Three ways HR technology can boost candidate engagement

With the low unemployment rates in today's labor market, employers need to step up their game to attract candidates to fill their open roles. As many as 76% of hiring managers say that attracting top talent is their biggest challenge at present. 

Failing to engage with your applicants might be your loss of great candidates and perhaps even customers. In fact, 67% of candidates are more likely to buy from a company, post-application, if they receive consistent updates throughout the recruiting process. Luckily, there’s HR technology that makes keeping candidates engaged a lot easier. How exactly can such technology help you boost candidate engagement?

1. Providing consistent communication

As much as it is important for applicants to feel engaged and not forgotten in the recruitment process, it is equally important that you find the right tools to help you automate this process and make it as efficient as possible. Gone are the days of having to pencil in different times to set interviews, or call an applicant back to remind them to send in their documents.

Nowadays, HR or recruiting software helps with workflow automation. In applicant tracking systems, candidate relationship management software or candidate selection platforms, you can set up triggers based on candidates’ actions that start automated, yet personalized communication flows. Imagine that a candidate can be in the loop as to what’s happening with their application without having to manually do anything.

What’s more, recruiting chatbots implemented on your career site or social media are able to answer questions from candidates and even pre-screen them. This will leave you with initial information about your applicants and leave them with information about your organization and already feeling engaged.

2. Creating an engaging pre-selection process

From a chatbot doing an initial pre-screen to an automated pre-selection process, HR tech makes it easier to shorten that list of qualified candidates. You might consider including a pre-employment assessment platform into your recruiting process with a dual purpose in mind: sufficient data for your selection, and improved candidate engagement.

Combining gamified assessments with videos showcasing your company culture and the day-to-day reality of the job you’re hiring for helps keep your candidates engaged throughout the pre-selection process. If you add the ability to provide feedback to a candidate about their results from the assessments, you give them something useful they can walk away with, make them feel valued and ensure they keep a positive view of your organization. 

3. Collecting feedback

As the selection process wraps up and you’ve screened, interviewed, and perhaps even hired one of the candidates, there’s still one piece to the puzzle that is missing: feedback from your candidates.

62% of candidates think that employers don’t care about mutual relations during the recruitment process. You can convince them otherwise by collecting their feedback on the process via your candidate relationship management system or your ATS. This not only gives you valuable feedback about your process but also leaves applicants with a good feeling and less likely to write anonymous reviews on Glassdoor about something they might not have liked. 

Wrapping it up

While 82% of employers believe there is little or no impact of bad candidate experience on their business, almost two-thirds of candidates are less likely to buy from a company where they got no response after they applied for a job.

Neglecting candidate engagement and candidate experience can be expensive for businesses. A leading television and telecom company Virgin Media estimated that bad candidate experience cost them over $5 million annually. So why not use HR tech to keep your candidates engaged and make their overall experience better?