5 Tips For Developing A Strong Candidate Communication Strategy

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Mastering the art of communicating successfully with candidates come with its perks. From delivering a higher-quality recruiting experience to accelerating the recruitment process and retaining a competitive employer image, there are plenty of ways to improve how you communicate with candidates.

This pops up the question: "How to improve a strong candidate communication strategy?"

If you're interested in knowing the answer, continue reading these 5 tips for developing a strong candidate communication strategy.

How to start developing a communication strategy?

Developing a successful candidate communication strategy is about knowing what the applicants want to ask and when they want to ask. Therefore, it is essential to put yourself in the job seekers' shoes and think about the hiring process from the candidate's viewpoint. Take this into consideration, and it will be much easier to communicate with them.

The current job market situation and the HR managers' tight evaluation process creates challenges for time-contested teams to respond immediately to applicants.

Respond to Every Applicant

Nothing is worse than exerting too much effort to achieve a goal, and then nothing happens. This typically occurs when a job seeker spends much time and effort tailoring his resume and cover letter to get the job and receive no hiring specialist's response. Candidates feel that all their efforts go into the air.

On the other hand, for HR specialists, replying to hundreds of job applicants' emails is a time-consuming task. To avoid this, you can leverage the automation tools such as Applicant tracking system "ATS" that allows you to turn on candidate notifications and generate an automatic submitted, rejected, or shortlisted reply email.

This will help save your time and keep the applicant notified of his status updates in the hiring process.

Be Consistent

Consistency in your candidate communication is critical, mainly if you concentrate on mitigating your recruiting process bias.

You have to offer all the candidates the same information using the same words and tone of voice that typically represent your employer brand. You give an equal chance for succeeding in the hiring process, especially if you provide information about scheduling interviews.

You can achieve this by two means: manually by creating various Email templates to save time or automatically by using personalization tokens to gather each applicants' information and simultaneously send your templates to many candidates.

Develop A Robust Employer Brand

Branded communications are the secret to reliability and loyalty; make the corporation's identity visible during the candidate's experience, from the moment he starts filling out the job application after screening the job description to the reply emails.

Hiring software tools can do it for you. A tool like Webrecruit ATS helps customize the email's sender name so you'll directly send emails using the name you've selected. Personalizing emails will solve the "no-reply" email, which leaves a wrong impression about your employer brand.

They also help you keeps your emails consistent with your company's brand colors, logo, and tone of voice on social media.

The recruitment team can also insert some links into their customized emails telling the candidates more about their work environment and how it will help develop their skills and qualifications.

Utilize Different Communication Ways

Other communication ways can serve it well when sending quick notifications about the interview confirmation or reminders. SMS text messages are among the fundamental ways to ease the communication flow, and it helps well because it's rarely skipped, unlike Emails, which can be easily missed. A phone call is also essential to maintain human touch while communicating with the candidates.

Ask for Feedback

The most powerful way to develop a strong candidate communication strategy is asking for feedback both through and after the interviewing process, even if the candidate is not accepted.

Conduct surveys using tools like Google Forms or Survey Monkey to all applicants who've already completed a particular stage of your recruiting process and get anonymous, real, and direct reviews about what it was like to apply with your firm.

You will also use this feedback to enhance your recruitment process and maintain a candidates' good experience.

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