Attracting the right talent is not an easy task. The tight job market has employers all over the world are trying innovative ways to attract candidates to apply and to keep them engaged through their job application journey.

Today’s candidates are more informed, educated and purposeful about which company they’d like to be a part of. In this high-demand era, the candidates pick the company, not the other way around. In this context, delivering a good first impression on your employer brand is more important than ever before. Building an engaging and efficient application process can be fairly simple if you know your target audience.

Here are 6 tips on how to customize your recruitment funnel:

1. Create an experience based on your employer brand.

Your candidate’s first communication with your brand happens when they greet you digitally — via your website and social media channels. They want to feel welcomed and empowered. Candidates need to know basic information such as your company’s values, culture, career growth avenues, flexible working options, and how your current workforce looks like.

You can showcase your EVP (employee value proposition) via your company blog (it’s even better when it’s curated by your own employees), employer branding and recruitment videos, and targeted events. This lets candidates get to know you and develop an affinity to your brand. Another great way to educate your talent pool is by using recruitment chatbots (aka conversational agents) to answer FAQs. These bots can live in your career site, your Facebook page, or your dedicated phone line. You can experience such a bot in our own career site. Further, when you design your recruiter chatbot personality, you can create an application process which is friendlier, faster, authentic, real-time, and transparent.

2. Make the application process technology-driven, yet human-led.

In our fast paced world, candidates expect a fast and easy application experience. They are no longer willing to fill out multiple application pages when this can be more effectively done with simple, easy-to-fill digital conversations — via an intuitive, mobile-friendly interface. This is where AI and automation have eased the application process, by asking the candidates a few pointed questions, and immediately directing them to the right job opening. Once the right candidate is matched with the right job opportunity, the process must let the human recruiters take over as fast as possible. Using CRMs such as Talkpush, recruiters can then have live conversation with their candidates as fast as possible. By automating FAQs, initial greetings and pre-screening, you free up recruiter time so they can offer a red carpet treatment to the right candidates.

3. Be mobile first.

People live on their phone… This is how they communicate with the world, how they purchase goods, how they share their experiences, etc. It makes sense that it is also how they should be allowed to apply for jobs, though only a few employers have truly enabled a good mobile experience. Doing so means allowing candidates to talk to you directly via Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other messaging apps.

4. Give regular feedback and updates.

Your candidates may have many job options from which they can cherry-pick the one that has kept them most engaged and up-to-date on their application process. So don’t just send a template e-mail and notify after days of radio-silence. Chances are, if they are one of your top talent contenders, they have a few options. So it’s important to keep them up to date on the status of their application. More than half of candidates will give up and move on if they haven’t heard back after two weeks of having applied to a job. In fact, candidates are always yearning to know how they have performed so far in the interview process. This can also be implemented through chatbots and by establishing a candidate-centric recruitment workflow.

5. Set a candidate feedback mechanism.

The more positive the candidate experience is with your employer brand, there are better chances for them to recommend other candidates to learn more about employment opportunities with your company. And that’s why it’s recommended to gather feedback from your current candidates about how they perceive the overall career prospects with your company, perhaps with a short survey. With this feedback, you can bring out the hidden marketer in a recruiter to co-create inbound content to attract and engage more qualified prospective candidates. Check out this video below which shows how a candidate’s NPS can be collected post interview.

6. Give recruiters all the information they need, on the go, so every interaction can be contextual.

Just as the application process needs to be mobile-enabled for candidates, it also needs to be enabled for recruiters, talent acquisition leaders and hiring managers. Indeed, they spend most of their time away from their desks, conducting interviews, traveling, etc. and this should be supported with hiring software which is available to them on the go, via a mobile app. This allows the recruiters to quickly access all the candidate information they need, so they can deliver a better candidate experience, without repeating questions that were already asked for instance.

Talkpush is the new way employers and candidates connect all over the world. We believe hiring is about starting conversations; and are on a mission to level up the recruitment experience. Learn more about our platform by scheduling a demo here.

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