AkkenCloud Founder & CEO, Giridhar Akkineni recently wrote a guest post on the popular business site, Influencive, “How Candidate Engagement Drives Top Talent to Your Company.” You can find an excerpt of the article below.
Attracting top talent to your company these days is more competitive than ever. Recruiting the most-qualified candidates to your job posts takes skill and requires a multi-channel approach. To stay on the radar of the industry’s most talented candidates, companies must create a recruitment strategy based on relationship-building and candidate engagement.
With candidate engagement, the focus gets centered on the candidates themselves in ways that build interest and trust. This strategy is a break from the past when companies primarily managed the requisitions and only engaged with candidates, if selected, as part of the interview process after filling out an online application. The communication with the candidate was primarily one-sided, with candidates often left in the dark after applying, not knowing if their application was ever even viewed.
Talent Board’s Annual Report revealed just how important communication with candidates has become. When rejecting applicants, Talent Board’s data showed that a candidate’s favorability rating towards an employer jumps by 28 percent when they receive a phone call rather than the automated email rejection.
Positive communication with candidates is also fundamental to receiving quality candidates through referrals. Talent Board found that “42.7 percent of referred candidates were much more likely to increase their relationship with a potential employer (apply again, refer others, make purchases if and when applicable), more so than if they conducted their own search or if they received unsolicited outreach from a recruiter.”
How Do Companies Implement Candidate Engagement
It starts with creating a two-way dialogue that is centered around the candidate. After all, candidate communication needs to extend beyond a single channel. The most effective way to communicate with top talent is to open multi-channel conversations with candidates, which starts with creating value-based content that keeps your company top of mind with the candidate. As with all inbound marketing, inbound talent marketing focuses on nurturing candidates by offering them valuable content until they reach a point when they are ready to apply.
Thankful for sharing this useful post!