Sometimes a strategic view doesn’t mean high-level, it means seeing what’s happening on the ground…

Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify, joins SmartRecruiters for the fourth annual Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco where he will be leading the session “Inside the Mind of Today’s Chief People Officer”. Full agenda here!

As a tech recruiter in the late 90s, Lars had a “front row seat” to the manic growth, and painful demise, of the first internet economy. Despite this trial by fire introduction to Talent Acquisition (TA), Lars continued in the industry, taking his talents in-house.

In the proceeding decade, he went on to run global recruiting for household names like Ticketmaster and NPR. Now, as the principal of Amplify, this people strategy chameleon helps companies build progressive talent functions for 21st century HR.

After so many years in TA, Lars’ view of the industry might be described as ‘high-level’. Yet, we prefer the descriptor ‘in-touch’ as much of his success has been his special attention to the ground-level of practitioners’ day-to-day.

For Lars, a big part of staying in-touch means continuous and open communication with the people in the field. That’s where HR Open Source (HROS.co) comes in, a not-for-profit he founded in 2015 along with fellow recruiting enthusiast Ambrosia Vertesi, VP of People at Duo Security. This global community aims to democratize access to modern HR practices through connecting practitioners who collaborate and share learnings to prepare themselves, and their organizations, for the future of work.

Speaking of the future of work, HROS.co recently put out a report on the near-future of TA, surveying over 500 HR/TA practitioners to understand what is happening on their teams now, and in the next three years!

Today, we speak Lars to learn about some of the surprising results, including how people-teams are investing in tech, and why TA is still wary of automation.

Why create another future of work report?

There’s so much content about the future of work, anywhere there’s another blog/podcast/report! The thing is, most of this content is developed by analysts, consultants, and pundits – entities that are a couple of layers removed from the actual work. We wanted to create a report that captured the perspective of practitioners on the ground: How do they view the future? What things are impacting them right now?

HR Open Source Future of Work Report found HR has concerns about job automation, and believe their organizations will be impacted in the next three years, what do you make of this finding?

The automation piece was certainly interesting. Our community tends to be on the innovative side of the practitioner spectrum and closely attuned to the technology impacting their work.

I don’t think automation will replace the majority of recruiting positions, but certainly, some roles will be impacted. Sourcing for instance: with everyone having such a large digital footprint it’s easier to find people, but harder to get their attention. Going into the future, sourcing will be more and more about personalized outreach sequences and tailored messaging.

Going into the future, recruiters will have to focus more on the human side of recruiting TA. Tech tools will automate tasks that don’t require empathy and human engineering. For the foreseeable future, humans are still the best equipped to understand what motivates candidates, and how to design the message to get them on board.

CRM is the top investment for the coming year, why is candidate experience coming to the forefront?

The reality is that most TA functions use their ATS as more of a transactional engine, than a talent database. Organizations have this dormant candidate database, of thousands – maybe more – who have already raised their hand and said, ‘yes, I’m interested in your company!’ Yet, recruiters approach every job as a ‘one off’ when they don’t have the means to leverage this talent pool.

With the means of a candidate relationship management (CRM) tool, recruiters are able to mirror the marketing function and replicate some of the more sophisticated branding exercises like audience segmentation and personalized nurture sequences.

Do you think tech in diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives will impact those programs’ efficacy?

Technology alone won’t solve a lack of diversity. Organizations need to have some non-tech foundational pieces in place, before these tech tools can be used to their full power. Pieces including interview design, closing the wage gap, internal mobility, continued learning, etc. – which come together under the umbrella of a general philosophical buy-in. Technology can then help you really accelerate those efforts, whether it’s software to scan job descriptions for gender bias, or bots to anonymize candidate details to prevent unconscious discrimination.

Was there anything in the report that surprised you personally?

One point, which I had experienced anecdotally to be true, that was interesting to see born out in the numbers, is that 70 percent of respondents previously worked outside of HR and recruiting. It’s a big shift from 10 years ago when HR was a very insular field, that people would enter and move through in a strictly linear fashion. This shift is important because it means the field of HR and recruiting is being infused with new skill sets and perspectives, and I view it as  extremely healthy for the function as a whole.

