Candidate engagement includes all interactions with candidates throughout the hiring process. Today’s candidates are shopping around for jobs and influencing how companies communicate. When you’re looking to attract top talent, you need to go beyond standard procedures and embrace continuous engagement.
A New Paradigm for Recruiting
During a routine hiring process, communication is often sporadic. Companies provide vague windows of time during which they’ll follow up with applicants or fail to follow up altogether. This gives candidates the impression that potential employers don’t care enough to stay in contact, and in this current gig economy, companies without flexibility in the way they handle hiring will lose the best employees to the competition. Continuous candidate engagement utilizes recruiting solutions to ensure that all candidates receive timely responses throughout the hiring process. Updates are sent on a regular basis, and candidates are never left in the dark about the next steps. This sets the stage for a smooth transition from hiring to onboarding.
Finding and Keeping Top Talent
In today’s candidate-driven market, every business is dealing with a talent crunch. Potential applicants are more informed than ever before, and they’ll embrace or reject your company based on the message you send. The best candidates go to companies where they feel appreciated, and engagement during the hiring process is a key part of convincing them that your company is where they want to be. If you fail to engage, skilled candidates will go elsewhere for the recognition they crave. To avoid losing the best candidates before the application process even starts, you need to establish a policy of engagement beginning with your career website and leading into an empowering onboarding process. A signed offer is no longer the endpoint for engagement; onboarding is necessary to guide candidates successfully from the recruiting process to a productive career with your company.
Bridging the Candidate Engagement Gap
If you want to grow your company with skilled workers, you need a plan to keep people engaged. A full-featured recruitment system with options for personalized messaging, consistent follow-ups and reminders gives your HR department the power to automate basic tasks and lay the groundwork to consistently nurture a pool of qualified talent. Improving hiring efficiency using engagement tools allows you to leverage growing social media channels and speed up your hiring process to bring in top talent ahead of your competitors. Maintaining continuous engagement tells talented candidates you appreciate their time and suggests they’ll be shown the same appreciation on the job. Adopting this policy in your recruiting process puts you ahead of the competition and attracts top talent to your company. Staying in touch through all phases of hiring and providing a seamless transition through onboarding makes candidates more enthusiastic about working for you and strengthens your company culture. If you want to get the best candidates on board today, continuous engagement is the strategy you need.