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Want to shift your hires from okay to great? Then, you need to get into the heads of your candidates. Successful hiring starts by understanding and responding to candidate needs in the recruitment process. And you won’t know what they are thinking if you don’t try to understand them.
By getting to know your candidates better, you’ll be able to identify the best ones and make hiring decisions faster and easier.
Here’s how to get into the hearts and minds of your candidates.
Keep up with candidate expectations
As a recruiter, understanding your candidates’ unique needs and wants is crucial, especially in today’s talent market, where candidates hold all the cards.
There’s a vast amount of information out there on candidate trends and expectations. For global talent trends, check out reports by management consultancy firms like Bain, Deloitte, Gartner, McKinsey, Mercer, PwC, and so on.
Candidate expectations have changed since the pandemic. Today, work is about much more than salary and a standard benefits package.
Here are some of the critical things to keep in mind that candidates now consider essential or are looking for in their next role:
- Flexible work schedules and options for remote working
- Job security – a recent study found that 92% of workers are prioritizing job security, and the majority would not accept a potentially unstable role
- A company with a commitment to diversity and inclusion
- Salary/compensation still matters
- Internal mobility – training and development opportunities/career advancement
- Aligned values
- Better work-life balance
Candidates also have higher expectations regarding the recruitment process. They want greater transparency, a speedier process, and better communications. For example, once a job seeker has applied for a role, they expect to receive instant automated communications from the company or recruiter. As a recruiter, fail to do this, and you’ll likely see your drop-out rate increase.
Focus on building relationships
Relationship building is now the pinnacle of excellent recruiting. Fostering better relationships helps recruiters get to know candidates better and learn more about them and their personalities beyond work-related skills and experience.
With a better understanding of candidates, recruiters are suitably placed to build a dynamic pool of talent and fill future vacancies more easily. Taking the time to cultivate genuine connections is worth it. Just because you don’t hire someone immediately, it doesn’t mean they are a lost cause.
To start, recruiters need a CRM and ATS that supports a relationship-building process. Tracker, for example, has been built by recruiters for recruiters with the express purpose of achieving long-term growth by building extraordinary relationships. It is essential to be able to dig into your data and find candidates that would otherwise be languishing in your database.
It’s not only about your software. Building stronger relationships stems from your habits as a recruiter, too.
Here are five tips for building better relationships:
- Create rapport
- Actively listen and find a meaningful connection
- Set up regular, personalized communication (even if it’s automated, and be sure to ascertain communication style preferences for each candidate)
- Be empathetic and patient – don’t get annoyed if a candidate says ‘not now’
- Always follow up at every stage of the hiring process, including after hire, and provide feedback where appropriate
Capitalize on automation and AI
Recruiters need more time to build relationships. With so many daily tasks to complete, spending quality time getting to know candidates can easily be overlooked.
That’s why recruitment automation is essential. The right software can automate many tedious daily tasks, meaning recruiters can spend more time focusing on candidates rather than paperwork.
AI can also provide insights and help recruiters better understand candidates. For example, technology can analyze video interview answers using facial recognition, NLP, and speech analytics.
In addition, AI can analyze vast amounts of data to predict which candidates are most likely to succeed in a role and identify red flags, such as incompatible personalities or behavior patterns. Tracker’s AI ranking, for example, constantly learns from the ongoing engagement with each individual in its database. It applies this with resume ranking to ensure the best candidates are always selected.
AI technology can mitigate bias, speed up the screening process, and improve the quality of hire.
Provide a positive candidate experience
The candidate experience is a journey that significantly impacts a company’s ability to attract top talent and shape perceptions of its employer brand. In today’s competitive landscape, providing a positive experience is a strategic imperative. It not only enhances your employer brand through word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews but also expands your talent pool by encouraging candidates to consider future opportunities or refer qualified peers.
A firm known for its excellent candidate experience gains a competitive advantage in attracting top performers, reduces hiring costs by streamlining the process, and gains valuable insights into candidate needs through active listening. To create a candidate-centric journey, focus on clear and timely communication, transparency, constructive feedback, simple processes, and personalized interactions. Investing in a positive candidate experience isn’t just about filling positions; it’s about building a sustainable talent pipeline, strengthening your employer brand, and ultimately positioning your company for long-term success. Also, recruiters get more information about individuals to help match them with their perfect job roles.
Consider cultural and motivational fit
Assessing cultural and motivational fit through behavioral interviews and scenario-based assessments can help recruiters get into the heads of candidates.
Let’s recap what cultural fit and motivational fit mean.
Cultural fit is the alignment between an individual’s values, beliefs, and behaviors and a company’s established culture. It can be a significant factor when considering a candidate for a role. A candidate is more likely to perform well if their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors align with the business’s.
What drives a person is more about motivational fit. This delves more deeply into a candidate’s personal motivations and aspirations. It involves understanding what inspires a person.
Psychometric testing can be beneficial for exploring and measuring candidates’ personalities, behavioral traits, and cognitive abilities.
Remember, optimal recruitment involves balancing several factors.
The perfect hire should be:
- Suitably qualified
- Equipped with the right skills and experience
- Aligned with the values of the company
- Motivated to drive the company’s growth and evolution in the future
Make more of references
References provide valuable insights into a candidate’s skills, work ethic, and suitability for a role. However, they can often be seen as a box-ticking exercise to validate skills and experience and verify the information given by the candidate.
However, references can be much more insightful to recruiters regarding character. A person may have achievements in their last job that weren’t related to their normal everyday role, such as getting involved in charitable events for the company’s corporate social responsibility charter. A reference can also shed light on teamwork abilities, attitude, strengths, and weaknesses.
To ensure you get as much valuable information from references as possible, structure questions around a potential job offer, ask about character and explain you are trying to decide if the candidate is the right fit for a specific type of role.
Listen to candidate feedback
Your feedback is another valuable data source that provides information about your recruitment processes and candidates. Candidate feedback gives detailed insights about their experience and can tell you more about expectations and what job seekers want from the application process.
Gathering this data is essential for evaluating your recruitment processes. When you receive significant volumes of candidate feedback, you can identify patterns in journey experiences and candidate behavior.
Significantly, candidate feedback can illuminate inaccurate preconceptions about specific demographics and help you understand candidates at a deeper level.
Ask unique get-to-know-you interview questions
Most interviews cover a basic set of questions to corroborate the facts on paper. These questions revolve around past skills, education and qualifications, previous roles, and experience.
Going deeper in your questioning enables candidates to talk about themselves in more detail.
Great get-to-know-you-better questions could include:
- Give four words that previous colleagues might use to describe you.
- What are your future career goals?
- How do you handle stress?
- What do you not want to be doing in five years?
- Why did you choose your university degree subject?
- What are your workplace pet peeves?
- Who are your role models in life, and why?
- What motivates you?
Tracker: better candidate experience, better use of data, better hires
Tracker helps recruitment firms build better relationships, streamline workflows, automate tedious tasks, and provide a better candidate experience.
Even better, Tracker’s newest AI feature analyzes candidate resumes and job descriptions, automatically generating targeted screening questions that determine a candidate’s fit for a role. Tracker considers a candidate’s past success in similar roles, their fit with the specific client, and even feedback from recruiters who’ve worked with them previously. We help you understand candidates better and faster so you can convert them into great hires.
Discover more about your candidates and make better hires with Tracker. Let us show you how our integrated ATS, CRM and Recruitment Automation Software will help your staffing or recruiting firm build better relationships, processes, and results. Book a demo now.
