Ask any recruiter why they got into the field, and they aren’t going to tell you about being swept off their feet with a particular HR tech solution—they’re going to tell you about changing someone’s life with a job offer, or building a world-class team for a large organization.
Recruiting has always been about people and placing people in the best-fit role. But in the past few decades, something’s changed. Incredible advances in technology have given us more organized and efficient processes — advancements that can often come at the cost of the candidate experience.
This is especially true in a COVID-19 environment, where so many organizations have had to shift their recruiting processes into a completely virtual experience. In fact, in Lever’s 2020 State of Recruiting Report, less than half (45%) of recruiters surveyed say they have the technology they need to build relationships with candidates, and 53% specifically want to want to emerge post-pandemic with talent management tools to better facilitate relationship building.
So can technology solve the problem? We think so. But it takes adopting a Talent Relationship Management (TRM) technology to create a more humanized, personal, and dynamic candidate experience. A TRM allows for email nurturing within your applicant tracking system, so data is stored and automated all in one more place for seamless personalization and workflows. Because today, candidates are wary of risk and uncertainty and carefully screening new opportunities making the landscape just as competitive as pre-pandemic. Therefore, how organizations build those relationships is critically important. Here’s why:
1.Candidates have higher expectations than ever before
Candidate expectations have been on the rise in the past decade, with recruiters noting the best candidates have little patience for long and drawn-out application processes, lack of follow-up and transparency, and disjointed interview experiences. The most seamless, transparent, and personalized candidate experience communicates how much a company values its prospective talent. After all, the recruiting process is a candidate’s first experience with a company’s employer brand.
You might assume the high unemployment rate would give employers and recruiters the advantage in the hiring marketplace and lower candidate expectations, at least slightly. But in reality, the unemployment rate has varied widely by occupation. For example, in April of 2020, the unemployment rate for computer occupations was only 2.8%, compared to the overall employment rate of 15%. When hiring for knowledge sector positions, recruiters should keep in mind that candidate expectations are just as high, if not higher, than at other times when there’s more stability in the economy.
Properly designed and deployed, TRM software allows organizations to meet and exceed candidate expectations by taking control over the candidate experience and delivering on those most important points: a seamless sequence of events overlaid with transparency and communication throughout the process.
[Keep Reading: 17 Email Nurture Tips to Hire Quickly and Keep Talent Engaged]
2. A positive candidate experience builds your employer brand
Organizations increasingly understand the important role employer brand plays in driving interest for open roles and making sure only the most qualified and high-potential candidates apply for open roles. This is because employees have become more vocal in how much they weigh a company’s culture, values, and how it treats its employees when considering new opportunities.
Just consider one Glassdoor study of 5,000 adults in the U.S. and Europe that reveals that, before considering a job with a company, 77% of candidates consider the company’s culture and 79% consider the company’s mission and purpose — and more than half (56%) prioritize workplace culture over salary.
Furthermore, how a company treats candidates throughout the application, interview, and onboarding processes directly impacts how interested a candidate is in the open role or the company in general. One study from Talent Board tracked this data, finding that the top three reasons candidates withdrew from the recruiting process were (1) having their time disrespected during interviews (37%), having a poor rapport with recruiters (32%), and finding that the process took too long (29%).
Organizations that use TRM software to improve the candidate experience are investing in their employer brand, creating room for more intentional interviews, facilitating stronger and more authentic rapport-building, and streamlining the entire recruitment process.
[Keep Reading: 8 Things Candidates Want from Employers]
3. Companies that leverage technology to deliver a human touch at scale win every time
Top industry analysts like SHRM, IBM Analytics, and Deloitte all agree: candidates increasingly bring highly personalized and tech-savvy consumer experiences to the job search process. However, recruiting teams without the right technology in place can often struggle to customize everything that needs to be customized. Manually tracking, customizing, and responding to upwards of a hundred candidates that might be in the pipeline at any given time is challenging for a recruiting team of any size — not to mention time-consuming.
This demand for a personalized and customized candidate experience isn’t going anywhere soon. This is why so many organizations are using a TRM platform to move candidates quickly and efficiently through a unique and automated recruitment process. Recruiters are able to customize outreach and processes to each role, then use all of the time they’ve saved to build authentic relationships with candidates through personalized messages.
For example, Lever helps Atlassian facilitate the collaboration of a 100-person recruiting team to grow to 4900 employees in 2020. But they didn’t just want to scale quickly — they wanted to scale quickly while maintaining their reputation for a humanized hiring process.
“Our values are real—and we live them. It is very much true at Atlassian from the way we do business, the way we transact, and most importantly the way we hold ourselves accountable,” said Atlassian’s Global Head of Talent, Robert Allen. “We view ‘talent acquisition’ as a function responsible for everything from the candidate experience, the way we source, the way we attract, and the way we keep strong talent.”
[Keep Reading: Building Remote Candidate Relationships]
Building a Winning Recruiting Process
Yes, we’ve lost those small, in-person touchpoints that helped make the recruiting and hiring process more human before COVID-19. But that doesn’t mean you can’t create a high-touch, personal candidate experience for your talent pipeline today. Many companies are using TRM software to create a more humanized recruiting process — one that puts the candidate experience front and center and delivers increased efficiency, transparency, and results to the organization.
If you’re interested in learning more about LeverTRM and how it can help you scale without sacrificing a personalized experience for candidates, schedule a demo today.