5 Essential Steps to Drive Candidate Engagement in Recruitment

March 6th 2019

The shift to a candidate-driven job market has put the candidate in control. In this competitive market, employers and recruiters must rethink how they attract, connect, and engage with prospective candidates both on and offline. Those in recruitment must find ways to engage with their prime applicants if they have any hopes of converting them into new hires.

Here’s a look at the five essential steps employers need to take to drive engagement in the recruitment process.


1. Create an authentic Employer Value Proposition (EVP)

Today’s candidates want to know more about their prospective employers. They want to feel a connection with the company and in what it’s presenting. It’s vital that you establish an authentic Employer Value Proposition (EVP) that resonates the core beliefs and needs of the candidate at that specific moment in time. Most importantly, your EVP should show candidates why they should work for your company and what differentiates your business from other companies within the industry.

Unfortunately, many employers fail to recognize the importance of creating an authentic and unique EVP. In fact, it’s quite common for a candidate to stumble upon the same EVP, such as a “we’re a fun place to work,” for different companies. However, creating an EVP that focuses solely on fun will only attract a specific candidate-type rather than resonate with all target candidates.

It’s better to look at your industry as a whole and to determine where you position yourself as a company into that framework. This step will help you create a more realistic and compelling EVP that attracts your prime candidates. At Tulsie, we work with our clients to develop an authentic EVP that resonates with their target candidates. We help to bring a human perspective to your EVP, that aligns with candidates at different stages within their career to help you attract the right target audience for your jobs.


2. Use social media to boost engagement

For most recruitment teams, social media has become a platform for sending messages about new job options, career opportunities, or company events to prospective candidates. In many cases, it’s a one-way street. These recruiters fail to maximize the use of these social media platforms in order to boost candidate engagement.

You can take your social recruitment strategy one step further by using social listings and monitoring tools to analyze data obtained on social media and discover new job market trends before your competitors. By using social media as a means to engage with the candidates rather than just spraying and praying, you can transform your social recruitment strategy from just a simple messaging platform to one that provides insight into candidate interests and trends.


3. Humanize the recruitment process

Recruitment is all about building a rapport with your target candidates. At its heart, recruitment is the process of matching the candidates’ hopes, dreams, and desires to new career opportunities within your company. Your recruitment strategy must move beyond the tactics of storytelling, social media tools, and content marketing and find a way to humanize the recruitment process.

At Tulsie, we provide our clients with valuable candidate insights to help them better understand their ideal candidate. We help our clients understand how their candidate think, how they behave online, and what they really want in a career. Understanding social psychology, as well as candidate behavior, will enable you to add a human element to the recruitment process and build a strong candidate engagement strategy.


4. Personalize candidate interactions

Personalization in the recruitment process is here to stay. Candidates not only want a high level of personalization – they have come to expect it. Unfortunately, the new GDPR rules have made collecting and saving the candidate data needed to provide a personalized experience more difficult.

In order to remain compliant with GDPR, while still personalizing the recruitment process, candidate data must be segmented and analyzed in a way that allows you to go beyond the standard Happy Birthday email and to apply personalization techniques that you can utilize in offline touchpoints.

By working with both employers and career professionals, Tulsie has the unique advantage to understand candidates on a deeper and more meaningful level. Our candidate insights help employers take a more personalized approach to recruitment, while still remaining compliant with all GDPR rules and regulations.


5. Create compelling candidate experience

A major step to modernizing recruitment is to align industry perspectives, company culture, and EVP with your overall recruitment strategy. Aligning these elements into one strategy allows employers to provide a compelling candidate experience.

For example, rethinking how you can best serve your ideal candidates requires you to know why candidates change jobs, when candidates actively look for new jobs, and what support they need from the recruitment team to make an educated decision. The candidate experience you provide is relevant because it gives a potential candidate a way to increase satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. Tulsie can help you create a compelling candidate experience by better understanding your ideal candidates’ career needs, goals, and motivators.

Written by: Sushila Ramkisoensing

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