How To Keep Candidates Engaged During The Hiring Process
The secret ingredient in managing candidates during the recruiting process is to put the boot on the other foot. Recruitment can be a test of time, labor, and sales. But it’s also a test of your empathy.
In a largely candidate-driven market, the onus on employers is to manage the application process with pace and diligence. But speedy service does not guarantee quality service, and for your interested candidates, you have to develop a strategy of personnel handling that defies critics of the industry, impresses and engages your prospective talent, and re-emphasizes patience at the core of recruitment.
The mark of a healthy candidate relationship is the quality of its tenure. If you’ve spent time building a relationship through shared values, patient and well-manicured job approaches, and well-communicated feedback, you will have a trusted candidate, open to opportunity and eager to pull the trigger on moving jobs and, it’s worth iterating, they will be moving jobs - most good candidates are in work.
Part of the candidate handling process, especially in candidate-driven markets like Marketing, MarTech, and Tech, is that of building rapport while in work. This means discretion is key and respect is vital, especially for passive job seekers. This is when the quality of tenure plays a part - some candidates are actively looking for a new job; most are not. This means you have to build relationships with talent who are at work. That means your approach has to be discreet, organic, subtle, respectful, and direct. You also have to provide context-led recruitment (ie. an offer that betters what they’re currently on) and an iterative approach to recruitment (ie. you need to listen, learn and make adjustments on the fly to changing candidates and industry demands).
Here at Sloane Staffing, we feel the key to candidate engagement is best described in 5 Stages - any good recruiter will use each one independently to build a relationship with a candidate, but the art of engagement is how you apply all 5, together, to create a long-lasting professional relationship, unique to the job seeker, and most importantly, effective in your efforts to find employment for them.
Empathy
The intangible tool that sits at the heart of any good recruiter relationship is empathy. But empathy is more important than being nice for the sake of it - it’s about understanding your candidate's motive, what drives them emotionally, and more importantly, how they will act and react to certain job approaches, success, and failure.
Recruiting with empathy gives you a critical emotional insight into how your candidates will act throughout the recruitment process. Your candidates feel understood, listened to, and that you’re committed to them.
What to watch out for: empathy means nothing without consistent communication and is the basis of effective expectation setting. Empathy sits above, and within, all 4 of the below points, like fuel for your service. But poor or rushed communication, poor expectation setting, and ineffective feedback will eradicate any empathy you are perceived to have. Empathy is fragile, hard-earned, and takes a conscious effort to develop.
Expectation Setting
A good mantra to recruit by is never to say the word “promise”. Your job as a recruiter is to talent match, headhunt, prepare the groundwork, and lead the proverbial horse to water. You cannot force anyone to drink: your job is to set the expectation that the water will quench both partys’ thirst.
What to watch out for: Setting the right expectation is integrity in action. You must be honest about any role you support a candidate into, the work culture, the promotional potential and the reason why employers are hiring. Setting the right expectation is about trust, and all about candidate preparation. Failure to communicate the role properly, or if you're unsympathetic about certain aspects of the role, you will lose your candidate immediately.
Communication
The no.1 top soft skill anyone in the recruitment marketplace should have - communication, like empathy, is a foundational element of recruitment. It’s central to how you effectively set expectations, it's your vehicle for showing empathy, it’s how you deliver feedback and it needs to be timely, precise and relevant.
What to watch out for: Make communication frequent! You don’t need to bug your candidate, you just need to be informative. There will be times you’ll be in contact with your candidate every day, or numerous times a day. Others, there could be weeks between emails. Both are fine if you set the right expectation. If you don’t set the right expectation, your communication will fall on deaf ears; if you lie in your communications, you undermine your integrity; and if you ignore calls and refuse to reply to emails, empathy ceases to exist.
Integrity
Integrity is the soul of recruitment. When your product is people, you need to put integrity at the front and centre of your service. You cannot over-communicate your commitment to honesty, to ethical working, and to sustainable relationship building.
What to watch out for embellishment, elaboration, or exaggeration. There is nothing more degrading to trust and expectation setting than embellishing job credentials, pay or working culture for prospective candidates.
Feedback
One of the chief complaints of job seekers everywhere is bad or poor feedback during the application process. Poor feedback happens through a critical failing of every above point - with a process lacking empathy, communication, integrity and poor expectation setting, the feedback offered to your candidate will be alienating. There is no quicker way to disengage a candidate than by not offering feedback, not seeking feedback, or offering poor feedback.
What to watch out for: make it obvious you’re seeking feedback at every stage in the application and interview process. Your candidate deserves to know how and why applications succeed or fail. Feedback is the only way.
