Is Your Sales Team a Part of Your Candidate Experience Strategy?
Just about everyone who works in recruitment knows the importance of creating a positive candidate experience. But, if you don’t work directly with candidates, it’s easy to think of the candidate experience the way the average middle schooler reacts when they see an unpopular kid sitting by himself at lunch—someone should sit with him, just as long as the someone isn’t me.
But the truth is, a good candidate experience is a company-wide effort. It doesn’t just fall on recruiters to make it happen. If you work at a split-desk agency with distinct roles for recruiters and salespeople or account managers, sales has a vital role to play. Here’s the how and why.
What Can Sales Do to Impact the Candidate Experience?
Your salespeople and account managers deal directly with your clients, so they play an important role in fostering communication. And a lack of communication in the hiring process is one of the most common candidate complaints.
While recruiters can do their part to keep candidates updated on the status of a job, there’s not much they can do if there aren’t any new developments. And if the candidate doesn’t get the job, and the recruiter doesn’t know why she won’t be able to give the candidate valuable constructive feedback.
This is where Sales comes in. They play an important role in updating prospective candidates on where they stand. Sales can then update recruiters with valuable information to share with the candidate. Intra-office communication needs to be clear and efficient in order for your candidate engagement strategy to work.
Aligning your recruiters and salespeople is also vital to the success of your candidate engagement efforts. Sales might not want to push too hard and lose their clients, while recruiters don’t want to waste their time on trivial jobs. But uniting them behind the one goal—placements and commission—will do a lot to get everyone on board.
What’s Good For the Candidate is Good for the Client
The sales benefits of a better candidate experience are profound. If you have a good reputation with candidates, you’ll attract more candidates and more of a high-caliber, too. And with better candidates more frequently, your clients will be consistently happier with the personnel that you supply.
But it’s not just about the personnel you’ll be able to offer. You can expect a much faster submission time when you promote a good relationship with your candidates. In other words, you’re fostering a more profitable present and future. And everyone—whether you’re a recruiter or a salesperson—can agree to that.
For more information on the traits of a winning candidate engagement strategy, get the Candidate Engagement ebook.
