IDP’s APAC Talent Acquisition team has won Talent Board’s Candidate Experience (CandE) Award for 2023, in recognition of their unwavering commitment to providing seamless and exceptional candidate experiences. 

Teamwork makes the dream work! Hear from Kavita Diwaker and Kishore Kumar, whose contributions have been instrumental in achieving this remarkable milestone. 

Kavita Diwaker - Talent Acquisition Lead, Corporate & Australasia 

 “Candidate experience is of utmost importance to us as a team. We believe that providing outstanding experiences to our candidates is not just a task, but a core aspect of our values of doing all that we can with integrity and delivering quality experiences. We value their motivation and passion to make us a part of their journey. We’ve put in a lot of effort and hard work into making our candidates feel valued and their journey seamless.  

We reworked our team structure and also established a new and strong TA strategy, ensuring enhanced levels of transparency and fairness in every stage of our recruitment process. Our revamped corporate and careers website is now more accessible and provides relevant content. This has significantly improved the user experience and journey, resulting in stronger and consistent employer branding.  

More importantly, we elevated our employee value proposition, highlighting our unique benefits, core values, growth opportunities and distinctive work culture. We also enhanced our recruitment marketing and employer branding strategy to engage with our candidates frequently that helped us consistently establish and build a stronger connection. Our Brand ambassador program enabled candidates to have a direct sneak peek of #idplife through the posts of our stellar Brand Ambassadors in LinkedIn. 

Furthermore, we focused on building brand consistency and ensured candidates receive clear, accurate and timely feedback, contributing to a positive candidate experience. We’ve also shared comprehensive information about our organisation and the benefits of joining our team to help them understand what to expect during the recruitment process.  

Finally, seeking feedback regularly from our candidates about the recruitment process helped us understand how we could improve their experience. We take pride in saying we were well supported by our Hiring managers in rendering a positive candidate experience, in line with IDP’s values and culture and best practices for conducting candidate-focused interviews. 

Talent Board has been researching and benchmarking candidate experience for more than 12 years now. They have had 1500+ companies participate in the benchmark research since 2011, with about 1.6+ million candidates taking up the surveys. It feels fantastic to know that our hard work has paid off. We are so elated to have received this accolade.  

We are glad that our candidate experience is ranked amongst the very best, and we take this as a commitment to creating exceptional candidate experiences as a great place to work!" 

 Kishore Kumar - Senior Talent Advisor, Corporate & Australasia 

 “At IDP we believe that it is paramount to provide delightful experiences for all our stakeholders, be it candidates, customers, or clients. We must appreciate the time and efforts our candidates have dedicated to their application process. Every interaction a candidate has with our team reflects on our employer brand. When candidates have a seamless and pleasant interaction with our recruitment process, they are more likely to view our organization as an employer of choice. 

Providing a positive experience is the result of good teamwork. We partner with our hiring managers and discuss the various applicants, their expectations, and aspirations and how much of it is aligned to our requirement. Based on it, we work on the flow of Interview questions. We make sure that we keep the candidates informed of the further steps involved in the process. 

In my opinion, recruiters/talent specialists must be a buddy advisor to the candidates, understand their career aspirations and guide them with relevant opportunities. Having transparent conversations with candidates makes them comfortable and would encourage them to apply for relevant roles in future as well.  

A few months ago, I was able to help one of our IDP team members from Kochi, India during their relocation to Melbourne, Australia with a suitable opportunity (he held a valid right to work for Australia). As a Talent Advisor, I believe that it is my responsibility to be empathetic, understand the candidate’s needs and guide them throughout the recruitment process. 

Also, continuous improvement is key! We focus on having consistent communication with our candidates at each stage of their hiring process. We also prioritise involving the hiring Manager in the process, having discussions around interview processes. As a team, we unlearnt and learnt the nuances of enhancing the overall candidate experience.  

This has been a win-win situation, as all of these efforts helped us render outstanding experiences for our candidates, which eventually led to us being recognised by Talent Board as the Candidate Experience Award winner for 2023! Receiving this award would not have been possible without teamwork.  

As a people first organisation, we will continue to work hard in providing exceptional candidate experiences for the years to come.” 

Do you want to belong to a global team and feel valued to use your unique skills to shape our organisation’s future together? Apply today - https://careers.idp.com/join-our-team