The two first installments of this blog series covered six important trends within the field of human resources, starting with recruitment marketing and ending with diversity hiring. Attracting top-tier talent to join your company is essential, whether you’re a mid-size business or a multi-national organization.
In this third article of the series, we’ll take a closer look at candidate experience and social recruiting. And we’ll explore how you can leverage those strategies to optimize your workforce and future-proof your company.
Candidate Experience
Candidate experience is almost self-explanatory: it is the combined impression that job candidates get throughout the recruitment process, from sourcing through recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and eventually onboarding into their new position. A negative experience will very likely get shared on social media and even on employer review sites, so it pays to promote candidate satisfaction — whether they end up getting the job or not.
There is a long list of items you can address to improve candidate experience for future hires. Try these simple and effective steps to get started:
Go mobile
If your company’s website (including your careers landing page) is not yet mobile-friendly, sort that out immediately. Within the next few years, smartphones will be the primary point of interaction with job candidates, so streamline that experience as cleanly as possible.
Know your candidate
We touched on candidate persona in the first article of this series. Defining who your ideal candidate is, will help you:
- determine where to source them;
- how to target them with ads and on social media,
- how to interact with them and
- how they will fit within your company.
The candidate avatar can include universal key points for cross-company hires, then expand with more job-specific points specific to each new position you are recruiting for.
Be transparent
Respect candidates’ time and effort by giving them an advance agenda of the interview process. Who will they be meeting within the company, how long will they be speaking with each person on the hiring team, and what are their expectations.
Give feedback
Ghosting rejected candidates is a very harmful practice, so follow up with those who don’t get the job. If you’re unable to contact each one individually, AI tech can help you send out automated emails to candidates who aren’t receiving offers or weren’t qualified for the position. If possible, offer feedback about their application, invite them to apply for future positions within the company, and add them to your talent network.
Get feedback
About a month after the interview process has been completed, reach out to ask for feedback about candidates’ personal experience. Let them know how much you value their opinion. Use the information you gain to make changes to your process, improving the experience for future candidates!
Communicate
Communication is key at all levels of the candidate journey. Even when personalized contact isn’t possible, it helps to have standardized messages acknowledging each milestone throughout the process. For any new hires, it also pays to stay in touch between the “you got the job!” phone call and the early days of onboarding. Creating a positive candidate experience here leads to a smooth transition, improved company culture, and ultimately long-term talent retention.
Social Recruiting
In this era of smartphones and internet literacy, social recruiting is becoming a vital tool in any company’s talent recruitment marketing. Your business is likely already using social recruiting, whether consciously or not, simply by posting job openings to your organization’s social media pages, from Facebook to Twitter and LinkedIn.
Social media is also a key tool to attract new talent by communicating your employer branding, showcasing workforce diversity, outlining brand vision, and emphasizing company culture. It’s a place where you can interact with potential candidates and even target them through advanced search filters and job-specific keywords.
One of the best parts of social recruiting is the chance to get your current employees involved. Content shared by a company’s in-house talent gets much higher engagement rates than content shared by brand channels. As excellent representatives for your company, employee endorsement of open positions within your organization, shared within their personal networks, can lead to high-quality candidate referrals. It’s an incredibly effective and low-cost form of recruitment marketing and your employees will be excited to help shape the future of the company!
Know your goals
As we touched on in our first post, this is where your candidate persona comes into play. The type of talent you’re looking for will dictate your social recruiting strategy.
Know your channels
Not every channel is suited to the same approach, so tailor your message based on the social media platform you’re posting to and be sure to keep things authentic!
Know your candidates
Which social media platforms are your ideal candidates using? It could be LinkedIn or Facebook, but might also be Behance, AngelList, or GitHub, depending on the job specialty you’re hiring for.
Know your brand
Keep your employer branding front and center in all your social recruitment messaging. That way people know exactly who they’re dealing with and why they would want to snag a position within your company.
Track your analytics
Use social media data to refocus your social recruiting strategy. That might mean increasing communication on one particular platform, exploring more video content, or putting some ad-spend budget behind certain keywords in order to reach your target audience.
For social posting, use scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to help automate the process. And find out more about the range of functionality available from Textmetrics, like real-time text suggestions to help streamline your company’s communication.
In case you missed part 1 and part 2 of this blog series, please check out six additional recruiting trends and strategies, from collaborative hiring to diversity hiring.
For information on how Textmetrics can help you in your recruiting process, with real-time SEO suggestions and content that leads to conversions, reach out to the Textmetrics team!