In the past two years, the hiring market has shown just how fickle it can be. And candidates have taken notice. New expectations on building a more inclusive workforce, creating flexible and hybrid work environments, ensuring fair compensation, and providing a streamlined, supportive hiring process are all part of worker motivations, according to the 2022 Job Seeker Nation Report.
Candidates are making it clear they want more from employers — and they feel empowered to ask for it. No longer can recruiters and talent acquisition professionals sit back and wait for candidates to come to them. Instead, they must recognize how to best nurture, identify, and prioritize candidate interactions with their employer brand throughout the hiring process. That’s where candidate engagement scoring comes in.
What Is Candidate Engagement Scoring and How Is it Measured?
Just as companies often measure levels of existing employee engagement or sales teams use lead scoring to determine consumer buying readiness, identifying candidate engagement is just as important in the recruiting process.
To measure candidate engagement, savvy recruiting teams leverage candidate engagement scoring to determine a candidate’s hiring readiness all the way from first look to first day. Candidate engagement scoring shows how engaged a candidate is with your employer brand and open roles, and it can even predict their future interest in roles or likelihood of accepting a job offer.
Candidate engagement scores help recruiters maximize hiring outcomes, improve key metrics, and nurture diverse talent pools. The measurement, or score, attributed to candidate engagement can be characterized in different ways. Every recruiting team has a different set of key metrics that tell the story of their candidate engagement, but here are some of the most used metrics when determining a candidate’s score:
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Site visits and activity
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Email engagement (clicks, opens)
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Texting interactions (opt-ins, responses, link clicks)
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Application submissions
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Signup for job alerts
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Response rates to recruiter communication
Save Time and Nurture Talent
While candidate engagement scoring might initially seem like a heavy lift, the long-term payoffs are well worth it. Once your team has mapped out and weighted the various metrics that are most relevant to indicating engagement, you will be able to be more focused in your outreach.
Candidate engagement scoring allows for segmentation by engagement data, and enhancing that by further segmenting by desired skills, certifications, or experience can give you a warm candidate pool to start from as positions open up within your organization.
As the speed of hiring continues to increase, talent teams must be confident they are spending time with the right candidates. Again, according to the 2022 Job Seeker Nation Report, 45% of surveyed workers are actively looking for a new job or plan to look within the next year.
That means nearly one in two candidates are actively looking and you need to be ready to identify which ones are most interested and engaged. Candidate engagement scoring gives you the ability to categorize and target candidates with high levels of interaction with your brand, which, in turn, serves to further elevate your employer brand.
Is Candidate Engagement Scoring Right for You?
Simply put… yes!
Candidate engagement scores are useful for recruiting teams tasked with building a diverse talent network of engaged candidates. With the importance of DE&I and the added pressure of the great resignation, candidate engagement scoring is no longer a nice to do, but is a must-do for any recruitment team.
Candidate engagement scoring is also valuable for teams with highly specialized roles because you can target best-fit candidates who express the deepest interest in your employer brand. Finally, if your recruitment process is already fairly streamlined, candidate engagement scores can further optimize your hiring process, taking recruiting to the next level by adding additional insight into your candidate pools and empowering you to increase effectiveness of nurture campaigns.
Ready to Learn More?
Learn how to take your hiring to the next level with candidate engagement scoring. Get your copy of our latest eBook to dig deeper and find out how to leverage candidate scoring to enhance your hiring process.