How to Maintain Good Relationships with Candidates

Successful talent acquisition is a product of many components. One of these is good relationships between candidates and recruiters. Why? Because for recruiters, the most valuable resource is the candidates themselves. By having a talent pool filled with a group of high-quality candidates, you will be able to save a lot of time and money.  

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Keeping a talent pool with under-qualified candidates or only a small group of individuals whose traits and skills do not match your expectations will only set you off on an expensive and time-consuming path. Therefore, it is very crucial to establish and maintain strong relationships with candidates. 

These relationships are the main factor in maintaining a golden talent pool. This, in turn, will ensure that you will be able to find, develop, and attract the right talents once an opportunity arises. At the same time, whether you are a company or a recruitment agency,  good candidate relationships bring you a competitive advantage. Nurturing and reinforcing relationships with candidates will give the result in the form of long-term success. 

As the recruitment industry gets more and more competitive, recruitment agencies are in a relentless search for a tool that enables them to forge, manage, and maintain strong relationships with high-quality candidates. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) with innovative features is a fundamental solution recruiters can find on the market today.  

To help you secure an essential foundation that builds up towards successful talent acquisition, we’d like to invite you to take a journey through the definition of candidate relationships, the essential components of it,  and strategies for establishing strong and continued relationships. 

What Is a Good Candidate Relationship? 

A good candidate relationship comes from communication between recruiters and potential candidates in the talent pool. Maintaining a solid relationship with candidates will help enhance their experience, no matter the outcome of applications, while enabling recruiters to pull the right candidates out of the pool and into the hiring pipeline quicker and with more ease.    

There will be a time when you are in need of sourcing new candidates. The first place to go would be your current talent pool. Having good candidate relationships will help you identify a group of potential candidates right away and bring back those who have been interviewed previously, back into the interview process.    

Why are Candidate Relationships Important? 

Without good candidate relationships, you will likely find yourself lost in the sea of unknown talents. When the time comes to urgently fill in empty positions, it will be hard for you to dive into the talent pool and identify the perfect candidate for the job. The result will be an expensive, time-consuming, and exhausting experience.

In the recruitment industry today - where candidates hold the upper hand and have more options when it comes to looking for a place to work - good candidate relationships help recruiters attract and engage high-quality talent. At the same time,  it also directly affects candidates’ performance when they enter the company as permanent employees, and defines their experiences which begins when candidates are first exposed to the employer brand. 

Essentials In Candidate Relationships

A Good Career Site

To establish strong relationships with candidates, it is essential to have solid career pages that represent the essence of the company. A career page should be constantly updated. At the same time, it should be able to provide visitors with important information about your company. These include contextual information such as history, goals and core values. 

Keep in mind that a career page is one of the main channels to promote an employer’s brand. This is the starting point of the candidate relationship. The site must represent your company as a good workplace. By using powerful images or videos of your employees explaining what it's like to be part of the company would complete the site and let visitors know what your organization is all about right away.     

Moreover, a career site should not take too many steps or too much of visitors’ time to get to the application form. Try to make the application process as simple as possible to provide the candidate with a good experience. 

Also, do not forget to update the page by removing open jobs that have been filled. Telling applicants that the position they are applying for is no longer available could cause a negative effect on your brand. You don’t want to waste applicant time while looking like a deceptive organization. 

To help you achieve the goal of establishing good candidate relationships, an AI-powered digital tool like Applicant Tracking System or ATS can help you create a solid and attractive career page. Manatal offers an ATS that allows its users to create customizable career pages that coincide with companies’ corporate identity while inspiring potential candidates to become employees.

Strong Communication Across Platforms 

Establishing good relationships with candidates requires continued communication and active engagement. Common platforms that you should consider for your communication strategy are social media channels, job boards, and even email.   

