Improving Connections with Candidates and Hiring Managers

Since The Great Reshuffle, the job market now favors both candidates and current employees within an organization — and the companies that offer the most attractive culture and experiences for candidates will win and retain top employees. Communication between recruiters, talent acquisition (TA) leaders, and hiring managers is essential to building a strong employer brand, but many teams lack the tools needed to take their programs to the next level.

Even if your recruiting program isn’t ready for a complete overhaul, there are simple ways to enhance the hiring manager and candidate experiences in your organization. These actionable strategies will help improve connections between key members of the hiring process.

How to Improve Connections Between Hiring Managers and Candidates

1. Intelligent Messaging Shortens the Feedback Loop

It can be frustrating as a recruiter to be excited about a high-potential candidate, only to lose them due to long feedback times from a hiring team. Deciding on a candidate can take the approval of multiple people in an organization — and that adds time to the hiring process. In fact, a good candidate is scooped up within just 10 days in today’s fast-moving job market.

Top talent teams use automation and AI to make key improvements in their hiring process. Intelligent messaging tools like chatbots and texting are helping teams shorten their response times with candidates, allowing them to answer questions and provide information quickly. Teams can even use AI tools to solicit feedback automatically from hiring managers after completing an interview with a candidate.

Don’t lose promising talent by relying on busy hiring teams to remember to provide feedback after an interview. Leverage intelligent messaging tools to help automate feedback and keep candidates engaged in the recruiting process.

2. Collect Feedback Throughout the Hiring Process

Recruiting teams must get more agile to transform their hiring practices for today’s competitive market. Adopting automation and AI tools to cut down on time spent doing manual tasks allows them to prioritize the personal aspects of recruiting. But no TA program is perfect, even the well-established ones. Strategic recruiters know that in order to improve the hiring manager and candidate experiences, they need to collect as much feedback as possible during the process.

Whether it be through a survey, email, or text, it’s important to ask for input on the recruiting process from candidates and hiring teams. This offers TA teams a chance to see where communication, bottlenecks, or technology could be improved when hiring. Below are some example questions to ask candidates and hiring managers after completing a recruiting cycle.

Candidate Feedback

  • Do you feel like your questions were answered by a recruiter in a timely manner?
  • Did you have the information you needed to confidently decide about working here?
  • What else would you like to have known?
  • Would you apply for future roles here?

Hiring Manager Feedback

  • Were you able to easily provide feedback on the candidate after completing an interview?
  • What would have made it easier for you?
  • What (if anything) held you up in deciding on candidates for this role?
  • Did this batch of candidates provide a diverse, qualified talent pool for you to consider?

3. Automated Scheduling to Easily Align Calendars

Nobody has the time to email back and forth trying to get schedules to match, but many recruiters are scheduling interviews this way. Given that candidates are moving quickly through the job-seeking process, TA teams need to maximize their efficiency in any way they can. Intelligent tools can cut down on waiting time for calendar availability, schedule interviews, and place on each person’s calendar automatically in minutes.

Automated interview scheduling tools can help avoid common recruiting roadblocks like an overbooked hiring manager calendar or a busy candidate who needs flexible interview times. This may seem like a small change, but applicants are more likely to stay engaged when they know the next steps and have an interview to look forward to.

Upgrade Your Recruiting Experience Trifecta

Looking for more information on how talent teams are transforming the recruiting experience? Take time to watch our latest webinar on The Talent Acquisition Experience Trifecta to learn how you can prioritize the candidate, recruiter, and hiring manager experience. Or subscribe to the Jobvite Blog and Resource Library for the latest in recruiting technology and strategy.