Your team is ready to select a CRM, but are you really? Here are four points to discuss to get the most out of your tech investment.

To begin, a candidate relationship management system (CRM)  is all about creating a great relationship between your company and candidates – even before they know they’re candidates. It’s not as creepy as it sounds! As part of a Recruitment Marketing strategy, a CRM allows your recruiting function to create talent communities and deliver targeted messaging that builds and nurtures relationships with passive candidates.

So, when it comes time to fill an open position, you already have a pool of vetted talent waiting to apply.

However, much like a treadmill, a CRM only works if you use it correctly. Everyone has seen how a mighty exercise device can quickly become a clothing rack in the garage… it may still have a purpose, but it’s a degraded one. And, if a laundry place is truly what you needed, then you could have spent $5, instead of $300.

Unfortunately, without the right strategy, a similar fate often befalls business-tech solutions. An organization makes a big investment in a new tool, and expects it to solve everything, and, when results are lagging, people get frustrated and use the system at a diminished capacity or not at all.  

But “strategy” is an intimidating word, and we often think of it in the wrong way. So, before we get started, let me tell you three things it doesn’t mean:

• Strategy doesn’t mean magically predicting the future.
• Strategy doesn’t mean making every decision right now and you can never change.
• Strategy doesn’t mean finding the one right way.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the buzzword and get back to the basics of strategy, define why you want this tech, what you want to get out of it, who will do what, and when will take time to assess/adjust.

Why CRM?

Talent is key to business growth, but it’s also scarce.

In a 2017 survey from GlassDoor, 76 percent of hiring managers found it difficult to attract the attention of qualified candidates. Given there has been a predicted labor shortage since the early 2000s, the only reason we are experiencing its effects so late is a consequence of the 2009 financial crises, which caused both a hiring slump and forced many baby boomers to delay retirement.  

And it’s not just a deficiency of skilled-workers, there just aren’t enough people in general. Even industries like hospitality and manufacturing are feeling the squeeze. Thomas Lee, head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, a private equity firm in New York, foresees the US to fall short by  8.2 million workers from 2017-2027.

All this means that employers have to work extra hard to be an employer of choice. The candidate is the new customer, and every touch-point has to be positive as well as purposeful so that your business can grow at pace with your goals.

 What do you want your CRM to do?

The desired capabilities and outcomes of implementing a CRM will be very personal to your team/organization. Once you’ve defined the need, this is a great time to bring your team together to ideate about wishes and goals. Here are a few common ones:

• Boost communication: Information flow is going both ways, you are sending candidates updates about the company, as well as collecting refreshed data about them.
• Activate talent communities: Without strategic campaigns, a talent community is just a dusty email list. Make sure you are nurturing candidates consistently with relevant information and check-ins. Have your team define what an active talent pool would look like to them with deliverable KPIs attached, like decreased time to hire or increased number of qualified candidates.
• Track team efficacy: Once you have defined what success is, then you can start measuring your success. Pinpoint effective messaging and notice trends in your communities to make each campaign better than the last.

Who will do what?

Teams tend to break down CRM in two distinct ways, either sourcers manage the CRM and recruiters the ATS or sourcers build the talent pools and hand them over to recruiters to manage. There are pros and cons to both. Solution one works because recruiters tend to be more motivated by recs that are open now, and may find it hard to divert their attention to the groundwork of talent pool maintenance, which doesn’t have an immediate payoff. And solution two functions well because it asks the sourcers to do what they are best at, which is to scrape info and build talent pools, and doesn’t assume they are also marketers. Your solution will depend on the skills of your team, and remember, you can always adjust!

Learn more about native vs non-native CRM here!

When will you assess and how will you adjust?

Even if everything is going great, it’s still important to assess your progress with your team and give everyone a chance to say if they’re happy, and if they aren’t – why?

