A Simple Answer To How To Provide Real Benefits To Candidates Online

How can Social Media or media enriched careers pages help to offer candidates real benefits? In my opinion, Jobsite UK provides a really appealing and simple answer to that with “Be My Interviewer”. Their ambition reads as follows: “We’ll provide you with valuable and practical advice to prepare you for the toughest questions and interview scenarios you are likely to face. Most importantly, we want to help you feel confident and ready to answer any question thrown at you.”

On the platform you will more than 20 recruiters and HR professionals from companies such as Shell, Ernst & Young or Accenture, introducing typical interview questions they use. Moreover, with click on the “Answer” button you gain some insight into what the question aims at and how you could prepare for it. Such a service should actually be a mandatory resource for jobseekers as there are still lots of questions related to interview questions coming up in communities and forums every week (e.g. in the German scholarship community e-fellows.net).

I came across another example when following the presentation of Franck La Pinta during Social Recruiting Conference 2011, London on livestream (the slides can be viewed here). He pointed at the fact that Société Générale offers a “Coaching Room” on their website, “specially designed by professional consultants external to Société Générale, in order to help you in your job-hunting efforts, irrespective of your chosen sector of activity”. One of the applications, for instance, is a Virtual Coaching, which provides users with an interactive tool to follow interview tips while being able to take notes at the same time.

The activities on both sites aim not specifically just at regular Jobsite UK users or candidates who want to join Société Générale – infact, they put the candidate first! And this could lead to an overall increased Candidate Experience with a very positive effect on your company’s Employer Brand (of course the overall recruiting and onboarding process has to be engaging as well). Companies of all size should consider at least whether they would like to offer more transparency regarding their own requirements, thus providing the tools or insights relevant for their desired target group to perform well during the application process.

An example of the latter would be “BNP Paribas Backstage” (in French). I already wrote about that platform in one of my earlier posts (in German).