How to build and maintain strong candidate relationships
Written by Martin
In the world of recruitment, your most valuable asset is your candidates. Without a vibrant talent pool of positive candidates, filling roles becomes an expensive and time consuming chore.
That's why candidate relationships are really important. They’re key to helping you maintain a meaningful talent pool and to ensuring you can identify, develop, and attract the right talent, at the right time.
Candidates are your source of revenue. It's your candidates that offer you a competitive edge, and nurturing candidate relationships is the only way to ensure long-term success. With that in mind we’re going to explore some of the techniques you can use in your day-to-day practice to ensure your candidates feel well looked after.
In the battle to attract top talent, it pays to think like a marketer. Before embarking on any marketing campaign, marketers define their target audience and you should do the same. The first step marketers take is to identify personas. They identify the specific features of their ideal customer, and through doing the same, you too will you'll build a better understanding of your target market, in turn helping you to create tailored, relevant messaging.
Try outlining the factors below to create profiles of your ideal candidates.
To help maintain positive candidate relationships it's important to understand the candidate journey through their eyes. A candidate’s journey is all encompassing and should include everything from their first interaction, through to application, shortlisting, interview, and any resulting decision. The aim is to map each stage and understand how your candidate may be feeling, what they might need, and what they might be missing. This will help you to nurture them through each stage, and build a positive relationship.
To attract the right talent, you need to communicate with them in a meaningful way. To do so you’ll need to engage them with innovative, relevant content. Vacancy alerts are just one part of the puzzle. Ideally, you want to create content that promotes your client's employer brand. What does it mean to work for you or the company you’re recruiting for? What is the culture like? What makes the company special? Give them an insight into what the company is doing right now. What are its goals and objectives?
And think about how you communicate with them too. Technology is great for automating communications between you and your candidates en masse, or for scheduling reminders for keeping in touch. Social media is a quick and easy way of maintaining contact, especially when on the go. But don’t forget the importance of personalising your conversations with candidates. If there’s one thing the pandemic did for us, it was normalising video calls - why not check in with a candidate on Zoom, Facetime or Teams to get to know them better? And as the world starts to open up again post-Covid, you could even meet for a coffee to forge stronger candidate relationships.
By tailoring the way in which you engage to suit the candidates your trying to connect with, you’ll entice the right candidates and sell them their dream job. Feel free to reach out to our team if you want to discuss how you can do this.
Consistent communication is often where recruiters fall short. The fast pace of recruitment, juggling multiple candidates, and recruiting for numerous roles, often makes it difficult for recruiters to maintain communication at each stage of the candidate journey. Fortunately, technology can help. If you have the right software in place, communication is easy. Automated responses or reminders to check-in with candidates will ensure that your candidates don’t drop off during the recruitment process. At idibu, we have a ‘candidate check in tool’ that allows candidates to record their status and updates recruiters on where they are in the candidate journey. Are you using the right technology to nurture your candidate relationships?
Honesty is a trait that all candidates are looking for in the recruiters they work with. We previously reviewed the experiences of 250 candidates from around 100 recruitment agencies. When asked “if you have ever established a good relationship with a recruitment agency, what was it that made them stand out for you above their competitors?” 31.1% said honesty. Providing honest feedback helps to build trust, and trust is a key factor in any good relationship. Are you taking the time to be honest with your candidates?
Building solid candidate relationships requires a combination of understanding, honest and consistent communication, interesting and innovative engagement, and careful timing. Technology can help to facilitate the process, but at the very heart of it, recruiters need to recognise the importance of candidate relationships to ensure a competitive edge. By truly caring about your candidates, helping them to make the right choices, and supporting them in achieving their goals, you too will be rewarded with ongoing recruitment success.
idibu’s helping recruiters attract the best talent, quicker, through market-leading tech that integrates seamlessly with your CRM. Click below to arrange a free demo or just to have a chat with our team about your needs
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