Technology has revolutionized everything from our social interactions to the way we work. While these advancements have made recruiting more convenient and efficient, human connection is essential to attracting and engaging top talent.

A recruiter’s work requires a wide range of skills: a deep understanding of the business, especially the role; the ability to cultivate and build relationships with candidates across all levels; strong active listening skills; and the expertise to align the right candidate with the right opportunity at the right time. While there are programs and technology platforms that can help match job seekers with open roles, aspects of the candidate journey are uniquely personal and human.

Here are a few strategies for using technology to optimize your process so you can spend more time engaging with candidates and tailoring their experience to what matters most to them. 

Improve your online job application with an easy, intuitive process

Have you ever tried applying to a role at your own company? The best way to detect why job seekers aren’t finishing your job application is to put yourself in their shoes. How long does it take to complete the application? Do you really need questions that repeat what’s on their resume? Can you apply directly from your phone? Developing an easy, intuitive application will mean more people will complete it, which means more opportunities to find the perfect candidate for your open roles.

Create alerts to help automate your sourcing and get new candidates delivered to your inbox daily

As recruiters, we know how difficult it is to review and vet every single resume. Lucky for us, there’s a solution to automate the process so great candidates don’t slip through the cracks in your inbox. Tools like Indeed Resume alerts and Google alerts help you stay on top of the best talent by automatically emailing you with new and relevant resumes based on your search criteria. This simple change will free you from hours of searching and scanning emails, giving you more time to connect with candidates.

Speed up the scheduling of an initial phone interview and increase your velocity by using an auto scheduler tool

Are you spending valuable time trying to schedule phone and in-person interviews? This scenario may be all too familiar: You suggest a time and then wait hours (or days) for a response only to find out there’s a scheduling conflict and you have to start all over again. There’s good news though — this problem can be easily fixed with scheduling tools like Calendly. By pre-selecting dates and times that work for you, the hiring manager or other interviewers, you can empower candidates to take control of their own schedule. In the end, there will be a lot less back-and-forth and candidates will appreciate you for making the process as painless as possible.

Create email templates for routine responses or snippets to scale your reach and communication to candidates

Timing is everything, especially when it comes to finding the right candidate. The majority of recruiters agree that personalization is important, but that doesn’t mean every email needs to be created from scratch. The old adage “work smarter, not harder” should be your call to action.

We all know it’s important to thank the candidate for their time, communicate next steps and encourage them to reach out with questions, but you can easily stretch this generic content by adding unique characteristics about your company.

Here are a few ways to personalize, and scale, your email templates across many candidates:

  • Share why you’re excited for the candidate to join your team

“Here at Indeed we love the science of people. We have economics teams looking at how people move around the world, user researchers who do ethnographic studies and a sales training team that can teach you crazy tricks when talking to prospects.”

  • Highlight what makes your culture unique and fun

“From our conversation, I enjoyed learning more about your hobbies outside of work. Indeed supports affinity groups to help employees connect over common interests, from tacos to techno music and beyond.”

  • Communicate what additional benefits your company offers

“Indeed provides a variety of benefits that help us focus on our mission of helping people get jobs. Because when you’re focused on what matters, everything else takes care of itself.”

Build a feedback loop into your process to understand your performance and areas of opportunity to improve

We can learn a lot about a candidate’s experience just by asking them. Measuring how candidates respond to the people and activities in your recruiting process will help you evaluate what’s working well and what needs to change. A brief survey can provide valuable insight into your candidate’s experience of applying and interviewing with your company, which is essential because it’s those micro-interactions in your recruitment process that will determine hiring success or failure.

Traditionally, candidate experience surveys have been long and lengthy — asking too many questions that take too long to complete.  At Indeed, we ask everyone for feedback, and we’ve iterated on our candidate experience to shorten it even more. Last year, we launched a separate candidate experience survey for my sourcing team. We recognized that there was a population of candidates that were not receiving our standard candidate experience survey because we or they decided to not move the conversation forward. Not understanding the experience of this population was a blind spot for us. To address, we decided to create a five-question survey to create a feedback loop on our performance, and it has provided insight on what’s working well and what needs to be changed.  

Conclusion

Ultimately, it all comes down to spending more time on what matters most: hiring the best candidate for your open roles.

There’s no shame in asking for a little help, especially with tools out there to save you valuable time and money. After all, every moment saved on logistical tasks means a moment earned to connect with a candidate is a future hired saved.


Authors

Ed is a global talent attraction leader at with a primary focus on helping companies identify and attract the best talent around the world. He is currently the Director of Global Sourcing at Indeed, where he is responsible for leading their global sourcing team. Prior to Indeed, he spent 4 years at Yahoo in a variety of capacities as both an individual contributor and people leader. He has a wide range of experiences in talent attraction. His accomplishments include building new sourcing teams, designing interviewer training, driving diversity recruiting initiatives and leading global recruitment programs. He is on a personal mission to help reduce the global unemployment rate and improve inclusiveness in the workplace.