Keeping your candidates happy is crucial for successful recruitment. Sadly, sometimes candidates might end up being dissatisfied with your recruitment, drop out from the application process, and share their negative experience with others. While there can be many reasons for their dissatisfaction, one of the biggest complaints candidates have is poor communication or lack of thereof. And you, as a recruiter, have the power to change that.
The most common candidate complaints recruiters receive are:
"The recruiter never replied my email"
"The recruiter didn’t get back to me after submitting the application"
"The recruiter never made contact after the job interview"
In the past, contacting every job candidate might have been a lot of work. But today, with the vast array of integrated communication tools in Applicant Tracking Systems, it doesn’t show much respect towards your candidates if you do not communicate properly with them.
The joy when recruiter answers your email
What you should always do is to send out emails or make phone calls so that all of your candidates know what’s happening, what is the next step and are they still considered for the job. That should be the default state of affairs. But what you want to be is an exceptional candidate communicator, and here are some suggestions for you how to be one:
Often the available information regarding a job position is massively lacking. Even when you have clearly stated a list of responsibilities a certain position includes, candidates hardly have an understanding of the everyday realities. Of course job interviews usually are the place where candidates will finally get answers to their questions, but what if at that point the candidate realizes that this position was not for her? A large amount of time is lost.
What if instead of keeping the process dim, your first step would be to open a Q&A session online, where the interested candidates could participate and get answers to their mind boggling questions? At the same time you could also show a glimpse of your corporate culture and all the great stuff you do.
One great tool for online Q&A session is just your company's Facebook account! This kind of session probably works best with larger number of interested candidates, so for example graduate recruiting could be the perfect occasion. To execute the session you have several options starting from Facebook and YouTube to different webinar tools.
This can mean many things. It can be a video where you introduce your company and your people, it can be footage from your annual sports day, it can be your company's vision as a story or it can be something completely different. But it should be something that addresses the kind of candidates you are looking for and provides them relevant information about you as a company.
Here is a good example from one of our customers, KONE:
You can simply write down the steps of the recruiting process with the dates. This way candidates know what should they expect and when.
If you are using Recright’s video interviewing tool, you can send direct video messages to candidates. You can either send messages to individual candidates or to a larger candidate pool, and you can either send questions or just inform the candidates about the next steps in the recruiting process. Video messages can every once in a while replace emails.
A happy candidate - with Recright you can also do it on mobile
After the recruiting process you should send every candidate an email with a link to a short questionnaire including a free feedback field. Two well-known service providers are Typeform and SurveyMonkey. Analyze the data and learn from it.
None of these ideas alone will make the process more pleasant for the candidates if they are not conducted well. Copying and pasting a practice seldom brings good results, so always remember to invest in quality.
Are you interested to read about how to make your company stand out in the eyes of the prospective job candidates? Then click here!