Candidate Data is at the heart of everything you do when processing Applications, carrying out Talent Pooling activities or running reports; so it's really important to ensure you have collected enough information from your candidates to allow you to do what you need to do.
Within Eploy, there are generally 3 stages where you'd typically collect Candidate Data: Registration, Application and Onboarding.
Data collection is a fine balancing act between making sure you're gathering enough information to be able to perform specific tasks, but also making sure you're not putting Candidates off from registering or applying by asking for too much information too soon. There are also GDPR considerations to take in to account as well - for example, do you need to capture certain pieces of information on Registration, or do you not actually need it until Onboarding?
In this article we're going to look at the first of these three stages - Registration, along with the Candidate's ability to update their information within the Candidate Portal.
We're going to explore the types of data typically captured during Registration, and we're going to look at the pages available within the Candidate Portal which can be used both as a way of capturing additional information not captured during Registration, but which the Candidate can also use to keep their personal data up to date.
We'll also look at how to complete the relevant specification documents.
To jump to a specific section in this article, please use the links below:
The Registration Page
Before a Candidate can apply for a role, they must first register; but they can also register speculatively, without applying for a role, adding themselves to your Talent Pool and signing up for Job Alerts.
This is your first opportunity to gather information from your Candidates.
There are two key things to consider at this stage:
- What information would you like to gather to enable meaningful talent pooling and reporting requirements
- What information do you need to know about the Candidate at this stage, bearing in mind relevant Data Protection and GDPR legislation
Typically, the type of information gathered on registration would include:
- Source data (i.e. How did you hear about us?)
- Basic personal information: First Name, Surname
- Email address (this will be their Username to access the Candidate Portal)
- Password
- Do you currently work for us?
- You might want to consider adding some additional questions here to validate that the Candidate does actually work for you, such as asking for their Staff ID and Line Manager's email address
- Job Alerts and preferences (preferred Location, Department, Industry, etc.)
- Candidate CV
We would always recommend asking your Candidate to upload their CV as part of the registration process and, wherever possible, this should be mandatory i.e. they must upload a CV to be able to register.
The Candidate CV is a goldmine of information as it typically includes their educational background, work history, qualifications, skills, languages spoken and whatever else they choose to include within their personal statement.
When a Candidate uploads a CV on registration, Eploy will parse the data, meaning it will extract all of the useful information and pre-populate the relevant fields within the candidate record. It is this CV Parsing that makes our Registration and Application processes so quick, as the majority of basic information about the candidate can be extracted from the CV, meaning they only have to verify the information on Application rather than fill it in from scratch. This is why we call the combined Registration and Application process Quick Apply.
Preferences
One of the major benefits of using Eploy is your ability, when Talent Pooling, to match the requirements of a Vacancy with the preferences of your Candidates.
The types of preferences we can capture include:
- Location
- Department
- Industry
- Distance willing to travel
- Salary
These preferences are all available within the Candidate Portal itself, but we would strongly recommend asking these questions on Registration - that way the Candidate doesn't need to access the relevant part of their profile to provide this information.
Some preferences will be added to the Registration page as a default, but consider what other preferences you might like to capture on Registration. If nothing else, it'll give you more information to be able to report on later. If you choose to ask the Candidate how far they are willing to travel, it would be advisable to ask the Candidate to also supply their Postcode on Registration.
Equal Opportunities on Registration
If reporting on Diversity and Inclusion is high on your recruitment agenda, you may also want to take the opportunity to gather that kind of information on registration as well, but you'd need to consider whether this kind of data gathering might put a potential candidate off from completing the registration process.
If you are going to ask these questions on registration, we'd recommend keeping it to the bare minimum, or giving the Candidate the option to answer the questions or not.
Whichever option you go with, it's always recommended to include a short bit of text explaining how the equal ops data will be used or the reason as to why you're gathering that information so early on.
Don't forget, you can always ask these questions again as part of the Application process and during Onboarding.
Registering with Social Media
You may also choose to include the option to register using a Social Media login, such as Facebook, Google or LinkedIn.
When registering in this way, Eploy will automatically pull across the Candidates name and email address from the profile, and it can pull across their profile picture as well, to be used as an Avatar within the system.
The key thing to be aware of with social media registration, especially in the case of LinkedIn, is that no other data will be pulled across from the profile, so even if you are allowing Candidates to register in this way, we'd still recommend asking them to upload a CV.
A thought on GDPR and Consent
Although you'll be gathering your Candidate's consent to process their data as part of the registration process, this is not covered as part of the Registration Page specifications, so although important, it's not something you need to consider right now.
You'll be asked to configure your system's GDPR and Consent Settings as part of Phase 3 - Customer Configuration.
Once configured they'll automatically appear on the Registration page.
Completing the Candidate Specification Document
Once you've decided what information you'd like to capture within the Registration process, you'll need to fill in the Registration worksheet of the Candidate Specification Document, which can be found in the Files tab of your Teamwork project.
Here you'll find all of our default "out of the box" fields listed. Please tell us:
- Whether you'd like to keep the field on the Registration form
- If you are keeping it on the form, should it be Mandatory that Candidates answer the question
- If you'd like to change what the field is called, what we should change it to
- For dropdown fields, what options would you like to have within the list
If you'd like to add any extra fields to your registration page, you can capture this information here as well, telling us:
- What type of field it should be e.g. text box, drop down list, check box, etc.
- What it should be called (in the Detail column), and
- Whether the field should be mandatory or not
Note the amount of customisation to be done to the basic default registration page will have been discussed and agreed at your initial scoping meeting. Any customisation over and above that already agreed should be discussed with your Implementation Manager before adding it to the specification document.
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