Virtual reality (VR) experiences offer a powerful solution to companies wanting to attract and inspire top candidates.
High performers are up to eight times more productive than other employees — and the gap rises as the work becomes more complex. Yet in today’s competitive job market, attracting top talent is harder than ever. Adding to the challenge, top candidates are only on the market for about 10 days. It’s essential to engage these candidates while they’re available. And the candidate’s experience during the hiring process can make or break recruiting goals.
How can your company offer the best possible recruiting experience to these high-performing candidates?
There are many reasons for accepting a new job, but for top people, we believe that inspiration is the primary motivator. As put by Stacey Browning of Paycor, “Attracting top talent is done by communicating what we all want in a new job — clarity about our mission, and colleagues who share the conviction that what the company is doing matters.” She further suggests that companies can authentically express these things “through video, robust career pages and personal communications from senior leaders.”
Of course, getting candidates to engage with senior leaders can be challenging, especially when companies scale. So how can your business get top candidates to understand your mission — and be inspired enough to come onboard — in the short time they’re available? Video and career pages are a start, but VR experiences offer a far more effective solution.
Connecting Talent to Mission and Culture
With VR, you can fully immerse your candidates into the company, the culture, and the moments that help define your company’s mission and vision.
Companies often spend so much time interviewing candidates that they forget to sell themselves. It’s should be no surprise that when they finally find the candidate they want and extend an offer, the candidate has already gone in another direction. In fact, companies are losing an average 41% of their top candidates in the final stages of the hiring process.
Given the work that goes into getting talent to the final stages of a hiring pipeline, any increase in acceptance rates makes a massive improvement in time and resources expended. It’s therefore critical to build a strong connection with candidates as they work their way through the interview process.
The ideal way to build this all-important connection, of course, is for candidates to learn about the company’s mission directly from the CEO or the founders and to see it in action first-hand… to visit the company’s key locations, see how the company works with customers, and experience company events, meetings, and moments that define the company’s culture.
But how is this possible once the company has reached any significant size?
This is where VR comes in.
Building Empathy
VR gives a feeling of “presence” that allows the brain to record and recall VR experiences as if they were memories.
Getting someone to care about your mission and culture means building empathy. “Empathy connects the heart with the head,” according to Rod Goldin, Product Design, Google. “It helps us feel what someone is going through, and inspires us to act to improve a product or service for the larger subset of customers that experience this pain.”
VR at its best can do more than immerse: it lets people appreciate new perspectives. — Will Byrne, Fast Company
When someone is in a VR experience, their brain responds and records the experience as if it had actually happened. That’s why VR is known as “the empathy machine.” If a candidate can use VR to “sit down” with a founder, join a meeting, or tour an office, they will have a vivid image of what working with your company might look like. They will be immersed into every scenario and location they need in order to understand who your company is. And they can experience this anywhere, anytime, in under 15 minutes.
Real World Results
We have the data and use cases within eevo’s customer base to understand how VR is currently helping companies recruit.
Companies need to engage and inspire their top candidates. We know that this pool of talent is highly mission-driven, so it’s important to let them experience your company’s culture first-hand and build empathy for the company’s mission and vision. And there’s no better way to deliver this message than through a VR experience.
The proof? While results differ from company to company, we typically see an increase of 15% or more in offer acceptances from top candidates through the use of VR in the recruiting process.
For more on how to use VR in the hiring process, see “Three Ways to Use VR to Hire Top Talent.”
