How to Use Data to Fuel Candidate Engagement: Consistency Counts
There’s never been a more important time to focus on the candidate experience. The way you engage with candidates impacts your brand’s image, your ability to fill jobs, your client relationships—and ultimately the success of your business.
While there are several steps you can take to plan an effective candidate engagement strategy, how you choose to implement that strategy determines how successful you will be.
To deliver the best possible candidate experience, you need to be consistent, personal, and you need to prioritize. In this blog series, I’ll explore the ways in which data allows you to enhance these core principles of a successful engagement strategy. First up: leveraging data to be more consistent.
Concentrating on Consistency
In order to deliver a great customer experience, you need to be consistent in your outreach to candidates. Set a regular cadence of calls and emails to your candidate database, and hold yourself to it.
But knowing where to start can be difficult. How often should you be emailing candidates? How often should you be calling candidates? This is where you can leverage the data you already have to help create a plan and stick to it.
1) Determine a baseline
Look at your historical communication with candidates to see how frequently you’ve been engaging with your candidate pool. See if you can uncover any trends – for example, is there an engagement method that most often leads to redeployments?
2) Set targets/goals
Decide how often you would like to call/email candidates. Consider setting different frequency goals based on the type of candidate you’re engaging with. Some segments you may want to consider are:
A. Strong Performers
B. Currently Contracted
C. New Candidates
Track your progress
Hold yourself and your team to hitting your candidate engagement goals. Monitor your performance weekly to ensure that you’re reaching out to the right candidates at the right frequency.
Following through on these steps requires that you have visibility into both your candidate pool and your activities. If you have a reporting tool, consider setting up ongoing reports to keep track of your efforts. In this case, using data will not only hold you to your plan and keep you consistent, but it can also help you adjust that plan based on effectiveness, to ensure you hit your goals.
Stay tuned for our next post to learn more about how you can take action with data as you implement your candidate engagement strategy.
For more information on the traits of a winning candidate engagement strategy, get the Candidate Engagement ebook.