Recruitment marketing mainly refers to attracting passive candidates and influencing them to the point that they want to look for positions at your company. A million-dollar question is what role does candidate experience (CX) play in it? Well, as candidate experience indicates to every context the prospective candidates face on their way from audience member to employee. These aspects are developed by your recruitment marketing efforts; we would say quite a bit, wouldn’t you?
There is a possibility that all of it is not quite as straightforward as it is to express in black and white. It is a bilateral process following give and take approach, with a feedback circle developing where recruitment marketing and candidate experience interact and play off each other. Let’s have a look at a beginner’s example of a candidate’s journey from the audience to the employee so that we can have a better understanding of those contexts and observe this interaction at work:
Your social network postings primarily attract the person to your executive board (EB) and executive vice president (EVP). They start following your presence on many outlets and subscribe to your blog too. Since they are passive jobseekers, this might be the level of interaction for some time, but then once they can get really curious to check you out on review sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn to know what people say about you.
Now! You inspire them through your rich reviews and employee testimonial videos and conclude that it’s time to look for your job openings on the company’s careers page. This phase too last for a short while, during which they will still be following your social media pages and networks, interacting with your postings and commenting on your blog articles. Then one day the perfect position pops up and they get their application in. Now they are for sure in the applicant funnel.
Each of these phases is a context where you and your recruitment marketing team have the capacity to affect the applicant’s experience, and in turn, their experience offers you information regarding the things that you are doing good and the areas where you need improvement.
There’s too much information assorted into each context, some of which you can find very easily by asking the applicants what they thought of their experience. The rest is discernible with some innovative planning and utilization of suitable metrics. Some of the major areas to take into consideration when delving deep into how your candidate’s experiences can be helpful in fine-tuning your recruitment efforts are wait times, the reality that people trust other people as compared to companies, and the reality that recruitment marketing is a long game. Each of these concepts offers more room for progress and methods to modify your campaigns to better influence the candidate experience.
Nobody Likes to Wait
Still, in the world of recruiting, waits are unavoidable. Be it the candidate who is waiting to hear back regarding an interview, or a recruiter who is waiting to hear back from a hiring manager regarding any number of things, there will be waiting. What can be done to make sure that the applicant doesn’t get fed up with all this waiting? The first thing you can do is to stay in contact with them continuously.
Utilize recruitment marketing automation software to routinely send email updates. This allows you to reach out to the applicant’s preferred network to keep them up to date on their status. It is not necessary for the emails to be related to that one candidate directly. They can be about general company updates, exciting news stories that are relevant to your industry, and much more. The purpose is to remind the person that you remember them and want to stay in contact with them.
In the existing candidate-focused job market, people accept being willing to wait no longer than two weeks before they take off. If you don’t do anything to let them know that they matter and what is the status of their applications, your quality candidates will certainly walk away. They will go on the road leading to your competitors in all possibilities. So, stay in touch with them.
People Trust Other People
You know that people do talk. On social media, on job boards, and on review sites. Unfortunately, if someone gets a bad experience from your application process. It will be the first thing for them to let everyone they can think of know about it. This means they are going to post it on Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, they are can leave contemptuous reviews on sites like Glassdoor.
This ought to affect your recruitment marketing in two major ways. First, modify your process to eradicate the pain points that instigated this person’s experience. Whether it was the lengthiness or complication of the online application form, make it short and simple. Whether they got lost in the applicant tracking system black hole and just never heard back from anyone. You have to discover the process gap that they fell through and plug it. Secondly, give responses to their comments, tweets, and reviews. Don’t forget to remain in brand voice. But also don’t forget that sympathy rules the day when it comes to calming the upset. Therefore, work to make sure that the bad feelings don’t continue toward your company.
Moreover, the social proof goes a long way in the war for people’s trust. Don’t forget, people trust other people. Post testimonials from existing employees, bonus points for videos so audiences have a face to put to the words. And for those reviews that might not be so heavenly, respond to them with gentleness, stay in the voice, and don’t forget the power of sympathy.
Recruitment Marketing is a Long Game
You already have got the idea that you are in it for the long haul. Since recruitment marketing can help generate incredible results and help drive your company’s recruiting efforts well into the future. But those outcomes don’t take place as if by magic overnight. The candidates who are sourced by recruitment marketing or referrals are possibly happier with their jobs. Further, these candidates have a higher retention rate. The fact is 47% of candidates stay longer than 3 years.
Understanding this must help you modify your content and better targeting those quality applicants that you want to engage. By doing this, it will also affect the experience of your candidates as they become your applicants. It’s the theme and writing you provide and design for this long game that offers the first, and every so often second and third, of those all significant contexts that shade people’s opinions of your recruiting department and by adding your company from the very start of their journey with you.
The candidate experience impacts your recruitment marketing by advising the decisions you make going onward. You cannot always undo past mistakes or mend the damages done when you have a poor experience. On the other hand, what you can do is utilize your recruitment marketing and social presence. This will help you to reach out to those people with sympathy. Then make amendments and modifications in your procedures to sidestep the mistakes with prospective candidates.
