDEN the desk chair moved. Talk about scaring the heebie jeebies out of me, the temp proceeded to climb from under the desk. I when I asked her why she was under there, she proceeded to inform me in a very calm and even voice that she was taking a nap.”

12) “I phone interviewed a candidate and ultimately ended up not advancing him to the in person interview stage. I sent him an email to tell him that his qualifications did not meet what the Company was looking for. When I explained that there was another candidate who was a closer match he started leaving voicemails and sending emails demanding what he was missing. He also accused me of hiding something from him because I rejected him so early on in the interview process. On the 3rd or 4th voicemail he said that he hoped it wasn’t because I Google searched him and found his hacked Facebook page with pornographic images. As if the voicemail wasn’t enough, he proceeded to send an email with a screenshot of the hacked Facebook and explained that he was trying to regain control of the account, but it wasn’t working.”

13) “I made a job offer to a candidate, then he ghosted for 4 days. Then he reappeared and said he’d been camping and accepted the offer to start in 2 weeks. Then 10 days later he contacted me to say he had a doctor appointment on his first scheduled day of work, and also would it be okay for him to leave early every Tuesday and Thursday for the next few months? Needless to say, he did not end up working here.”

Meanwhile, the hiring manager may ask surface-level questions that don’t accurately assess the candidate’s suitability for the position. On top of this all, interviews can be nerve wracking for candidates, no matter how qualified or prepared they are.

• This is a real problem, because there’s a lot on the line during the interview.

And not just for the candidate, for an organization too. Eight in 10 job seekers say that a bad interview experience can change their mind about working at the company, according to LinkedIn research.

A certainly concerning statistic, but the flip side is encouraging: Nearly 90% of job seekers say that a positive interview can change their opinion of a position or company they were previously skeptical about.

So, the mission is clear for companies: It’s time to create better-than-ever interviews. And a large part of this comes down to building a great interview environment. That makes it crucial to put candidates at ease to help them shine.

Here are a few ways you can create a pleasant interview environment that fosters a better candidate experience.

1) Start with scheduling

Scheduling can be one of the biggest headaches for candidates, and a frustrating experience can set the tone for a bad interview. Use a centralized applicant tracking system that enables you to quickly and easily coordinate interviews with candidates when their schedule permits.

If a candidate is selected for an interview, be sure to notify the individual as soon as possible and schedule the interview in a timely manner. Don’t leave anyone waiting.

When it comes to specific times, be considerate of the candidate’s schedule. If arranging an interview between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., providing the candidate with lunch can be a thoughtful gesture.

Also, try to remember that your candidates may have a job. They’ll need to understand how much time away from the office they need to plan for. Try to be up front with expectations when possible.

2) Upgrade the basics

As soon as the candidate walks through the door, that person is immediately be forming a positive opinion of your company and its work environment. The administrative assistant should greet the candidate in a friendly manner, offer him or her coffee or water, and ensure he or she isn’t left waiting. The interview should start promptly on time.

It’s also helpful to walk around your office and imagine seeing the environment as an outsider. Are employees harried and stressed? Is the lobby decor looking a little worn for wear? If so, make some tweaks to make a better impression on candidates before the interview even starts.

3) Relax

Interviews can often become formal, stuffy affairs, but they don’t need to be this way. Uptight environments only cause candidates to be nervous. Instead, adopt a friendlier, more conversational approach to interviews.

Don’t shy away from small talk. That’s often how you learn more about a candidate’s personality and character. This will give you deeper insights to if they are a good fit for the existing team, especially in a highly collaborative environment.

And as Entrepreneur magazine recommended, be sure to listen. Hiring managers are so often focused on getting to their questions that they don’t really listen to the candidate’s answers. Being a more active listener can prompt candidates to relax and share more authentic, off-the-cuff information about their skills and experiences.

Interviews are often negatively stereotyped, but they have so much potential to improve the candidate experience and ensure your company hires the right person for the job.

Applicant tracking systems are designed to streamline your hiring process and help you deliver a great candidate experience. To apply this to your own org, start by scheduling a brief demo of JazzHR today.