Social media is arguably one of the most effective channels for building relationships with candidates. Not only does it enable a company to increase its employer brand awareness, but it is also directly connected to a company’s career site, making it easy for job seekers to apply for open positions. At the same time, social media posts present great opportunities for a company to engage with potential candidates. You can immediately respond to potential candidates via comments or direct messages. 

Job boards have been treasure troves for recruiters around the world for a long time. They are the classic go-to's when it comes to spreading the word about job opportunities and discovering talent. Effective job posts must be clear and present a company’s brand. At the same time, job posts must be concise and to the point. Provide important details about the position candidates need to know, such as requirements and qualifications as well as main responsibilities, work hours, and benefits. Moreover, seasoning the posts with links that directly lead to your social media profiles will further reinforce your brand.      

While email is as important a communication channel as others, it has a different approach when it comes to building relationships with candidates. When launching a campaign via email, firstly make sure that candidates have opted-in to receive your messages. Secondly, keep in mind that no one likes to read long emails. So whatever content you have, just keep it short. Insert a link that leads recipients to more appropriate channels for more detailed or longer content like a website or social media. 

One more thing to keep in mind when orchestrating an email campaign is to try not to blast your messages to recipients too frequently. Sending out a batch of emails without leaving a fair amount of gap between one another would lead people to perceive your messages as spam. When communicating through email, always reply to responses to maintain your company’s brand standards. 

Maintaining communication across these platforms might be a troublesome and time-consuming task at times. But fear not, for there is a solution. An Applicant Tracking System can help companies and recruitment agencies establish and maintain strong relationships with candidates by automating the communication management process across online platforms. 

Manatal’s ATS comes with the ability to publish job advertisements across multiple platforms at once. Users are only a few clicks away from advertising job opportunities on online sites, from job boards to social media channels like LinkedIn or Facebook. 

Moreover, Manatal makes mass emailing possible within a few clicks. Manatal’s users are granted the ability to customize email templates to meet their company’s corporate look while maintaining their standards. The templates can be saved and reused in the future. 

A Tool That Offers Analysis Data 

At some point, you might find your talent pool continuously growing and feel that your relationships establishment strategy is working. However, without data analysis, you will never be able to truly measure your performance and the value of the candidate pool.  What are the chances that these talents would turn into candidates and be pushed into the recruitment pipeline? 

An ATS has the capability to manage, collect, analyze, and display data in real-time, allowing you to determine how many of your talents are likely to move from the pool to a hiring process and see if your strategy really works.   

Manatal provides analysis and detailed performance reports that allow you to keep track of every step of your candidate relationships. Our customizable dashboard enables you to follow up on all important activities with ease and stay up to date on your team’s progress and performance.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is the backbone of candidate relationships. How does that work? The answer comes in the form of ‘employee referrals.’ Bringing existing employees into the loop of hiring will boost internal applications and promotions as well as open the channel for employees to make recommendations.     

This is a great way to broaden your talent pool with high-quality potential candidates. Why? Well, existing employees are already familiar with the company standards and they would not want to stick their necks out for under-qualified individuals.  

Having employees make referrals is also a way to promote and strengthen a company's brand. Showcasing that they are happy to work for your company will attract talents. If such talents successfully secured positions in the company, employees who made referrals would receive a reward and understand the critical role they have played in the growth of a company. A win-win situation for all parties.    

To help you ensure the quality of your employee referrals, Manatal enables you to organize employee referrals with its AI-powered recommendation tool. You would know right away which recommendations meet your requirements and expectations. Also, tracking and managing referrals and referrers can be simply done within a single platform. 

Strategies for Good Candidate Relationship 

Invest In an AI-Powered Tool 

Putting money into an AI-powered digital tool that provides a  good candidate experience -  like Applicant Tracking System - is worth your investment. As exemplified above, an ATS comes with many innovative features that automate the recruitment process while strengthening and optimizing the relationships with candidates.

To run the show without a digital tool in this era would not be different from hiking in a desert without a bottle of water and a map. You would eventually get lost and collapse from the tedious job of candidate sourcing. Investing in a digital solution would help you gain advantage over competitors while smoothly engaging and bonding with candidates in a short period of time. 

