Maintaining consistent candidate communications is one of the most important factors in providing a positive candidate experience, however it’s an area that many organisations need to improve.
The candidate market is currently busy and HR teams are under pressure to review and manage high volumes of job applications. Naturally, this can present difficulties for time-challenged teams to respond to candidates in a speedy manner.
Due to these time pressures, candidate communications are usually the first thing to suffer.
In a busy jobseeker market, what steps can you take to improve your candidate communications?
Communicate with every applicant
As a jobseeker, there’s little worse than spending hours putting together a CV and application for a job and then never hearing anything from the employer.
However, from an HR point of view, responding to potentially hundreds of applicants for a job can be time consuming. This is why it’s a good idea to take advantage of the automation that hiring software, such as Applicant Tracking Systems, can offer.
Software allows you to turn on candidate notifications, so an automatic email can be generated when an application is submitted, rejected or shortlisted. This ensures that candidates always know where their applications are in the process and saves you having to manually send emails to each candidate.
Be consistent
Consistency in your candidate communications is important, especially if you’re focusing on reducing bias within your recruitment process.
By providing all your candidates with the same information, particularly when arranging interviews, you’re giving everyone an equal opportunity to succeed.
We’d recommend creating a variety of email templates that you can send out to multiple candidates at once, again saving you time. However, when using technology, you can take advantage of personalisation tokens, which will allow you to quickly send your template to multiple candidates and pull through each person’s details and information about the job they’ve applied for.
Keep communications on brand
Branded communications are key for continuity and trust; keep your company’s brand prominent throughout the candidate journey, from the moment they click onto your careers site and complete your application process to the emails you send out.
For example, we know that sending out notifications from a ‘no-reply’ email address from your system vendor doesn’t look great; that’s why Webrecruit ATS allows you to customise your senders so all candidate communications can be sent directly from contacts within your company. Emails can also be branded with your corporate colours and logo.
You could even take it one step further when customising your emails; consider including links to employee-related content about what it’s like to work for your company or any exciting company news to further engage candidates.
Don’t just rely on email
Take advantage of other methods of communication, especially if you just need to send quick reminders or interview confirmations to candidates.
Sending SMS messages is a great way of quickly communicating key information to your candidates; texts are more difficult to accidentally miss than emails. They’re particularly useful when it comes to reducing the likelihood of interview no-shows.
Ask for feedback
The best way to evaluate and improve your candidate communications is to ask candidates for feedback on your application process.
Send out surveys to all candidates who have reached a certain stage in your recruitment process and get real, honest feedback about what it’s like to apply for a job with your company. You can then use this feedback to improve your candidate communications strategy moving forwards.
Want to learn more about improving your candidate communications? Download our eBook, Improving the Candidate Experience, by clicking the link below:
