One of recruitment marketing’s main challenges is having to compete with many other companies for the same candidates. You try to entertain as many of them as you can, but this still leaves some of them neglected at some point.
Candidate engagement automation can smoothen your hiring process by allowing you to fully engage with many candidates quickly. Here’s what you need to know.
The Problems with Engagement in the Traditional Hiring Processes
80 percent of people in recruitment teams believe that recruitment automation will help improve their candidate engagement. Companies are already investing in their digital transformation to improve all aspects of their business, including candidate sourcing and candidate experience in talent acquisition. ¹
You may have encountered many hindrances in finding the best candidates for your team and may feel lost in addressing them. Here are some challenges you may have faced and how automating them gets them fixed.
Inability to manage a candidate pool due to information loss
A common problem in recruitment is losing your applicant’s data. This may result in them dropping out of your application process due to multiple unkept promises and repetitive messages from your end.
It may also be difficult for you to go through hundreds of resumes when one job opening can attract an average of 250 applications. These issues and more can affect your human resources team’s productivity and your employer brand.
Ineffective communication with candidates
Keeping your word may be a challenge when you are engaging hundreds of applicants. Saying that you will update them in a week but leaving them forgotten doesn’t sit well with a lot of candidates.
Candidates don’t like being kept waiting because many of them may be working on their day jobs while having interviews with you. On top of that, other companies may be interested in their skill sets as much as you are.
Hiring process that takes too long
Due to lengthy recruitment processes, around 57 percent of applicants lose interest in a position they’ve applied for. On the other hand, recruiters may spend an average of 13 hours a week evaluating candidates for one job position alone.
Your recruitment procedures may have too many interview stages or very long examinations. Having each phase of your hiring be too long can become a burden to you and your candidates.
Set Up Your Candidate Engagement Automation
There are many aspects of your candidate relationship management that can be automated, but here we’ll focus on communicating with them promptly, wisely, and meaningfully. Here are some features you can prioritize to succeed:
1. Take advantage of Applicant Tracking Systems.
Elevate your hiring procedures by reducing administrative tasks through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). An ATS can automate several areas of your hiring, such as your screening of submitted resumes, communicating with candidates, scheduling interviews, and keeping track of candidates.
ATS can assist you in creating a more positive candidate experience by sending out emails to candidates at different stages of your recruitment so that you can keep them updated about the status of their applications and further steps to take.
2. Send out automated but personalized email campaigns.
The 2022 Talent Benchmarks Report by Lever found that recruiters who send a minimum of three automated emails in their candidate nurture-related campaigns garnered an average response rate of 356 percent. This was compared to the results of other campaigns where only one email was sent out.²
Use email marketing tools to consistently engage candidates. Tools like Hubspot or Mailchimp can assist in creating and sending out automated email campaigns containing significant information about your company. These emails may include job openings, application status updates, and events like job fairs.
Your hiring managers can also take advantage of these email features by including scheduling links in their emails to candidates. These links will help a candidate choose an interview schedule based on the manager’s available times.
Remember that these email tools must be used with personalization in mind and must be sent out on a regular schedule. You may have them scheduled to be sent on a monthly or weekly basis, depending on what works best for you. These email marketing tools can help you sort out your recipients based on their interests so that they will only receive what is most relevant to them.
3. Simulate human conversation through chatbots.
A chatbot is a type of AI that can mimic human conversation through text. You can integrate it into your social platforms and career pages. These bots will take care of answering frequently asked questions from your page visitors and candidates and can help them schedule interviews and provide exact feedback on the state of their applications.
Chatbots can help you provide personalized and timely responses to avoid any candidate from waiting too long. When implemented right, you can then focus on activities with higher value such as interviewing screened candidates.
Your already-existing social pages can help automate your relationships with your candidates by providing real-time responses. You can share job openings, provide updates, and engage your candidates through platforms like LinkedIn.
Although you will be going for automation, make sure that people will be seeing authenticity through your pages. Showcase your work environment and culture to provide a more positive story to your viewers. You may also include the success stories of your team and share your day-to-day activities. Ask yourself what it’s like to work at your company and put it out there to be seen.
5. Automate your initial interviews through pre-recordings.
Your initial interviews are usually the quickest to go through and automating them can save much of your and the candidate’s time. An automated interview setup has your candidate responding to your pre-recorded video or voice. The candidate’s responses will be recorded in the same format you chose and sent back to you for your or an AI’s review.
This setup allows you to get more straightforward answers. Meanwhile, a phone or voice-recorded interview has two advantages: first, it prevents you from seeing the candidate’s face and may potentially lessen any unconscious bias you may have toward them. Second, it can make your candidate less conscious about their appearance and they can focus on their answers alone. ³
6. Provide updates quickly with an accessible candidate portal.
Provide your candidates with better access to their information through a candidate portal. It is a secure online platform that will help you automate your candidate engagement by lessening the usual manual communication from hiring managers and recruiters.
Portals for candidates can also improve the experience from their perspective by giving them a more personalized and convenient way to communicate with you online.
Candidate portals allow people to apply easily and make interview scheduling more efficient. They can also view the status of their applications through it and be offered job offers when accepted for a role.
Automation makes it easier for you to engage with candidates.
An automated candidate journey can help keep you on the right track for your hiring goals. Maximize it to improve the quality of your interviews and lessen the time that may be wasted by managing your data manually.
LEVEL UP YOUR MARKETING STRATEGIES TO REACH YOUR BEST CANDIDATES
Allied Insight is here to help you attract the people most suited to your team and work environment. We are full-stack marketing experts who will provide you with impactful services in Complete Competitive Analysis, Securing Brand Uniformity, SEO Optimization, and more.
Contact us today and discuss with us your company goals.
References
1 Nesterov, Oleg. “Technology against Chaos: How Workflow Automation Can Beat Recruiting Challenges.” MindK, www.mindk.com/blog/workflow-automation-in-recruiting/. Accessed 3 May 2023.
2 Bushery, Matthew. “Scaling Candidate Engagement with Recruitment Automation.” Lever, 5 May 2023, www.lever.co/blog/candidate-engagement/.
3 “What Are Automated Interviews.” Qualifi, www.qualifi.hr/info/automated-interview. Accessed 7 May 2023.
