In today’s applicant-driven economy, the candidate experience can make or break a company’s hiring success, and the most successful employers put in extra effort to keep candidates engaged. But creating and maintaining an engaging candidate experience can be complicated and time consuming if you don’t have the right tools in place.
One way to simplify your hiring process, while boosting candidate excitement about your open roles, is to partner with a recruitment CRM platform for your hiring effort. Doing so will help your team build strong relationships with candidates and hire your best team. Below, we’ve outlined a few benefits of partnering with a recruitment CRM platform to keep candidates engaged each step of the hiring process.
Respond to Applicants Quickly
Recent data reported on CNBC found that 70 percent of job seekers lose interest in a job opportunity if they don’t hear back within one week of applying. But Hireology data found that most businesses takes even longer than this to review and respond to job applicants – averaging 10 days. By taking too long to respond to applicants, not only will they lose initial interest, but they can also be scooped up by other job opportunities while waiting to hear back from your team.
By partnering with a recruitment CRM platform for your hiring efforts, you can reduce this time to review and respond to applicants by up to one week. In many cases this can be made possible by prescreen surveys available through a recruitment CRM platform. Prescreen surveys are automatically sent to applicants, helping your team save time instead of reviewing each applicant manually. Once the prescreen surveys are automatically scored, only qualified applicants will move on to the candidate stage of the hiring process, helping you significantly decrease candidate review time. By cutting down the time to review applicants, you’ll fill roles much faster, boosting productivity and profitability at your business.
Stay in Constant Communication with Candidates
Beyond speeding up applicant review time, the right recruitment CRM platform will also help you keep candidates engaged throughout the hiring process. All candidate data is centralized in one platform, so your HR and hiring managers can easily contact candidates via phone or email.
To make candidate communication even easier, the right recruitment CRM platform will enable you to text message candidates directly from the platform. This way, you can avoid playing phone tag with candidates and the risk of candidates overlooking emails in their crowded inboxes.
Text messaging is a powerful communication channel for both employers and job seekers and can streamline your candidate and new hire communication, keeping candidates engaged. Text messaging can be used to seamlessly schedule interviews, share directions to your place of business, remind candidates to complete key hiring steps, such as completing background and reference check forms, and more. As an added bonus, hiring managers who have used Hireology’s text messaging solution have decreased time to hire by 8 days, ultimately increasing productivity that’s typically lost when roles are open.
Complete Effective Interviews
Asking the right interview questions can help you build your best team, as interviews offer insight into candidates’ personalities, skills and motivations for wanting to work for your business. And if you run an efficient, informative interview, you can also get candidates even more excited about joining your team.
During the interview process, make sure you ask each candidate the same questions to ensure you’re completing fair, compliant interviews and evaluating all candidates in the same way to measure fit for the open role. And make sure to avoid asking any illegal interview questions. These can include questions touching on such topics as age, family, gender, marriage, nationality and religion.
A recruitment CRM platform can make your interview process easier with integrated interview guides. Industry- and role-specific guides include questions designed to assess unique fit and integrated scoring capabilities enable your team to identify qualified candidates faster.
Automate Reference and Background Checks
Candidate screening is critical to the hiring process because your business needs responsible and trustworthy team members. But in some cases, reference and background checks might be skipped in an effort to speed up the hiring process. Using a recruitment CRM platform, you can automate reference and background checks to both save your team time and make the process easier on candidates and their references.
For reference checks, candidates provide their reference contact information and surveys are automatically sent to each contact, saving time that would have otherwise been spent scheduling and completing calls. And for background checks, candidates simply submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically. A recruitment CRM platform helps you select the required background checks, obtains candidate authorization, verifies results and manages payment. It also emails candidates if they need to take any action, and you’ll be notified as well to cut down on manual task management. This results in accurate and timely turnaround of applicant screening results, eliminates errors and ensures each new hire can be fully vetted before you extend an offer.
These are just a few of the many critical steps your team should take to keep candides engaged and hire effectively. For more tips on how to attract and hire your best team, read our resource, “The 9 Elements of a Well-Oiled Hiring Process.”
