Closing the Communication Gap: A Recruiter’s Guide

With unemployment rates hitting record lows across the globe and with more than 40% of the global workforce still thinking about tendering their resignations this year, it’s an absolute requirement that HR leaders and recruitment professionals fine tune every component of their existing recruitment and hiring processes.  

If you expect to have any success winning the ongoing talent sweepstakes happening in the marketplace right now, beginning with the elimination of any existing gaps in their communication pipelines is a good first step.  

Communication gaps in your hiring processes don’t simply equate to lost opportunities anymore.  They’ve become enormous liabilities to an organization.

The inability to recruit and retain talent because of the gaping communication gaps that exist in an organization’s hiring processes will undoubtedly weaken the competitive positioning of any company in the modern marketplace, no matter what the industry. 

It’s just a trademark of the modern times - recruiters and HR professionals can have all the education and talent in the world, but without powerful communication skills married to the proper HR technology, there will continue to be communication breakdowns with colleagues and candidates alike. This, in turn, equates to lost opportunities to recruit talent in a very stingy job market.

Fortunately, we’re going to show you five points that will give you an idea of how recruitment technologies like a powerful applicant tracking system (ATS) and a robust candidate relationship management (CRM) engine can significantly enhance your organization’s ability to bridge these communication gaps and make you more attractive to prospective candidates.

Identifying Communication Gaps

We are rapidly moving into a post-pandemic marketplace, but that doesn’t mean society isn’t still smarting from that all-too-familiar feeling of isolation that’s been brought on by the effects of the pandemic. It’s a curious thing when one stops to consider that, globally, our society has never been more digitally connected than it is today thanks to modern technology.

A closer look at historical recruiting demonstrates that the candidate is the one most often left “in the dark.”  This won’t suffice if recruiters want to succeed in today’s job market.  And it’s not just communication gaps that exist between job seekers and recruits; communication gaps that exist between HR managers, clients and colleagues can be just as much of a liability.

Watch a 20-year veteran working alongside an ambitious Gen Z’er right out of college and the lack of rapport will be almost palpable.  It’s unfortunate, but it’s also a marquee example of how communication gaps get in the way of production.  

The Communication Gap between Recruiters and Candidates

Candidates understandably prefer to be informed about an organization’s hiring processes and it’s an area where many companies tend to fall short.  For too long, traditional recruiting has been a sequence of processes that potentially create huge chasms between an organization’s recruiters and their job candidates.  

Upon applying, candidates are left to rely on recruiters to provide them with updated information about their application status. In the absence of this communication, candidates begin to either lose interest or they begin to send texts and emails inquiring about their applicant status.  Fortunately, it’s a problem that can be solved with a little effort and the adoption of new HR technologies such as an applicant tracking system, but many organizations remain stuck in those traditional habits they’ve cultivated over the years.

Still, there is hope.  There is a trend of HR professionals wising up to the real costs of not closing these communication gaps. They’ve responded by modifying their hiring processes to include new HR technologies that not only help get the word out about how their organization evaluates candidates and what their compensation and benefits packages look like, but also engaging with active and passive candidates using social media.

The majority of candidates you hope to be talking to fall in the passive job seeker category.  These are would-be candidates that aren’t actively searching for a job but will certainly consider the right job if they’re aware of its existence.  These are the candidates you want to be building relationships with.  Lastly, recruiters need to be consistent and clear in their communication strategies with candidates, or risk shrinking their talent pool.

Speed to Hire

The speed to hire metric has never been more crucial to a recruiter’s success in locating, attracting, and hiring the right talent than it is today.  By adopting new innovations in HR technology (most of which offer remarkably economical and cost-sensitive options) your organization can make tremendous strides in closing existing communication gaps.  Remember, the speed to hire metric is very dependent on expedient and thorough communication between candidates, recruiters, and clients.

Technology’s Role

The HR technology market is white-hot with new innovations that are giving recruiters the competitive edge they need to turn the tide and start winning the war for talent.  Adopting the right recruitment technology, like a powerful applicant tracking system (ATS), can be very effective at closing communication gaps and accelerating collaborative efforts at an organization by keeping candidates, hiring managers and clients all informed on the status of progress and facilitating a rapid exchange of data and feedback.

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have evolved to become a crucial component of modern recruitment technology.  Fortunately, the best ATS systems on the market come with CRM functionality as a core component of their software stack.  These technologies are powerful resources that give recruiters the tools to manage communication at every step of the hiring process and the combined features help build relationships with candidates and clients, both current and future. 

A customer relationship management feature coupled with an ATS gives recruiters the tools they need to ensure that recruitment agency clients receive timely and unambiguous communication throughout the hiring process. When a powerful ATS and CRM is operating at the heart of an agency’s recruitment strategy, the results are powerful for both your business and your client’s needs.

Recruitment agencies are the ones who benefit the most. A modern CRM that comes embedded within a robust ATS system provides recruitment agencies with a single, unified software platform on which they can manage clients and candidates alike.  

Having this single platform to handle all correspondence and communication with both clients and candidates can be very effective in closing costly communication gaps.

