Unanticipated emergencies like the Covid-19 pandemic are set to test the resilience of any recruiter, employer, and job seeker. Yet, the role of candidate experience in these situations is paramount. You may not be hiring today, but you will in the future. Nurturing candidate relationships is critical to the success of your long-term talent pipeline, as well as your employer brand.
How do you maintain a positive candidate experience during uncertain times? Here’s a few tips:
1. Nurture candidates over time with personalized emails
Chances are your key mode of communication with candidates is email. Develop email nurture campaigns that can drip personalized emails to candidates over time. Use your recruiting technology to create candidate profiles and track responsiveness to email campaigns.
2. Connect with empathy and transparency
A Black Swan event, Covid-19 is at once a deeply personal and publicly shared event. Be empathetic when communicating with candidates — they will appreciate it. As well, be as transparent as possible about your company’s situation. If hiring is frozen, share that. If you are unsure when hiring will resume, be open with that message.
3. Ensure the content you share with candidates is relevant and timely
In difficult times, it’s even more crucial to deliver the right content to candidates at the right time — tailored to their profile, interests, and stage in the recruiting process. For instance, videos conveying what it’s like to work at your company to messaging showing how you’re handling business disruption.
It’s vital at times like this that your content is authentic and emphasizes your commitment to ensuring the safety of employees. For example, if all staff are working from home then why not showcase employees taking videos on their cellphones. Many candidates value flexibility and this is a simple way to demonstrate your company’s flexibility.
4. Maintain contact with new hires yet to start
For organizations that made job offers before the pandemic hit, it is particularly important to keep in touch with these candidates and ensure that they are engaged, nurtured, and generally feel warm towards you as their future employer. Give them resources and showcase your approach to keeping employees motivated in the exceptional circumstances.
5. Go virtual with your recruiting events
For many employers, high-volume recruiting events are the holy grail for sourcing and nurturing quality candidates. But as career fairs and other in person recruiting events are postponed, personalized digital outreach and engagement is even more important. Candidate experience can still be maintained through virtual events. For example, webinars can easily take the place of informational meetings that happen in large venues to virtual conversations. Or, instead of a webinar, go larger with a fully hosted virtual event.
6. Make virtual events engaging
One of the challenges with virtual events is how to achieve the same level of engagement you would at an in person event. To drive engagement, look to leverage mobile apps to capture candidate registrations and to make content sharing easy for candidates to digest outside of a live broadcast. Mobile apps can go a long way with hiring managers too: hiring managers can monitor and rate candidates who have uploaded a resume and are actively showing an interest in virtual activities.
7. Don’t lose personal touches: embrace video Interviews
It’s important that hiring still feels personal where possible. Although the formalities of handshakes and in person interactions are lost, video interviewing is a great way of maintaining a feeling of status quo and personalization. Consider what you want to use for this: a recruiting video tech (such as HireVue, Launchpad Recruits, or Cammio) or more mainstream tools (such as Google Hangouts, Webex, or Zoom). Either way, try to make the delivery of the virtual meeting as seamless as possible, with your recruiting system.
There’s no secret lever or switch you can flip to make your Candidate experience amazing in a crisis. It all depends on the efforts you put into making your hiring strategies personalized, faster, and more efficient than ever before. I hope these 7 tips help you adapt your approaches as we all eagerly await the return to normal. Stay safe and healthy everyone!
