Candidate Engagement : Why should it be a priority for you !

Ever wondered why many candidates freeze another opportunity even before they complete your interview process? Or become so disinterested that they’d not be willing to apply again.

To come to terms, you think the market has a lot of opportunities. Deep dive and you realize you didn’t pay attention to keeping the candidate interested in what you have to offer.

Imagine Nick Fury assembling a team of Avengers and sending Deadpool to do an exploratory call to hire Wolverine! Recipe for failure isn’t it? To hire Wolverine you need Professor Xavier to understand what his pain points are and how to best channelize the core strength of Logan. Thankfully we do have some good recruiters today who don’t require telepathic powers to think like candidates.

Always remember Interview process and selection is 50% the journey to hire great talent. The remaining 50% is candidate engagement. Below are a few key areas I feel organizations and recruiters alike should spend more time on – Pre-offer and Post offer.

The Pre-Offer stage candidate engagement is a precursor to how your organization treats employees. This is a dry-run of what a candidate is getting into and more reason for handling with care.

1.      Correct Expectation setting: If you want to hire a nonpareil HR business partner and make him validate reimbursement bills 3 days a week, you are basically telling him he has no work. Why will he be interested in such a role which is a step down from his current one?

Personalize your approach and tell him how he can add value. Share more clarity on the position KRA correlation with business impact. At the same time avoid any false flowery pictures.

2.      Real-time feedback: Don’t keep candidates guessing. If there is a delay tell them why! If they are not shortlisted tell them their areas of development. Don’t expect a good pass through percentage if you are complacent to not dial their number.

3.      Inputs on candidate pipeline: All interested candidates want to know who they are competing with for an open position. It is always good practice to share with candidates who are in the final stages of the interview process - ‘how many have reached the final round’. Definitely boosts candidate morale!

4.      Active ‘humane’ conversations: While you speak to the candidate about the role and expectations always keep the conversations real. The candidate will trust you, if you want to know him more as a “Cristiano Ronaldo” fan than a Pytorch Visualization expert.

Strike meaningful conversations to understand his/her current predicament. You end up creating active connects and candidate relationships with returns manifold helping meet your hiring numbers in future.

5.      Optimizing recruiter’s bandwidth: If you have 100+ open positions, please don’t have just 2 recruiters to close them! They will get entangled in chasing numbers and lose focus on quality of hiring. This will get even worse when you start blaming recruiters for their inefficiency rather than getting appropriate number of recruiters on board. In any progressive organization, a good recruiter to unique positions ratio is 1:8 at any given time. If a recruiter gets appropriate time to concentrate on conversions and brand building, your hiring process becomes that much seamless.

Once you have identified your purple squirrel, leave no stone unturned in getting the candidate to join. Here are a few tips that can be helpful in the Post offer candidate engagement :

1.      Involvement in actual work: I remember hiring for a senior role in Data Science when we didn’t have many in the team back then. The only way we could make sure the candidate is interested is by offering him to mentor juniors and start getting his advice on day to day data mining and data driven decision making (without revealing any trade secrets!). Many recruiters make it a point to up the ante, display ownership and make the candidate ‘feel at home’. The candidates get a flavor of work-life in your organization and leaves a great impression when comparing other opportunities.

2.      Hiring Manager Interaction: No matter how good a culture and role fit a candidate is for you, unless the candidate knows who she is reporting to and how the manager plans candidate’s career progression, she will always be weary of your organization’s intent of hiring. Candidates scan through your Glassdoor pages way before attending interviews. They need information and fast – let the hiring managers be your ‘knight in shining armor’. A candidate gets motivated even at the thought of learning the trade and from a great master.

Never make a candidate join without proper interaction with the reporting manager – you won’t do justice to either parties. Ever imagined going to a movie without knowing the lead actors/protagonists? Precisely my point!

3.      Team Interaction: Learning curve and peer group is as important as an amazing boss. Connecting candidates to team members over a call or Linkedin gives them an avenue to understand like-minded colleagues and work better. Great employees attract great talent!

4.      Rapport Building: Extremely important once you release an offer since you have competitors going after the same candidate. Keeping warm makes no sense if you just want to know if another offer has come his/her way. Sharing a link with a candidate about a relevant Tech talk over whatsapp gives the impression that you genuinely care. Sharing a relevant Coursera nano-degree link serves even better. No harm in making a candidate feel special and wanted! The candidates will hold you in good regard and keep you posted on their joining without your follow-ups.

5.      Career coach: When you become friends with a candidate and share insights about industry and similar roles – you are guiding him/her to do well in life. Sometimes you should empathize with your hires rather than pushing them to join early or ‘giving them a piece of your mind’ if they drop-out. Candidates will confide to you, take career advice and will be open to discuss any prospective opportunity in future. Maybe right now the candidate is more interested in compensation – 5 years down the line ‘production level experience’ becomes a priority. Make yourself approachable! An act of kindness comes back to you many times over.

Candidate Engagement forms part of the yearly charter in most organizations but many don’t have the time. In such cases, prioritizing the aforesaid pre and post offer scenarios and customizing to your urgent hiring needs will surely help.

If you can’t mine your own ‘Vibranium’ for delivering phenomenal products (aka Captain America’s shield), you need good talent on-board to do that for you. Give them due attention and actively engage with them before on-boarding - they would work out of their skin to get it done for you.

Wakanda Forever !