Don’t be afraid to experiment, but start small and get bigger. Now, that doesn’t mean small in terms of risk, it means small in terms of buy-in. If you are rolling out a new 10-page strategy every quarter, other departments, and even your team will start to ignore everything. So, if you want to change it up, find a few key stakeholders to run the test first and if it is successful, expand. That way you aren’t fatiguing the goodwill of your coworkers.

The final takeaway of these points is that you are investing in a tool for your arsenal, not a genie. So the best way to make sure CRM is effective is by getting your team to buy-in. Remember, these are the people who will use it every day so they have valuable insight into their needs and pain points, make sure to listen!

The candidate experience is traditionally split into pre and post application, but does that really makes sense for how TA leaders work in the real world?

Today, there are tech solutions to enable every workflow under the sun, and most likely not just one – many! Want to track vacation days, plan work trips, onboard new employees, or even organize a gift exchange? There’s an app for that. In fact, the Human Capital Management market as a whole was valued at 14.50 billion last year, and it’s projected to grow by nearly 30 percent by 2022 to $21.51 billion.

This is great news in terms of innovation, but for talent acquisition leaders already trying to stretch 24 hours into 25, it means a deluge of SaaS decisions. That’s why we are answering one of the most pressing questions – ‘When do I go with a blanket solution and when do I specialize?’ and applying it to candidate relationship management (CRM).

CRM has become an imperative consideration in the current climate of talent scarcity. Unemployment in the US is at a 17-year low of 3.9 percent in May of this year, there is a predicted worker shortage of 8.2 million people from 2017-2027, with an increasing number of employers already reporting a lack of qualified candidates across multiple industries. Organizations with their sights set on growth will need to distinguish themselves as A+ employers at every point of contact.

Think of CRM as “keeping in touch at scale”. One of the top candidate complaints in the hiring process is a lack of communication, which is where CRM solutions step in. Without getting too technical, CRM helps nurture potential candidates, including passive ones, so that an organization has ready access to top-talent ahead of demand. That means resurfacing formerly rejected candidates as well as finding new connections. With the right system in place, recruiters become recruitment marketers thanks to features like branded landing pages, targeted email campaigns, messaging templates, and custom reporting and analytics.

Learn the difference between ATS and CRM here!

Back to our original question: when it comes to CRM, is it better to bundle your CRM with an ATS for an all-in-one solution,  or to specialize with a third-party CRM?

The argument in favor of native CRM solutions is rooted in data quality and ease of use while specialization makes sense if the solution will significantly increase the quality of experience and work produced.

The deciding factor between native and non-native CRM is whether the candidate journey should be split up into pre and post application or not. Which makes for a better experience?

A non-native CRM breaks the candidate flow into two distinct parts— pre-application and post-application while the non-native CRM covers the pre-application phase through a nurturing system. Once the candidate has applied, their data is transferred to the ATS and funneled through the recruiting process.

This workflow would make sense if the candidate journey was linear. Unfortunately, that typically isn’t the case. Let’s say a sourcer nurtures a candidate in the CRM, processes them through the ATS, but doesn’t make the candidate an offer. Does the relationship end there? It shouldn’t. At this point, the candidate’s information must be transferred back to the third-party CRM.

Anytime there is more than one software solution as part of a recruiting workflow there must be an exchange of data, which can lead to data duplication or misplacement. This effort is worthwhile if you are siloing distinct workflows while providing a better candidate experience, but in this case, the cost outweighs the benefits.

In a general context, when and where a company decides to split the systems has to reflect the workflow or the candidate journey. This is where non-native CRM becomes problematic. The reality is that separating the nurturing process from the application process is a huge headache for recruiters and sourcers, not to mention for candidates as well.

Larger companies may have sourcers working with a CRM and recruiters/hiring managers working with an  ATS, which means sourcers may not know what has happened with candidates that pass into the ATS, causing them to neglect rejected applicants when the demand for future hires arises. For smaller companies, sourcers and recruiters are required to constantly toggle between systems,  and be unable to provide a consistent flow for the candidates as they move through the hiring process.

