Key Strategies to Boost Your Candidate Engagement Process

Candidates are the lifeblood of the recruitment industry. A candidate’s impression of a company begins with a positive employer experience. Every successful company wants to create an engaging experience for candidates to attract quality talent and keep them interested in your company, which in turn future proofs your recruitment activities

Candidate engagement is the key to successfully creating a positive relationship between your organization and its talent. It is imperative to identify and include specific engagement touchpoints in your strategic plan. In fact, candidate engagement is a protracted process requiring consistent communications between candidates and recruiters. 

Before you jump into creating your strategy, it’s important to ask yourself a few questions;

• What are your engagement goals? 
• What’s the purpose of your engagement? 
• Are your engagement goals long-term or short-term? 

1. Devising a Hiring Timeline

Hiring is time-consuming, and with all the recruitment tools available in the market, it is very easy to reduce hiring time using automation at every step. In order to set things in motion, your candidate engagement process should align with your overall hiring activities.  

2. Identifying Conversational Touchpoints

Whether or not a candidate is hired, it is important to keep them informed about the status of their application. Even a short confirmation email about a job submission creates an impact. Once the touchpoints are identified, conversations can be scheduled with automated responses. 

3. Developing a Content Strategy 

Content is crucial to communicating your key brand messages. Your messages need to be included in your job descriptions, email campaigns, and social media posts. All of these influence the brand perception of the candidate. 

4. Employing AI Tools for Implementation

AI-powered Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) allow staffing professionals to integrate all of the recruiting activities in one place. An advanced ATS streamlines the entire recruiting experience from the moment the candidate visits the career portal, to onboarding, while keeping the employer brand message consistent across all channels. 

5. Captivating Pre-Selection Engagement

The pre-selection assessment phase gives a glimpse of how the company works. With personalized questionnaires, gamified assessments, company videos, culture fit assessments, recruiters can keep a grip on their applicants and keep the engagement process alive. 

What’s Next?

Candidate engagement is all about making the candidate want the job. Consistent communication without over-communicating helps establish a positive and balanced relationship, while keeping candidates informed about the process. While achieving hiring goals is always the main objective, building a diverse and inclusive talent community is also important. 

1. Emails: Email marketing is still one of the easiest ways to interact with candidates periodically with content that is tailor-made for each specific talent community. A variety of campaigns can be executed based on:

• Company culture
• Company wins
• Information about new partnerships 
• Blogs specific to the target group
• New and open job positions
• Videos and testimonials
• Employee perks and benefits 
• Upcoming events
• Newsletters

2. Social Media: Employers can either create separate pages on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for their career page and communities, or they can integrate with their existing pages and run employer branding campaigns there. Through posts and stories, a potential employee can get an idea of what it is like to work for the company. 
3. Chatbots and FAQs: Don’t want to bug candidates with tons of emails? Want them to look out for themselves? Chatbots in career sites can be automated to answer all the queries a candidate may have about hiring processes, open positions, etc. Similarly, FAQs sections in career sites help candidates learn more about the company. 

Feedback, Please!

Giving feedback to candidates is as important as getting feedback from them. Asking for feedback not only gives candidates the feeling of being valued, but also brings to light any gaps or hurdles in the hiring process of the company. 

Adding the Human Touch

It’s important to understand that candidates are not just numbers, conversions, and placements. By automating the candidate engagement process with the help of an advanced ATS, you can reach thousands of candidates, making sure they remain interested in your company and manage the emotions of the candidates at the same time. Contrary to popular belief, when used properly, AI doesn’t replace the human touch with technology; it only strengthens it.