If promising talent keeps dropping out of your hiring process, your candidate engagement strategies may have dropped out of alignment with what modern candidates will tolerate in hiring. Candidate engagement can be a moving target, especially in the rapidly evolving post-pandemic world. Your candidate engagement strategy should parallel your talent pool’s motivations for a job change. It should also make the most of advancing hiring technologies.
The five trailblazing ideas that follow are delivering results for recruiting teams in healthcare, financial services, engineering and more. They may help spark a refresh of candidate engagement in your organization.
- Let’s start with a 2-for-1 candidate engagement story. When recruiters extend a job offer at one stellar healthcare organization, candidates have the option to select where they’d like to work from a list of three locations. What a way to build engagement! After recruiters started delighting candidates with this strategy, they noticed one location was chosen more often. When they visited the location, here’s what they found: Before candidates come to tour, the hiring manager prepares her staff, so they take an active role in showing off their organization. She sets the expectation that her team will help make candidates feel welcome. The data says it’s a candidate engagement strategy that works.
- Help talent access your hiring process with less delay. Candidates who see complicated and high-effort steps as their starting point will likely skip your organization altogether. With an intelligent hiring platform that combines advanced selection science with assessment, video interview, and workflow automation tools, you can reduce friction and engage them with convenient, personalized, time-saving experiences. Same- or next-day assessments, interviews, and live interview scheduling all boost candidate engagement. Read how a global courier company enabled 52,000+ package handler candidates to self-schedule their interview time within 24 hours.
- Give same-day feedback, at scale. Talent Board research indicates candidates are 36% more likely to increase their relationship with a company (apply again, make purchases as a customer) and 24% more likely to refer others if they receive job-related feedback at the interview stage of the hiring process. Companies are finding ways to give same-day feedback, at scale, to increase candidate engagement. To implement this strategy in your organization, you’ll need to put a few things in place:• Solidify feedback as a recruiting goal, and set up tracking
• Encourage hiring managers to get on board. To make your case, let them know that speed is critical in modern hiring and that they’ll benefit on two fronts if they commit to the goal. First, their positions will likely be filled faster. Second, the increase in candidate engagement can help protect against ghosting.
• Deploy an intelligent hiring platform that enables you to do on-demand and live voice and video interviews, automates workflows and facilitates online collaboration with your hiring managers. If you’re aiming for same-day feedback for more than just a handful of candidates, technology’s essential. - Transition recruiters to job coach roles. This is another candidate engagement strategy that’s been effective for healthcare organizations: Creation of the nurse recruiter position. Nurse recruiters help recent nursing graduates find their best role in the organization. They allow candidates and new hires to understand the opportunities available and go further to help candidates define their job paths based on their interests. Healthcare organizations are training experienced recruiters to transition to these new responsibilities, which require them to know much more about their organization beyond job specifications. To build the levels of candidate engagement healthcare organizations are looking for, it also calls for coaching and relationship-building skills at new levels. It’s a dream job for recruiters whose passion is helping others find their dream job.
- Extend the mindset about hiring as an experience, not a process. The period between job acceptance and Day One is prime time for increasing candidate engagement, reducing pre-start quits, and laying the foundation for long-term retention. Companies are ramping up engagement during this onboarding phase with:• AI-enabled onboarding systems that simplify forms management for new hires and reduce the time it takes to complete them
• Intelligent hiring platforms let TA teams share welcome videos with new hires and, conversely, share videos made by new hires within the company before their start date.
• Visual roadmaps that help new hires know what to expect in onboarding
More communication by recruiters and hiring managers with candidates before Day One - Amplify your careers site with recruitment marketing. Recruiters are applying the proven communication strategies marketers use to build deeper connections with candidates. Think of your careers site as a window into the employment experience in your organization. How can you share that information and that feeling with candidates? Get candidates engaged and excited about working for you with employee testimonials, messages from company leaders, and images from social and team-building events. Be sure to describe your hiring process, so they know what to expect and how they can proactively build a relationship with you.
For more strategies you can implement right now to increase candidate engagement, download How to Hire Right When You Are Starved for Candidates.