With native CRM is fully integrated with the applicant tracking system so there is one data flow. That means candidates have a universal profile as they move through the candidate lifecycle, which makes for consistent, updated candidate data for all parties. In addition, sourcers and recruiters can use the marketing tools of the CRM like branded landing pages in the latter half of the hiring process, for great brand consistency.

For recruiters, a quality CRM solution balances effective functionality with strong design that delivers impactful communication and consistent employer branding. While there are multiple third-party CRM solutions available on the market, a native CRM offers seamless integration with your existing workflows that doesn’t compromise candidate experience.

Learn more about SmartCRM with our VP of Product, Rebecca Carr.

Don’t lose great talent to the competition because of bad recruiting software—here’s why your hiring team needs a TA solution that makes no compromises.

Recruiting is changing on a fundamental level. Today, 36 percent of the US workforce currently freelances, and reports project this figure will grow to over 50 percent within the next decade. Conversations about the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning replacing human jobs are at the forefront of our social consciousness, and recruiting is becoming exponentially more difficult in this economy.

Traditional sourcing channels are no longer yielding the quality candidates they used to, and truly exceptional talent is not actively seeking new work opportunities, though 82 percent admit they are open to them.

As a result, recruiting is shifting from a reactive function into a proactive one, with a greater focus on candidates. Attracting passive candidates requires your company brand to stand out from others, your job offers to be highly competitive, and your recruiting practices to be fast-moving and engaging. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through feature-rich recruiting software.

The recruitment market is currently worth over $215 billion worldwide, and at a projected growth of 5.6 percent over the next few years, is estimated to be worth over $330 billion by 2025. Today’s market vendors offer talent acquisition suites and recruitment technology solutions to organizations at the enterprise, SMB, and startup level. With so many offerings available in the market—HCRM, ATS, CRM—it can be difficult to wade through the alphabet soup to decide which solution will work best for your organization.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) systems are top choices for recruiters; however, many believe that they don’t need CRM if they already have an ATS. In reality, top recruiters rely on a solution that offers both CRM and ATS in one platform, as each focuses a specific function within the hiring process.

But what’s the difference between an ATS and CRM? And why should you use both in order to source, attract, and hire the best talent?

What is an ATS?

An ATS is a type of recruiting software that facilitates and optimizes the hiring process. It acts as a repository where recruiters and hiring managers can create and post job openings, collect and organize applications, and screen, evaluate, select, and move candidates through every step of the hiring process in one platform.

What is CRM?

A CRM system is designed to strengthen relationships between potential candidates and recruiters so that recruiters can use these candidates for future job openings. In this way, CRMs are considered part of Recruitment Marketing strategy, allowing TA professionals to create talent communities and deliver targeted messaging that helps build and nurture relationships with passive talent. That way, when it comes time to fill a rec, recruiters already have a pool of vetted candidates from which to choose.

What’s the Difference Between an ATS and CRM?

CRM systems work to scale a recruiter’s sourcing efforts by attracting passive candidates ahead of demand. Meanwhile, ATSs are built to make selection and hiring as streamlined as possible by eliminating unnecessary administrative tasks and improving the three most important hiring metrics: hiring velocity, hiring budget, and net hiring score.

In other words, an ATS is a workflow and compliance tool for managing applicants, while a CRM system is a pool of all passive and active candidates, as well as previous applicants already in your system. A bad ATS does little more than execute repetitive functions, meaning recruiting teams waste time on non-value added tasks rather than focusing on strategic initiatives.
Here are some signs that your ATS is not fully optimized with CRM:

• Multiple entry fields that require manual input
• Candidates are categorized by their current jobs or work rather than their desired work.
• No way to evaluate the candidate-recruiter relationship (i.e. measuring the candidate’s level of activity or engagement)
• No ROI (time to hire, cost per hire, quality of hire are still low)
• ATS functionality is mostly administrative work
• Hard-to-fill positions remain open for months

Why Integrating CRM With an ATS Makes Sense

Today’s candidate-centric work economy means that companies need to be aware of candidate experience now more than ever, and technology solutions that prioritize this will be critical for the success of talent acquisition leaders. Between 70 and 80 percent of recruiting happens during the pre-applicant stage, so delivering the right messaging to the right people at the right time gives companies an advantage when attracting top talent in today’s ultra-competitive market.

