7 Ways to Improve Candidate Engagement

Over half (52%) of candidates declined job offers due to negative experiences during the hiring process.Additionally, 53% have had at least one negative hiring experience in the past 12 months. These figures paint a stark picture yet emphasize how important it is to keep candidates engaged during the hiring process. 

Keeping candidates engaged and creating a positive hiring experience is critical to how they view your organization. It also plays a crucial role in building and maintaining your brand’s image. After all, the last thing you’d want is for a candidate to leave a negative review of your organization, isn’t it? 

If you’re dealing with the challenge of keeping your potential hires engaged through the hiring process, this guide lists seven ways in which you can solve this. 

Key Highlights

• Candidate engagement refers to the process of building strong relationships with potential hires to keep them engaged through every step of the hiring process. 
• Candidate engagement can help improve the quality of hires, build and maintain your brand’s reputation, and continue to attract high-quality talent in the future. 
• The first step toward improving your candidate engagement rates is with personalized and timely communication.
• Gather feedback from candidates on the hiring process just as you’d offer them the same on their skills and profiles. 

Why is Candidate Engagement Important? 

Brand image, as the introduction mentioned, is critical in today’s landscape. With information easily accessible on every possible medium – LinkedIn, Indeed, GlassDoor, Twitter, Instagram, and so much more, candidates can find out all they need to know about an organization in just a few clicks. 

This, along with the need to ensure that you secure the best talent out there to build your organization, makes it essential to keep candidates engaged through the hiring process. In fact, 7 out of 10 individuals who stated having an exceptional candidate experience report being very happy with their jobs. Clearly, then, the quality of the hiring process also has a direct correlation with employee retention. 

The benefits are clear. A positive candidate experience plays a major role in every part of an employee’s journey with your organization and benefits the business itself. 

7 Ways to Improve Candidate Experience 

Here are seven of the most effective ways to create an appealing and positive image of your brand and ensure consistent communication.

Make Candidates Want to Work For Your Company 

Several talent acquisition professionals hold one key opinion about the hiring process today –  hiring is increasingly becoming about marketing your business to potential candidates. 

Building a positive brand image then becomes critical to hiring the best talent. A few ways to manage this include: 

• Use social media channels and your recruitment page to show candidates what your organization is about. 
• Use technologies like Virtual Reality to show candidates where they’ll be working. 
• Highlight employee experience on social media channels. 
• Use your job descriptions to highlight the benefits of your organization’s culture. 

Pro Tip: Use your Careers Page for more than just listing vacancies. Highlight your company’s culture, the team, show how accessible the leadership is, and what a day at work in your organization looks like. 

Communicate Consistently 

Consistent communication is another key aspect that can help keep candidates engaged. Think of this like any relationship in your life: the more you communicate, the more engaged you are. One simple way to do this is to send confirmation emails. 

• Have you received a candidate’s application? Send them a confirmation email. 
• Have they moved on to the next round of the screening process? Send them a confirmation email. 
• Are you no longer moving forward with their application? Communicate with them. 

And this process doesn’t have to be time-consuming either. You can use Oorwin’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to send candidates automated emails in bulk. The key is to ensure that you keep in touch, and this goes a long way in maintaining a positive brand image. 

Make Your Hiring Timelines Clear 

35% of applicants find lengthy applications frustrating. Think of the talent organizations miss out on in such situations when frustrations like these lead to high application abandonment rates. 

Making your hiring timelines clear from the very beginning helps build a sense of trust and keeps candidates engaged through the hiring process, especially since they know what to expect and when. While you don’t have to give them precise dates, you can always give them a time frame (such as a week or two) by which time they should know whether they’d have an offer in hand or not. 

Pro Tip: Creating a timeline of your candidate journey can be a great way to streamline the hiring process. It helps build a framework for how you should communicate with your candidates, and when, and ensures that you keep them engaged till the last step of the process. 

Make Use of a Content-Driven Engagement Strategy 

A content-driven engagement strategy involves sharing key pieces of content with candidates to keep them engaged through the hiring process. These could include blogs, videos, newsletters, reels, or other social media posts that educate them about your organization and get them excited about the opportunity to work with you. 

Sharing such content also helps filter out candidates who may not be a good fit for your organization as it helps paint a picture of your organization, the work it does, and its culture. 

With Oorwin’s advanced Contact Management Feature, you can seamlessly engage with candidates at every step of the hiring process and use it to deliver key brand-related content. 

Make Candidate Assessments Exciting 

Certain roles require assessing a candidate’s skills through an assignment, but as much as this is a necessity, it doesn’t have to be a painful experience. Finding ways to make assignments fun can help build engagement and improve the quality of the submissions as well. Additionally, it can also be a great way to increase the amount of time candidates spend on your website (think of the SEO benefits of this.)

PwC, a well-known consulting firm, made use of a business simulation game called “Multipoly” in its assessment process. The result? Job seekers who’d spent an average of 10 minutes on their website ended up spending an average of 90 minutes instead. 

Make Use of AI 

Leveraging AI in your hiring process is a no-brainer today. AI tools can be remarkably effective in streamlining and automating several aspects of the talent acquisition process. A chatbot, for example, can help answer candidates’ questions about your organization. Integrating one into your website can help candidates gather more information, giving them an edge in their interviews since they’d better understand what your company does. 

Similarly, using an AI-powered ATS can automate the process of managing resumes across multiple sources, locating qualified candidates, and so much more. 

With Oorwin, you can seamlessly integrate the tools in your existing tech stack using email and browser plugins and other integrations like ChatGPT. You can use AI to enhance your recruitment strategy for candidate scoring, searching, generating matching suggestions, gaining job insights, and matching profiles.

Always Gather Feedback 

While feedback was traditionally seen as a one-way street, with organizations occasionally offering candidates a review of what they can do better, it’s just as crucial that organizations themselves gather feedback on how they can improve the hiring process. 

For starters, this is a great way of telling candidates that you care about more than just your company and its needs. Additionally, making meaningful changes to your hiring process can further help build your brand’s image and reputation in the future, giving you a better chance of hiring the best talent. 

Boost Candidate Engagement with Oorwin

Candidate engagement and a seamless and timely hiring process are critical to hiring the best talent for your organization. Oorwin’s digital onboarding streamlines the process using tools like digital signatures and e-forms and offers a personalized onboarding experience for new employees. 

Oorwin’s comprehensive suite automates onboarding, assigns tasks to new employees, and tracks their progress, all of which contribute to making employees feel engaged and valued. Talent acquisition can seem challenging, but it doesn’t have to be if you have the right tool at your disposal. Sign up for a demo today to see how it can transform your hiring process first-hand.