Communication With Candidates

Recruitment Challenge: Let's Communicate Better With Candidates!

We had a meeting about this at our company Friday. Our internal talent acquisition team has responded and come up with a revamped program for communicating with applicants from start to finish. We addressed these two issues:

  1. How do we communicate better and more consistently with candidates who apply?
  2. How do we communicate better and more consistently with candidates who fall out of contention for the job they applied for?

Communicate better with applicants

  • One person is designated to route all applicants to the correct person in our organization within 1 business day for each department.
  • Our team has agreed to give each applicant some type of 'real' response within 2 business days from a live person, either through email or on the phone, as to the progress of their application.
  • We say 'live person' because an automated email from the ATS system saying, 'we have received your resume' does not count as communication.

Communicate better with applicants who fall out of contention

  • We prefer to let a candidate know right away when they fall out of contention, that way they aren't relying on a false hope.
  • We agreed to let the applicant know right away when aren't selected by our client (or internally) to move forward to the next step in the process.

How about a policy for communicating with applicants about updates when clients are still in the process?

  • We have found that recruiters generally don't need a policy on follow-up on candidates that are still in contention because we are already hard-wired for being awesome at that.
  • The hard part is when we don't have an answer or have to share the not-so-good news. However, we believe that communication is just as important in these instances.

We believe that it is showing common decency and respect for the applicant's time and effort in applying for the position.

We believe that we are in a much smaller world now more than ever, with online accessibility at an all-time high. So it is important to focus on our recruitment brand in the minds of all applicants, not just the ones that are hired.

We challenge all other recruiters (whether internally or 3rd party) to adopt some sort of policy on communication and be accountable to each other and our applicants.

How do you feel about these policies, are we on the right track?

#recruitmentprocessenhancement #hrmaximizer

Rollis Fontenot IIIRollis Fontenot IIIPresident and Business Development Executive for Ascend HR Corp. Rollis recruited healthcare clinicians, professionals, managers and executives since 2004. Some examples titles include: CEO, Director, Nurse Manager, RN, nurse practitioner, physician, physician assistant and more. Rollis has also recruited many other functions within healthcare as well as escrow officers and assistants within the title insurance industry.

Ascend HR Corp offers recruitment services on a monthly subscription. We specialize in recruitment process enhancement from finding qualified and interested candidates all the way to full life-cycle recruitment for our clients. We specialize in fixing the most difficult recruitment issues/challenges. No problem is too large. We can help turn around the results of any recruitment department that wants to improve. Please download a sample of Rollis' book "Winning the Talent Acquisition Game with Recruitment Process Enhancement"

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