2. Using Communication Templates & Resources

The best recruitment technologies on the marketplace today offer recruiters a whole swath of useful and customizable email and text message templates that can ensure swift and smooth communication with candidates.  These communication templates often come as a feature of modern ATS systems like Manatal. 

There isn’t a recruiter operating in the marketplace today that wouldn’t benefit from automatically distributing correspondence to candidates, whether by email or text, and make it personalized to each recipient.  The ATS systems that best serve this function, like Manatal, are making these real-time, fast communications possible, and that is a competitive advantage in this job market.

Remember, candidates tend to remember personalized communications.  It’s a very nice and rare touch that can keep your applicants engaged in the process.  

There are also other useful communication features that come embedded within a modern ATS system that can help recruiters close those pesky communication gaps that exist internally so that your team, your clients, and candidates can all operate with the appropriate progress, data, and feedback.

3. Speak the Language of your Applicants

A common challenge is that traditional hiring processes customarily take a lot longer.  The best recruiters and HR professionals are overcoming this challenge by rapidly connecting and building rapport with quality candidates before they’re off the market by demonstrating to them that they “speak their language.”  The best way to achieve this is to have the processes, and the technology, in place that puts recruiters in the best position to get to know candidates on both on a personal and professional level.

Here’s what we mean: The workforce is rapidly becoming a place where Millennials and Gen Z candidates will soon hold the majority.  Over half of them want to be able to apply for jobs on their phones.

Investing in a modern recruitment platform that enables social media hiring strategies can close communication gaps with the younger clients in the job market because it shows you speak their language.  Applying on a mobile phone is an expedient measure and that technology sends a message to applicants that your organization understands the lifestyle of the younger generation and that is something they’re likely to talk about online.  

4. Using AI to Close the Communication Gap

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all around us in our daily lives.  In the HR industry, AI technologies are helping organizations maximize the efficiency and communication efforts of their recruiters more than ever.  The truth is that AI brings a wide array of time-saving benefits, but, for our purposes, the AI functionality within your ATS systems can do much more than quickly determine the best candidates - AI is now helping organizations bridge the communication gaps that exist between candidates and recruiters.  

Artificial intelligence allows for recruiters to pay closer attention to the candidates that are the best fit for a specific role. Manatal for example, uses AI technology to parse resumes according to your criteria and swiftly rank candidates based on suitability of skills, experiences and qualification. With this, data-driven information sets are served to everyone in the hiring process - recruiter, hiring manager and clients - in order to expedite the flow of information to all stakeholders. More critically, AI funnels that information onto a single dashboard - a single source of truth - to understand who the applicants are, and what kind of decisions need to be made to improve the quality of candidates. Everyone sees the same data, and can be notified instantly. 

5. Accelerating Collaboration

Keeping all stakeholders (candidates, recruiters, HR leaders, clients, etc.,) updated with progress reports and feedback throughout the hiring process is difficult enough, even with texting options and email being immediately available to most of us all the time.

But imagine a scenario where your recruitment technology is outdated, and it doesn’t include the emails, texts, or phone conversations that recruiters have in their daily interactions with candidates, clients, and colleagues.  The communication gaps get wider and more numerous by the day.  

Fortunately, there is recruitment technology that can successfully close these gaps and accelerate collaboration.  The solution is an ATS system with a fully integrated email, scheduling and team chat features that eliminates the need for using multiple platforms.  In fact, communication can be enhanced with these ATS systems via the use of customized email templates that can be shared with others at your organization.  

Enhancing Key Metrics by Closing Communication Gaps

Successfully closing the existing communication gaps at your company can also translate to positive results for key metrics that are used in HR.  We’ve already mentioned how speed to hire can be accelerated when communication gaps are eliminated.  Two other metrics that can be improved with the elimination of communication gaps include:

Cost to Fill - a metric that measures the average cost to fill a position from candidate attraction, interviewing, to hiring.  This metric can have a noticeable impact on your company’s bottom line.  The more expedient your communication channels, the shorter the timeline – that saves money.

Quality of Hire - a direct reflection on the effectiveness of your recruitment team.  It’s been discovered that the best workers do the most work.  In fact, the finest talent can be up to eight times as productive as their counterparts.  Closing communication gaps means having the agility to sign the best talent, before your competitors do.

Manatal – The HR Industry’s Leading ATS Platform

Organizational leaders have discovered that the talent they so desperately need is going to remain in short supply for months to come.  It’s no surprise that a large number of Fortune 500 companies now rely on a powerful ATS system to help them find that talent. Manatal is widely recognized for offering the industry’s leading SaaS-based ATS platform and organizations all over the world have come to rely on our platform to optimize their talent acquisition and hiring procedures.  

If closing communication gaps at your organization is your goal, Manatal’s ATS platform offers a wide array of tools that can enhance all your organization’s collaboration, communication, and task planning efforts, both internally and externally.

To discover how we can help your organization close the communication gaps we discussed above, start your 14-day free trial today and test it out without the need for credit card information. It’s quick and easy, and lets your whole team try the key features that help close communication gaps which persist in hiring processes