Nurturing candidates has one overarching purpose: to convert top talent into new hires.
By continuously engaging with job prospects of interest — whether passive or active — through multiple engagement strategies across their respective candidate journeys, you and your talent acquisition team can offer a seamless experience that delivers results for your recruiting function.
Focusing on building your employer brand, streamlining your sourcing function, and constructing robust databases of top talent using a CRM all goes into candidate engagement. But, it’s the continuous drumbeat of interactions that can make a difference for your hiring outcomes.
15 questions to ask about candidate engagement
No matter the level of sophistication of your enterprise organization’s recruiting function and processes, you can always work to improve your candidate engagement approach.
Here are 15 questions related to your recruitment marketing efforts, the hiring experience provided to prospects, and the onboarding process carried out for new hires that can help you strengthen your candidate relationship management strategy and boost your conversion rates moving forward.
Recruitment marketing
1) Do you have segmented talent pools that you consistently nurture with social and email campaigns?
2) How well do you keep ‘silver-medalists’, or those candidates who made it to the final interview stage, but did not receive an offer, engaged with your employer brand?
3) Do you have a compelling career site to post search-optimized job postings that showcases what it’s like to work at your company and offers a mobile-first experience?
4) How well are you managing your social channels and promoting employer brand content?
5) Are you tapping into employees to recruit new talent (i.e., leverage them for employee referrals)?
Hiring experience
6) Is it easy for a candidate to apply to your job openings on a mobile device?
7) Is it easy for a candidate to schedule or reschedule interviews with your hiring team?
8) Is your hiring team trained to engage candidates and welcome them either by video or onsite?
9) Are you responsive to candidate questions throughout the process? Do you have AI and automated messaging that can answer questions when you’re not available?
10) Do candidates receive timely feedback and do you track overall candidate feedback time?
Onboarding process
11) Is your onboarding experience seamlessly connected to your hiring experience?
12) Are all of your new hire forms digital so that new hires don’t have to fill out forms by hand?
13) Do you have an onboarding portal that prioritizes all of a new hire’s tasks?
14) Does your org’s onboarding portal work on mobile devices?
15) Do you offer pre-boarding? In other words, is your onboarding portal available to candidates before they start, so they can get a head start on the process?
“Smart” nurturing the top candidate engagement approach for today’s talent teams
To improve your team’s respective recruiting process, you need to understand that you can make a tangible difference in engaging candidates — whether job seekers are simply taking an initial look at your business and available openings or actively ready to interview for (and take on) open roles.
A candidate-centric approach shifts the focus from managing reqs to creating remarkable hiring journeys that enable you to engage talent at the right time and in the right way throughout the process.
Companies that have figured this out are seeing increases in social hires, higher rates of referrals that turn into applicants, increased application rates, greater candidate response rates, reduced time to fill, decreased time in screening applicants, and faster time to onboard.
Remember, nurturing candidates is the one area you can actually impact, so it’s important to orchestrate high-quality interactions across the entire recruiting process to create an exceptional candidate experience for job seekers.
Forward-thinking TA leaders and recruiters need to think more strategically about how to improve the quality, speed, and effectiveness of engagement across a broader candidate journey, and in turn, an expanded recruiting cycle — from recruitment marketing to hiring to new hire engagement.
Find out how you can enhance your candidate engagement efforts with Evolve, our complete Talent Acquisition Suite for enterprise recruiting teams. Schedule a demo of our ATS today.
