In a challenging job market for companies hoping to make a successful hire, candidate experience becomes crucial. Today’s hiring marketplace continues to suffer from the effects of The Great Resignation, with professionals understanding the high demand for their services. As a result, many employers increasingly turn to gig workers, also known as a contingent workforce.
Still, providing an exceptional candidate experience plays a critical role in any successful hiring effort. This is especially the case when the competition for talented professionals remains fierce. In the scenario, working with a managed services provider (MSP) specializing in contingent workforce management needs consideration. These and other types of managed staffing services help optimize any company’s hiring efforts.
If your company needs a better candidate experience to improve its hiring efforts, consider a workforce management solution provider. Let’s analyze this critical topic influencing staffing across a myriad of business sectors. Understanding the functions a managed staffing services provider performs for your HR team ultimately informs your company’s hiring strategy. Expect being able to focus more on running your successful business as a result.
Why Does Candidate Experience Matter?
As noted earlier, the demand for talented professionals remains high, largely due to the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is especially the case in the technology industry, as companies need IT talent to supercharge their operations. Benefiting from the transformational effects of AI, the Cloud, and mobile development require a robust supply of talented tech professionals.
In this competitive environment, job seekers increasingly judge companies by the quality of their candidate experience. Obviously, this influences whether or not they accept an offer from your organization. For example, businesses with a long, drawn-out staffing process – including multiple rounds of interviews – typically suffer as a result. This same concept applies to maintaining contact with a candidate throughout the hiring process.
Don’t forget that any job seeker’s opinion about their own candidate experience quickly travels around the grapevine. Because of this, taking the wrong approach without focusing on each potential employee might become disastrous for your company. It starts with a welcoming job ad all the way through an efficient interview process. After all, your top candidate might accept another offer a week before their scheduled second interview with your team.
Ultimately, fostering an exceptional candidate experience typically requires an inordinate amount of effort from your management team. If you are a smaller business, without the resources of a large enterprise, finding this time becomes difficult. This is the exact scenario where partnering with a managed services provider for your staffing needs makes perfect sense.
What is a Staffing MSP?
A managed staffing service provider helps companies handle their hiring process, a time-consuming task for businesses. Partnering with a staffing MSP effectively offloads repetitive tasks typically performed by a business’s HR team. These include writing job ads, vetting résumés, and even conducting interviews.
Staffing MSPs also ensure communication channels remain open between your company and its candidates. In this role, they essentially serve as the face of your organization from the job ad to the final extension of an offer. If your business employs a host of contract gig workers, most staffing MSPs also offer contingent workforce management services.
Additionally, since this kind of MSP focuses on the staffing role for many businesses, they generally provide mature and effective processes. This ensures your own company’s staffing efforts benefit from this critical optimization handled by experts. In short, partnering with an MSP offers many benefits to companies struggling to hire in the current job market. So let’s see whether an expert managed staffing service provider is able to improve your organization’s candidate experience.
Can an MSP Improve Candidate Experience?
If your company generally finds it difficult to hire professionals, this problem likely became worse in the current job market. When you lack sufficient HR resources to proactively manage a staffing process, expect your candidate experience to suffer. It becomes obvious that offloading those duties to a mature staffing MSP focused on efficiency makes sense.
In the end, adopting this approach benefits all aspects of your staffing process, including the candidate experience. It’s a common refrain seen from companies leveraging MSPs for IT needs as noted above. Letting the experts handle certain time-consuming but critical tasks lets you focus on managing your business. In addition to improving your candidate experience, you also hire crucial talented professionals in a more efficient manner.
How Can an MSP Provide A Great Candidate Experience?
Now we determined engaging with managed staffing service provider offers the potential to improve your candidate experience. So let’s dive more deeply into the details on how staffing MSPs help provide an exceptional candidate experience. Simply stated, you want to offer an experience that increases your chances of making a successful hire.
Remember, staffing MSPs also exist in a competitive market for similar services. As such, they strive to forge long-term partnerships with the companies they serve. Over time, this helps the MSP truly understand your organization, including culture, technology stack, and long-term staffing needs.
MSPs and Candidate Nurturing
Once again, maintaining open communication between your company and its candidates remains a critical part of a candidate experience. In short, a candidate needs to be nurtured throughout the hiring process, from first contact to final job offer. As noted earlier, this regular contact requires a great time commitment from your HR staff. If your business currently employs a small team for this purpose, expect inefficiency to hamper any candidate nurturing.
Working with a staffing MSP provides candidates with a consistent experience throughout the hiring process. This plays a key role in shaping their opinion of your organization’s candidate experience. As opposed to matching a candidate based on only their skills and experience, it also ensures that critical cultural fit. In the end, this plays a key role in forging a candidate recruitment journey benefiting all parties.
Staffing Suppliers Want to Protect Their Brand
Staffing MSPs sometimes partner with suppliers that serve as a source of talented candidates for permanent or contingent positions. In some cases, these managed staffing service providers employ their own suppliers or recruiters. No matter the nature of the relationship, everyone want to ensure their brand stays protected.
A supplier needs candidates to trust that they remain a great source for new opportunities. The staffing MSP also wants their client partners to ensure they provide the necessary permanent and temporary professional talent. Both entities want to establish credibility in their service offerings over the long haul. These requirements ensure the MSP strives to understand your unique staffing needs and company culture.
As a result, expect a strong effort making sure each candidate looking to join your organization receives a compelling candidate experience. This process begins when first contacted by a recruiter discovering their résumé or answering a candidate’s application. Simply stated, both parties benefit from providing service above and beyond the standard.
In the end, expect a higher quality candidate pool when partnering with a mature staffing MSP. Their brand and subsequent business growth depends on offering exceptional service to both the candidate and your business.
Ongoing Candidate Contact
As noted earlier, open communication channels between candidate, supplier, and staffing MSP remain crucial throughout the hiring process. For example, a small and overworked HR team might take a few days to respond to a candidate application. With a top-shelf technical professional, like a data scientist, your chances of hiring that candidate become close to zero.
Conversely, a representative of an experienced managed staffing provider responds to that data scientist’s application as quickly as possible. Once the connection gets made, that candidate deals with the same representative throughout the staffing process. They answer any questions on the culture or technical stack with speed. The candidate trusts the process and feels comfortable continuing the staffing effort with your company and its MSP partner.
Consistent messaging introduces the candidate to your brand and company culture. The candidate understands the details of the assignment and whether or not they make a great fit. Ultimately, this level of communication illustrates another critical aspect of why partnering with a staffing MSP makes perfect sense. It provides the means for a top-shelf candidate experience making your company stand out in a competitive job market.
Looking For A Better Way to Manage Your Contingent Workforce?
Simply stated, running own business becomes easier with a trusted partner managing your contingent workforce and other hiring needs. When searching for a top-shelf general staffing organization, look no further than the talented team at Dahl Consulting. As one of the top managed staffing services providers in the Northern United States, we provide the exceptional candidates to help your company’s success. Schedule some time with us to discuss how we can help improve your organization’s candidate experience.