Engage best practices

Create lasting candidate experiences

When it comes to engaging with talent, one size doesn’t fit all. Today’s talent wants recruiters to be proactive (and frequent) with opportunity outreach, and prefer email almost twice as much as the next communication option.

The examples below are ways your team can improve on current strategies to foster better relationships and more placements.

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Improve candidate engagement with best-in-class strategies

Leverage every opportunity to connect with your talent

Develop a candidate journey map

Put yourself in your candidate’s shoes to understand their experience with you once they’ve applied for a role. This will help recruiters to build stronger relationships, make candidates feel supported, and set your firm apart from the others.

Automate submittal status updates and interview reminders

Keep candidates prepared and in the loop, reduce recruiter busywork, and improve placement rates with ongoing communications throughout the submission process and into the interview stage.

Gather candidate feedback early and often

Create a touchpoint at each step of the candidate journey that allows you to capture interview feedback, thoughts on new opportunities, assignment details, and more.

Consider these fundamental engagement tactics

Deliver the right message at the right time

This level of engagement starts with clean data. Make sure to capture complete and accurate information from your candidates regarding communication preferences, job and content interests, and assignment timelines. Then use the data to send candidates personalized information at the right time.

Develop a segmentation strategy

Segment your database by things like engagement scores, communication preferences, and last touch to ensure you’re delivering the right content to the right people.

Use automated communications

Automate communication cadences that offer new job matches, reminders of next steps, branded content, and/or opportunities to provide feedback on completed assignments.

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Engagement metrics are a bit harder to track than other KPIs in the industry. Nonetheless, they are just as important. When determining the success of your activities at the Engage phase, here are the top KPIs you should be tracking.

Email open, click, and reply rates

Know your audience. Are you sending the same generic mass email to all of your candidates, or are you sending personalized content and messages that resonates?

Engagement scores of contacts in your ATS

Calculation based on how they’ve interacted with your messages and website. Opening emails scores a few points, clicking links will get more points, and viewing jobs or buying signals will score even higher. Generally, a score over 75 means the contact or candidate is engaged. The higher the score, the healthier and happier the contact.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Survey candidates and clients about the likelihood that they would recommend your company and services to people in their network. This should be done once or twice a year (monthly if you have a large base) to keep a pulse.

Percentage of complete data in your database

Identify the most important information to capture from candidates. Then measure how many of your contacts have these key fields filled out. More complete data means more personalized engagement.

Tips from the experts

We have a very step-by-step process for communicating with candidates. It made sense to us to have a tool that would make sure a lot of those communications were happening on a continuous basis.

Dustin Couts Vice President Business Operations at PGS Worldwide

You’re creating a data warehouse of your human capital, and it’s important to leverage that data and have a candidate management strategy in place. Have people in relationships, and automation on repetition.

Lauren Jones Founder at Leap Consulting Solutions

Candidates want to be seen, they want to be understood, and they want to be happy. Giving people the opportunity to have the experience that works for them is important.

Julie Haldorson EVP at Parqa Digital Marketing

Through implementing automation, we have been able to connect with so many more clients and candidates than ever before. This has ultimately given our recruiters more time on their hands to do what they do best, which is recruit.

Nicole Hart Fuse Recruitment

Explore the Connected Recruiting phases

Attract and convert more applicants

The Attract phase of the talent lifecycle is all about streamlining your application process and tailoring your brand to offer a memorable experience — from their first interaction with your website to your application follow-up.

Meet candidates where they are

The Engage phase of the talent lifecycle is all about knowing your audience. Do you have enough information about all the candidates in your database to be able to deliver the right message, at the right time, in the right channel, for the right opportunity?

Take the busywork out of onboarding

The Onboard phase of the talent lifecycle is all about checking the administrative requirements while delivering a positive candidate experience (in the lead up to their first day and throughout their assignment).

Increase redeployment and candidate satisfaction

The Nurture phase of the talent lifecycle is all about building long-term relationships, making the most of your existing database, and leveraging reviews and referrals, to ultimately build a talent community.

Staffing firms are leveraging Connected Recruiting to source candidates in new places, match their candidates with better opportunities, and make their recruiters more effective.

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