This can only happen when hiring teams leverage a powerful and comprehensive TA suite that seamlessly integrates CRM with an ATS in one platform. Recruiters who maintain their talent pools with CRM systems can make better, data-driven hiring decisions. And because CRM nurtures strong relationships with past, current, and future candidates, speed and efficiency are built in when it’s time to hire, making the applicant’s journey through the ATS a better experience.

With the right tools for the job, all recruiters can make great hires that drive business growth. As future industry trends emerge, the technology solutions designed to meet these demands will evolve in response, and recruiters who stay on top of what today’s exceptional candidates value will be in prime position to hire them.

See how recruiting is taking a page from sales’ playbook by adapting strategies to keep talent pools stocked with prospects.

No recruiter likes hurrying candidates through the hiring process, and no candidate wants to feel they’ll never hear from that recruiter again. These kinds of negative experiences directly affect a candidate’s impression of a company’s image, and companies need to take notice. Forty-two percent of candidates claim a poor experience would prevent them from applying to another position at a company, and 22 percent say they’d tell their friends not to bother.

At the same time, 82 percent of working professionals admit to being open to new work opportunities. Capturing their interest requires proactive strategies and a standout employer brand. Candidates open to new opportunities want to see measurable value in another company, something organizations communicate through their Employee Value Propositions (EVPs). The task of engaging passive candidates, measuring their readiness, and converting them to active applicants falls on recruiters.

One practice that talent acquisition borrowed from sales is Candidate Relationship Management (CRM), a tool becoming increasingly popular among TA professionals. With current numbers suggesting that a majority of the workforce is open to new job opportunities, recruiters and hiring managers are charged with managing a healthy recruitment function, and a CRM model ensures that businesses have an engaged, enthusiastic, and high-impact talent pipeline ahead of demand.

Rather than letting candidates slip through the cracks, a CRM model allows recruiters to make good on their promise to revisit and reconsider candidates who may have been passed over previously. This turns the recruitment function from a one-off execution into a relationship-building model that nurtures passive candidates over time. Speaking to SAP, Kyle Lagunas, Research Manager of Emerging TA Trends & Technologies at IDC, said that “by embedding candidate relationship management functionality into the core recruiting offering, candidate relationship management becomes an organic part of the talent acquisition operation — and this is proving to be a key driver of adoption.”

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS), for example, offers recruiters an overview of where active candidates are in the hiring process. Within the platform, integrated CRM technology automates communication processes with talent pools and pipeline, creating workflows that speed up recruiter efficiency, encourage candidate engagement, and improving their connection to an organization. If an ATS is crucial for sourcing and tracking candidates, then CRM is vital for long-term relationships that lead to faster, better placements in higher numbers.

At the most basic level, CRM helps shape candidates’ impressions of—and interactions with—an organization. Recruiters can use CRM to:

• Build personalized talent communities, organized, sorted, and managed to retain high-quality talent
• Organize and manage large recruitment campaigns
• Build custom career pages
• Create targeted campaigns to capture interest and assess candidates’ readiness to convert
• Build and deliver branded email, social, and web campaigns
• Share impactful content (i.e. videos or employee testimonials)

Each touchpoint is another opportunity to build rapport, increase talent pools, and maintain passive candidates. Recruiters who maintain their talent pools with CRM strategies know their candidates’ levels of interest, and can easily categorize their skills, experience, and education to make data-driven hiring decisions. And because CRM nurtures strong relationships with past, current, and future candidates, speed and efficiency are built in when it’s time to hire.

