While there are many strategies to consider to win what remains a fierce battle for talent, the candidate experience is crucial in attracting talent and a key focus of HR departments. It also informs the following strategies for better hiring in 2023.

1. Optimize your career site

Your career site is likely the first place a potential candidate interacts with your company. With hiring likely to continue at high volume in 2023, it is critical to optimize your career site, so candidates can find it easily and it is both appealing and easy to use.

The site should be slick and enable candidates to quickly and easily set up a profile, search for jobs and apply. Candidates who are potentially applying for multiple jobs and can't perform these activities quickly will look elsewhere.

You can make things easier by using career site or recruitment marketing software. (Some recruitment marketing software includes a career site capability.) Your career site should use search engine optimization to maximize the likelihood of search engines directing people to the site. It should also be attractive and representative of your company culture, set up to work inside and outside the organization and configured to place surveys throughout the site, so candidates can provide feedback on their experience. Using a chatbot to provide real-time responses and information to candidates also adds real value to your career site.

Content such as videos and infographics makes the site more attractive to qualified candidates. Videos showing aspects of working at the company can appeal to candidates who place a high value on the work environment. Interviews with employees can also tell candidates a lot about the culture and the people they will work with if their application is successful.

It's important to make sure your career site and the job search and application processes are mobile-ready. The changing demographic of the workforce means that, for many people, their smartphone is their computer and may be their only method of accessing your career site and applying for jobs. The key features and content of the site need to work well on mobile devices and be optimized for the platform to give the same experience as through a desktop web browser.

Remember to freshen up your career site periodically, so returning candidates see new content and not just the same old site.

2. Implement an applicant tracking system

Alongside your career site or recruitment marketing software, you should be using an applicant tracking system (ATS) throughout the hiring process. An ATS is for more than simply tracking candidates and applicants; it is also about the end-to-end management of candidates, job postings, applications and job offers, as well as creating a searchable database of candidates, resumes and job descriptions. An ATS also helps recruiters schedule interviews, sends automated emails and notifications to recruiters and candidates, and keeps recruiters and hiring managers notified about the status of each hiring process.

An ATS is a wonderful tool to manage the entire recruiting process. Once candidates filter through to the talent and applicant pools in your ATS -- whether from the career site or external job posting or social media channel -- you will able to view, identify, compare and rank them against job openings.

Even if you already have an ATS, you might want to see if it is the best system available. A good ATS will be able to post jobs to external job sites and social media sites, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, which can improve your reach and target a wider range of candidates. The ATS can reuse content from other jobs -- such as the company overview, employee benefits or skill sets -- to streamline the creation of job postings before they are pushed out by the ATS. Some ATSes come with AI capabilities built in, which can add significant value to your recruiting processes.

Using an ATS is a good way to manage the hiring process so candidates receive an impressive experience and therefore a great first impression of the company they may soon work for. Having a professionally managed process with regular communication that sets out expectations and next steps will entice candidates to accept an offer. This can make the difference in hiring top talent before your competition does.

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