Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.

At SmashFly, we are committed to providing great customer service to our clients. We love our clients and above all else, we aim to make them as happy as possible. Happy clients not only provide the best feedback on our product but they actively tell others about it, are more willing to learn about new product offerings and are much more likely to keep coming back year after year!

Offering great customer service isn’t just important in selling a tangible product but it also is extremely important in recruiting as you try to build your employer brand.

Here are three principles we live by in offering great customer service and a few ways you can provide this in your recruitment marketing process:

Timely Transparent Response: Whenever we receive a request from a client, we look at the request and provide an immediate response. On top of that, we provide an expectation on when we expect to resolve the issue at hand to provide transparency.

For Recruiting: You can do this a few ways. First, make sure to get back to any inquiries or questions you receive about a position within at least 3 days from candidates. Second, make sure to be transparent in providing candidates with an expectation of how long the recruiting process will take and what the steps involved will be. These two steps can go a long way to heightening the experience of your candidates.

Be a Good Listener: We are constantly listening to our clients on new features we could add to our Recruitment Marketing Platform or new ways that we could think of doing things. While we don’t (and can’t) implement everything, some of our best innovations have come from client feedback.

For Recruiting: First, I would try and solicit feedback from candidates as they go through your recruiting process on everything from how did you like the application to how would you rate the interviews. Second, set up a robust recruitment metrics system in your recruiting process, so that you can “listen” to candidates actions. Are candidates dropping off of your online application? Is your job ad messaging compelling? What job sites do the best candidates hang out at?

Make Information Easily Accessible: At SmashFly, we always make time for clients when they want us to do a walkthrough of a particular component or product offering. The main reason is we want our clients to be the most informed as possible so they can use the component successfully. In addition to live walkthroughs, we are starting to create video walkthroughs of our product offerings so clients can review them at their convenience. This helps to cut down frustration in not knowing how to use our product and ensures that clients get the most out of our components by using them correctly.

For Recruiting: The biggest thing you can do is provide as much information as possible on working at your company and the position that you are hiring for. You can do this in a variety of ways but a few important ones are creating a dedicated career site, using web video directly in your apply process and utilizing social networks to interact with potential candidates (with links to your profiles from your career site).

Customer Service is a great way to differentiate your company and ultimately your employer brand. In the end, you are selling your company to the most qualified candidates and the better you are at communicating and presenting the opportunity to enable candidates to make an educated employment decision, the more top talent you can attract to your company!

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly is the provider of the first recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that enables companies and staffing firms to easily distribute and more importantly measure the performance of their recruiting efforts online.

The WildFire recruitment marketing platform offers every tool you need for your recruitment marketing needs all in one centralized solution including Real-Time Recruitment Metrics, Job Ad Distribution (job boards, social networks, SEM, email & SMS campaigns), Recruitment Opt-In Database, Recruitment CRM, Web Commercials / Micro-sites and Resume Sourcing services.