Your competitors are looking to make the same great hires you are, so how do you make sure you have the upper hand in snagging candidates? The answer, increasingly, is Artificial Intelligence.

“Recruiting has really been transformed these past years,” said Hessam Lavi, Director of Product at SmartRecruiters. “We’ve seen a shift from HR and recruiting coming from an admin function, or merely a cost center, to much more of a strategic function. It’s become mission-critical, but, at the same time, increasingly expensive.”

Speaking in a webinar detailing how SmartRecruiters’ SmartAssistant, the industry’s first native AI-powered recruiting tool, Mr. Lavi stressed five ways he sees AI technology providing the backbone for recruiting in the future.

Task Automation: AI will take over high-touch activities like scheduling interviews and screening resumes, allowing recruiters to focus on high-value, strategic activities.

Automated Sourcing: AI will source new candidates online and re-discover talent in organizations’ own talent pools, helping recruiters leverage their own networks more efficiently.

Smart Advertising: Job advertising is a highly manual, unscalable process. AI enables advertisers to automate job advertising, making it performance-based and targeted. Through technology, your jobs will be advertised on the right job boards to the right candidates – at the right price.

Improving Diversity: Diverse teams perform better, no doubt about it. AI helps identify potentially biased language that would dissuade women or people from minorities to apply. Automated screening and scoring evaluates candidates only based on their skills, eliminating implicit bias from the hiring process.

Candidate Relationship Management: Candidates behave much more like consumers now – they value convenience. By outsourcing 1:many conversations to AI (through chatbots, for example), recruiters can focus on 1:1 conversations and drive better talent engagement and hiring success.

For this all to work seamlessly, cobbling a batch of BoBs onto a legacy ATS just won’t do. Real performance needs native level integration, and SmartAssistant is setting the standard for everything that will follow.

Click here for the full lowdown on what SmartAssistant can do for you.

This is a contribution from Tomáš Haviar, a Recruiter at Bynder Orbit – a creative content management software provider.

In many organizations, recruitment is reactive. Businesses only start seeking people once a glaring hole in the company becomes apparent instead of preemptively seeking people as part of a business strategy.

Yet, people are key to reach any business goal. Take the following three objectives for example.

• Build a new workout app.
• Market footwear to the right audience
• Put on a world-class event to showcase your new SaaS platform.

The necessary ingredient to accomplish any of these objectives is people – people with the right skills and at the right time.

Your business strategy could fall apart if you don’t have the right team which means recruitment can’t be an afterthought. 

Recruiters know that finding the right talent isn’t as easy as just posting a job advertisement so here’s what you need to know to turn your hiring process into a proactive system that grows your business.

Make recruiters your partners in strategy.

Involving recruitment in your key business strategy decisions is beneficial for creating realistic budget and time expectations.

Recruiters can help you figure out whether the people you need to make your business strategy a reality are available in the recruitment market at the moment. If they are not, then recruitment can also advise on how long it might take to recruit those people, and therefore how long it will take to put your business strategy into practice.

Let’s say your tech company wants to create an app, then you will need IOS and Android developers. If there is a shortage of IOS developers and Android developers in the market at the moment, then you will have to set longer and more realistic deadlines for the creation of the app.

Your recruiter can also let you know how much finding and hiring these developers will cost and if they are out of your price range you can reconsider how vital the project is to your overall business strategy.

An additional advantage of including a representative from your recruitment team in your business strategy meetings is that the recruiter can gauge the direction in which the organization is moving, and can start the recruitment process with the future of the company in mind. This means that when the organization does firmly decide on a business strategy, the necessary recruitment process is already underway.

What exactly can recruiters do with this extra lead-time?

Recruiting for in-demand positions takes time. It’s not just a case of writing a job description for your career site. The best talent is usually passive. So it’s important to nurture your desired candidates and slowly build up their interest in your company. That way, once you are ready to hire, you have a full pipeline of interested candidates.

