Recruiters: Keeping candidates warm...

Whenever recruitment is discussed attraction and retention is often the key focus but what happens in between? What do companies do to keep applicants engaged throughout the recruitment process and, crucially, what do they do at the offer stage?

Experienced recruiters know how hard it can be to find talented candidates so how do you keep up their enthusiasm throughout a recruitment process that will take weeks and sometimes months?

If your company isn’t considering this, then it should be right now.

There have been various discussions in HR groups recently about combining old school recruiting standards with new school social media and online engagement. These points are often then followed by comments about the importance of keeping up to date with technological developments. Mystery Applicant has covered both the need for the human touch in recruitment with the need for embracing new technology in blogs as we know just how vital they both are. The point now is to ensure that candidates don’t drop out and to use technology and research data to understand where process improvements could have made a difference.

In a recent article Gerry Crispin provided very thought-provoking feedback from a candidate where ‘silence’ had been used as a keep warm tactic – for six weeks! Incredibly ‘no response’ from the recruiter was considered to be the best option. Whatever the rights or wrongs of how this situation was handled, companies should always consider the candidate perspective too.

We know only too well from candidate feedback that we receive, recruitment is a situation where silence isn’t golden. And remember, recent data shows that 49% of candidates have some relationship with a company prior to applying and many candidates are also existing customers of that organisation – emphasising that the candidate experience impacts more than simply the recruiting process.

So embrace candidate feedback and be proactive about process improvements.