The holiday season is upon us with it comes the added chore I mean joy of planning, preparing for and attending all the holiday festivities on top of everything else going on in your already jam-packed life. If you aren’t organized, informed and properly prepared, what’s meant to be a time of excitement and celebration can become a time of stress and irritation.
Similarly, searching, applying and interviewing for a new position on top everything else going on in their lives can be very stressful for candidates. It’s your job to help manage those stressors by keeping them informed, organized and properly prepared throughout the recruiting and hiring processes. Creating a positive candidate experience has never been more in, and now there are tools that allow you to do it easily and effectively.
A positive candidate experience starts with the recruitment process. Ideally, you’re staying engaged with the candidates in your talent community before you’re trying to recruit them for a position so when you do contact them with an opportunity, you’re a familiar and trusted source. When engaging with candidates, focus on what motivates and attracts them to a position, not why they’re an attractive candidate for the company.
As employer branding expert Crystal Miller advises in this post, “research and collect data about what social sites your candidates use, what technology they’re invested in and communities they’ve chosen to be a part of. [This] not only allows you [to have] a better conversation, [it enables you to] craft your messaging to include topics they’re more likely to respond to and be interested in.”
The more you can personalize your messaging, the more successfully you’ll be able to engage your candidates.
But how can recruiters – recruiting for dozens of positions at at time and keeping in touch with hundreds of candidates – be capable of collecting data on and tailoring messages to each of their candidates?
Enter marketing automation platforms (MAP). Traditionally used by marketing and sales organizations to engage prospects and nurture leads, MAPs are now being integrated with recruitment management software (RMS) and used to engage candidates throughout the recruiting and hiring processes.
This allows you to use the data captured and stored in your RMS to segment your audience based on activity, industry, title, experience, interests, etc. and tailor your messages to target them specifically. Additionally, you can create candidate nurture tracks that keep them informed and walk them through each step of the hiring process based on their statuses.
Candidates, who claim to have had a negative recruiting experience, often cite impersonal or lack of communication from their recruiter. A more personal experience means a more positive experience. MAPs enable you to create a personal experience for your candidates without creating additional manual work for your recruiting team.
So if you’re looking for gift ideas this holiday season, give your candidates a positive experience, your team a scalable way of providing it and your clients an informed, prepared and excited new hire.