There are a number of ways to begin nurturing your ideal candidates:

• Look for the kind of events your ideal candidates go to and go along to them. This is where recruiters can meet their ideal candidates in a less formal setting.
• Before you start talking about interviews or job offers, invite ideal candidates to the office for a coffee or beer, just to show them what the company and its culture are like.
• You can also promote your company and its culture through website content. This could be as simple as a blog post on the company blog on ‘6 reasons why working for Bynder will change your life’.

These are long term strategies with high rewards. The sooner the recruiter can be brought into the business strategy, the sooner these techniques can be put into practice and the rewards reaped.

A lot can go wrong when you’re communicating with candidates. An unprofessional or careless communication strategy not only leads to disgruntled applicants, but can also damage the company’s reputation in the long term. Here’s what HR Managers need to know. 

Every job applicant, regardless of whether they end up getting the job or not, is an ambassador for the company. The candidate’s experience of the application process may decide whether they speak positively or negatively about the company thereafter.

You might not think that one dissatisfied candidate could possibly ruin your employer brand, but when there are fundamental problems with candidate communication, negative sentiment starts to accrue. In the long run, this has an enormous effect on the company’s public image, and in turn, its attractiveness as an employer.

An applicant and their network

A study [in German] conducted by Meta HR Consultancy and stellenanzeigen.de found that 80% of applicants publicly share their experiences. They tell their friends and acquaintances in person, or share their experiences via Facebook,Twitter, or review portals like kununu or Glassdoor. The same study shows that only 17% of respondents felt that companies catered to their needs as candidates during the application process. Potentially, this could result in quite a few negative comments.

Ultimately, this underlines how important a professional candidate communication strategy is to employer branding. Maintaining a high level of communication through the application process isn’t all that difficult. Here are the essential elements.

A step-by-step guide to an ideal candidate communication strategy

1. Be available for questions

Before applications start to come in, HR should make themselves available for questions about the role, or the application process. The job description should state the relevant contact person, along with an email address, and a phone number. This adds a personal touch, regardless of whether the applicant makes contact or not.

2. Acknowledge receipt of applications

If the candidate hasn’t been in touch with questions, your first point of contact with them will be when you acknowledge receipt of their application. This can heavily influence the candidate’s perception of the whole process. Acknowledgement of receipt should of course confirm that they have successfully applied for the position, but also outline a basic timetable of how things will progress, e.g. when people will be called for interview, when people will find out if they got the job or not. That way, every candidate knows what to expect.

3. Give status updates

Like anything, the hiring process can be subject to delays. For example, sometimes you’ll receive many more applications than you were expecting. This delay can be a pain for applicants, but providing that you communicate this to them in a transparent way, you’ll maintain their interest in the role. Send them a brief notice about the delay, giving reasons as to why it occurred. However, make sure to avoid stalling candidates for weeks on end if, for example, your decision is still pending. Being staved off like that will leave a negative aftertaste with candidates, and you risk application withdrawals if they have to wait too long for a decision.

4. Send constructive rejections

The most sensitive aspect of candidate communication is obviously the rejection letter. It is, without a doubt, the biggest challenge for HR managers, so please don’t avoid the task altogether! That’s completely unacceptable.

In addition to providing them with a general ‘regret letter’, it is very helpful to the applicant if you give them some feedback as to why you made your decision. Constructive criticism is worth its weight in gold to a job seeker, as it gives them the chance to improve their next application. Ideally, you could offer a feedback session over the phone. If the candidate is still interesting – even if they don’t suit the current role on offer – you should invite them to apply again at a later date for a more suitable role within your organisation. The study shows that 84% of candidates would re-apply for a different role within a company if they have a good experience during their initial application process – even if they were rejected!

Communicate on the same level

Any method of communication with candidates should have a personal touch, instead of just anonymous mass mailings. Companies should never forget that candidates usually invest a lot of time and effort in their applications, and connect hopes and desires to them. Although in most cases you will be sending rejections, you need to treat each person with respect, and communicate in an open, honest and transparent way. Don’t leave anyone in the dark!

Republished from Jobspotting and updated November 29, 2017.