Transforming Your Hiring Process With Continuous Candidate Engagement

Hey, TA Leader — are you starting from scratch every time you need to make a new hire?

It’s time to put on your marketing hat, and start treating your candidates like your customers by engaging — and re-engaging — them before, during, and after the hiring process.

How the Traditional Hiring Funnel Keeps You Spinning Your Wheels

Traditionally, the candidate experience starts when talent becomes a candidate and ends when they don’t get the job. But what about before and after?

By failing to engage with candidates both before and after they enter the recruitment funnel, TA leaders can run into significant barriers to fast, quality hiring, such as:

• Missed opportunities with quality talent. You may only be hiring for one role right now…but what about next time? Chances are, there are multiple quality candidates in your funnel. 

Continuing to nurture relationships with these candidates (long after you offer the position to someone else) means that when it’s time to hire next, you won’t have to start from scratch…again.

• A diversity needle that doesn’t budge. Did you know only 11% of diverse candidates ever get the opportunity to interview? Many companies assume it’s because diverse candidates aren’t applying; yet, oftentimes, diversity problems occur due to implicit biases found somewhere between application submission and the hiring decision. 

By engaging with quality candidates who didn’t quite make the cut the first time around, hiring leaders can feel confident they’re making decisions based on relationships – not just resumes.

• Negative impact on the employer brand. A candidate who feels rejected, then ignored, will often air their grievances to family and friends, which ultimately erodes your employer brand.

Are you ready to take a step back and re-evaluate how you’re engaging with candidates? 

Take a Page Out of the Sales Pipeline Playbook

Most companies are dialed in when it comes to their customer experience. They develop an ongoing relationship filled with valuable content to build brand awareness, nurture emails, and  follow up phone calls.

Now, apply that same idea to your candidate pipeline.

Start by examining the elements of your company that are unique and engaging to specific individuals in your network. Then, build a pipeline of continuous engagement through your CRM that builds an ongoing emotional connection with candidates.

How, you ask?

“I think for TA, the last decade has been spent on the top [of the hiring funnel], and I think now it’s time to start focusing on the bottom.”

 – Charles Mah, Chief Evangelist, iCIMs

The Four Essential Parts to an Engaging Recruiting Model

Step 1: Learn

It begins with learning. Ultimately this touchpoint is about skills and connections—not a job. This is your opportunity to learn about your candidates and their interests.

Use resources such as newsletters, blogs, or podcasts to build connections. Then add these people to your CRM so you can start to build on their engagement.

Step 2: Participation

Then, form a participation circle where you’re connecting your engaged contacts to larger-scale events like roundtables, hackathons, or Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). 

When candidates in your CRM elect to participate, ERGs become a place where candidates come together based on their shared experiences, ultimately diversifying your candidate pool.

Step 3: Networking

Now it’s time to bring hiring managers, ERG members, or peers to a central place where they can connect one-on-one—creating genuine, lasting connections within your candidate pool.

Step 4: Hiring

Finally! All the data you’ve collected thus far through the hiring funnel, now stored in your CRM, gives you a pool of highly engaged candidates that has already been pre-vetted on soft skills, eliminating the need for multiple rounds of interviews.

And the other candidates? They return to the talent network, where you can continue to nurture those connections.

Why Care About Continuous Candidate Engagement?

It’s time to start treating your candidates like your customers by engaging — and re-engaging — them before, during, and after the hiring process.

Focusing on continuous candidate engagement will give you:

• Faster turnaround on hiring decisions.
• More high-quality talent in your pipeline.
• A higher number of engaged candidates.
• A larger pool of more diverse candidates.
• More candidates that turn into customers.

GoodTime Hire focuses on candidate engagement through the power of Candidate Relationship Intelligence. Hire’s comprehensive solution not only lessens the burdens of administrative tasks, but brings qualified talent to the forefront. 

Learn more about how Hire can supercharge your talent acquisition process.