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Candidate engagement is the key to achieve recruitment success

Yes, you read that right — candidate engagement can actually be the key to achieve recruitment success. It is fairly easy to engage with candidates when you have fewer roles combined with a fairly small list of candidates. It gets tougher to engage with candidates when you have a high volume of roles and a large list of candidates.

Candidate engagement is one of the key experiences a candidate would remember during their career. Sadly, most of the recruiters do not have a good candidate engagement process in place as about 60% of the candidates have experienced a bad engagement process where they haven’t received any feedback from the recruiter or employer. (Source: Careerbuilder)

There are few tips to level up your recruitment game by prioritizing your candidate engagement process:

1. Communicate a clear hiring timeline
   Candidates should be made aware of the entire hiring timeline, so they stay updated and know what to expect at any given time. Yes, we know it gets tough when the volumes are high, but let technology assist you here. A lot of recruitment tools have it inbuilt, where you get to send message to specific candidate pools. Oleoo, Talentwave & Beamery might be some of the tools you would want to check out.
2. If the volumes are high, use a chatbot
   A chatbot can be used to message candidates for general queries which they might have — without your involvement. A candidate has a lot of questions on role, package, experience and so forth. Although a bot requires initial setup, it will save you a lot of time!
3. Talk to qualified candidates with more enthusiasm to boost their morale.
   Today’s workforce is a multi-generational workforce and they like to have multiple channels of communication. Maintain a good level of professionalism added with a good sense of humour. Get the candidate excited about company he or she is fit for.
4. Provide feedback to candidates
   As we mentioned earlier, use a tool to manage candidates. The tool itself has features to send feedback to candidates. That way, candidates do not have any level of uncertainty about assessment results. This will help you as a recruiter, to fill positions faster and deliver a great candidate experience.
5. Ask for feedback
   Create a form on Google Forms or Typeform, put relevant questions in the form and keep it short. Ask your candidates to provide feedback so that you know where you can improve and track your performance over time.

Conclusion
Candidate engagement used to be tiring, especially where high volume is involved. However, the power of new tools available to the modern recruiter can be leveraged to create a better and more efficient hiring process. You can indeed create a memorable hiring experience for candidates and fill in the positions faster.

Happy recruiting!