An AI-powered tool like the ATS automates most of the relationship establishment process, especially in the early stages when you reach out to potential candidates. At the same time, it notifies you when candidates are engaging with your communications. With the ability to identify individuals who possess the qualities to fit in the open positions in a blink of an eye, you can efficiently push engaged potential candidates into the hiring pipeline with ease.   

Properly Approach Potential Candidates 

Communication plays an important role in every step of candidate relationship establishment. 

So keep in mind that pushing generic newsletters or non-specific messages will not help generate interest or build up any kind of relationships with candidates. 

Directly contacting potential candidates and having one-on-one communication with them would be the way to start a good relationship. It shows candidates that you are actually interested and care about bonding with them. A human connection like this helps nurture and strengthen lasting relationships.  

Keep Talents Engaged Throughout the Recruitment Cycle 

Because of the Great Resignation, candidates today are presented with many job opportunities. 

It is crucial to keep the communication between recruiters and candidates ongoing. Of course, candidates are aware that you are considering multiple individuals for a role and it takes a fair amount of time before you reach the conclusion of who would be the perfect fit.  

The fast pace of recruitment processes - coupled with going back and forth between a huge batch of candidates in multiple roles - can be a challenge for recruiters who want to maintain communication with candidates and provide updates on each stage. 

There is a high chance that candidates will not apply to a certain company ever again if they went through a bad experience like being ignored or left in a disconnected communication. However, thanks to advanced technology these days, recruiters no longer have to worry about juggling multiple tasks and running against time to keep candidates engaged. An efficient digital tool like the ATS helps you automate and streamline the pipeline while taking the workload out of your hands. 

Now that you have a sophisticated digital assistant, you can keep your candidates in the loop by notifying them with updates on the process. This is the most crucial part of providing a good candidate experience while building up solid relationships. 

Focus On Both Active and Passive Candidates

Positions that require highly specialized skills - like software engineers or surgeons - are quite challenging to fill. These job titles usually don’t lead to a large stream of active candidates. Therefore, your best chances of discovering individuals who possess qualities to fill the spot lie in the relationships with a pool of passive candidates who carry skills and qualifications that perfectly fit the positions.   

Passive candidates are individuals who are not on the lookout for jobs but they are open to opportunities. General channels like online job boards or social media might not be an effective way to attract them. 

Employee referrals, on the other hand, may give you a good chance of expanding your pool of passive candidates. Developing a recruitment marketing campaign is also a great way to approach passive candidates. 

Although it's important to maintain strong relationships with passive candidates, you also have to focus on building connections with active candidates as well. Channels like social media are effective portals to reach out to active candidates and build relationships with them as they are constantly on the lookout for job opportunities. 

Conclusion 

A strategy to carry out an efficient recruitment process on the employers’ side is important. However, companies and recruitment agencies should also pay attention to establishing solid relationships with potential candidates. In today’s recruitment world, where competition is stiff, grabbing the right talents quickly means success over other players in the game. 

As candidates are now left with more choices when it comes to job opportunities, it is crucial that recruiters put their focus on providing candidates with the best experience while establishing a solid bond. 

With advanced technologies today, there are many tools out there that could help you define the quality of your relationships with candidates today, and help you devise ways to strengthen it. The fact that an ATS automates the recruitment pipeline while taking a huge workload out of its users' hands, allows recruiters to manage and invest their valuable time in establishing relationships with candidates while offering them unmatched experiences.   

Manatal offers a powerful and affordable Applicant Tracking System that grants companies and recruitment agencies the ability to establish strong relationships with both passive and active candidates via a customizable career page, mass emailing feature, analytics reports, and more!

Start a 14-day free trial now to discover more of Manatal’s innovative features that could help you establish long-lasting bonds with candidates while strengthening your employer’s brand and attracting a stream of high-quality potential candidates.