Keeping the Connection: How to Best Engage With Top Candidates

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You can keep the moving parts of your recruitment machine well-oiled by examining and revising critical components of your talent pipeline. By now, you’re well aware that job candidate management is both a science—and a very delicate art. Ongoing evaluation regarding how you follow up with potential high-value job candidates is especially critical to the success of your recruitment process.

The way that you fill your talent pipeline and follow up with potential new hires can make an enormous difference in whether you land the best talent around. What you must remember is that while you’re evaluating job candidates, they’re also evaluating you.

Filling the Pipeline: Application Optimization

With so many responsibilities to manage, it’s easy to overlook the application process from the job candidate’s perspective. 43% of job seekers use their mobile devices to apply for work, according to a CareerBuilder survey. What’s more, 21% of them will abandon your application if it’s more than two or three pages long.

You can evaluate your organization’s mobile readiness by filling out your company’s application using your smartphone. If filling out the mobile application is unpleasant for you, then it’s also awkward for potentially high-value job candidates.

It’s essential to create mobile-friendly applications that better engage top candidates. Top organizations are already doing it. If you’ve already put some work into creating a mobile-friendly job application, you most likely focused on ensuring that it renders correctly on various screen sizes and is easily navigable via touch. However, you must also consider how easy it is to complete the application using a mobile device.

In other words, you must think beyond merely reformatting the desktop version of your job application to fit a mobile screen. You must think about the feel of the entire application process from a job candidate’s point of view. For example, you can make the application process easier for job applicants by allowing them to upload resumes and cover letters via services such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

Streamlining Your Pipeline: Embracing Automation

Tedious manual entry wastes time and resources. Each one of your human resources personnel may spend 170 hours or more every quarter engaging with candidates via email. Automation could cut that time down to approximately six and a half hours a quarter, or 30 minutes per week.

For example, you can leverage automation to engage potential hires using a platform such as The WhetherBy automating all manual workflows, you can give human resources personnel up to 12 more hours a week that they can spend going after the best talent around. Furthermore, you can easily access a high-level overview of the potential hires in your pipeline whenever you desire.

Recruitment automation software leverages technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. It enables recruitment teams to automate manual processes and significantly boosts productivity. You can incorporate automation into all stages of the hiring process, including:

  • Engagement
  • Final selection
  • Interviewing
  • Scheduling
  • Sourcing

A growing number of HR leaders are embracing automation, giving frontline recruitment personnel time to stretch their creative mental muscles to develop more effective recruiting strategies. With automation, HR specialists are empowered to drive progress and develop a deeper understanding of the nuances of the local talent pool.

Stay in Touch

Less than half of administrative personnel manage to make their way through all their daily email correspondence with consistency. For recruiters, this means that high-value potential new hires get lost in the shuffle.

Office workers spend an average of 209 minutes a day checking and responding to their email, according to a study conducted by Adobe. In the same survey, only 46% of respondents claim that they can clear their inbox every day. Templates, however, can help you to communicate the common issues that arise during the hiring process and recapture some of the lost time spent on manual email responses.

It’s essential that you stay in touch with high-value candidates throughout the hiring process. To aid in the process, create templates that are clear, concise and encourage candidates to ask questions if they desire. You should have a template to inform candidates when you receive their application. You should also create an acknowledgment template that explains how you’ll follow-up on a candidate’s application.

Often, there are delays in the hiring process. There’s no need to write a detailed email about every delay, but you should have a template informing candidates regarding the issue so that they don’t assume you’ve overlooked them for a position. You should also create a template for rescheduling interviews. Finally, you’ll need templates to inform job candidates that they are moving to the next stage in the hiring process and another template to invite them to the actual interview.

Don’t let potential rock stars fall through the cracks. During the recruitment process, your company is on trial. Recognize that the hiring process is an engagement where you are evaluating job candidates just as much as they are evaluating your organization. However, you can leverage technology to put your best foot forward during every candidate engagement.

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