With a significant shift to remote work, recruiters may find it challenging to engage their candidates remotely during the recruitment process. 

Right from when potential candidates submit their job applications until they receive their offer letter when selected, a valuable candidate journey should be provided by recruiters.

Let’s dive deeper to understand more about remote candidate engagement!

What is Candidate Engagement?

Candidate engagement is a process during recruitment that involves continually interacting with job seekers from the talent pool. Communication can be done via—email, text, job posting, interviews, etc.

Engaging candidates during talent acquisition involves the internal staffing agents, i.e., the recruiters and the job applicants. Ensuring an exceptional remote candidate engagement in the recruitment process can be challenging, but it’s essential as it helps provide the best candidate experience to the applicants.

Why is Candidate Engagement Important?

• It makes the recruitment process interesting for the candidates and enhances their performance.
• It helps improve a company’s reputation and spreads the message to other potential candidates.
• It decreases the number of candidate dropouts during the hiring process.
• It enables the job applicants to be satisfied and happy when they start working with the organization when selected.

What Happens if Candidate Engagement is Poor?

The answer is simple. The applicants abandon the hiring process. Yes, they will look for another job. A LinkedIn report found 20% of candidates drop off from the job recruitment process due to poor online candidate engagement.

Here are reasons why job applicants abandon the recruitment process:

• The application process is time-consuming and complicated.
• Candidates have a feeling that they are being ignored.
• On selection, the onboarding process takes forever.

6 Ways to Boost Remote Candidate Engagement

1. Excite the Candidates to Apply for the Job

The first step is to get the candidates excited to work with you. Recruiters can do this by posting job descriptions in a proper format. Make sure your job descriptions are well-written, descriptive, and concise.

Advertise your job and the organization as well. A company with a good reputation automatically attracts job seekers to work in your agency. You can also use a candidate applicant tracking system to automate the process of job postings to multiple job boards. 

2. Provide a Hiring Timeline

Your candidates need to know the timeline of the hiring process to plan their availability accordingly. Therefore, let your candidates know the recruitment process steps and stick to the timeline.

Not all recruitment agencies follow the same process, and you don’t want to surprise your candidates when they aren’t expecting it. So ensure you provide them with an exact time frame for assessments and interviews.

3. Review Applications and CVs quickly

Hiring in volume, that too in a remote setting, can be tough because going through all the applications and resumes can eat up most hours of your days. Here, technology comes to play. You can automate such a task using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

ATS helps in screening candidates and resume parsing to speed up the process. When the applications are reviewed quickly, you can move further in the hiring process so that candidates stay engaged.

4. Directly Interact with Candidates

Candidates need a lot of assurance during the hiring process. A study found that 96% of candidates want confirmation emails during recruitment. So keep sending timely confirmation emails and texts to your candidates when moving toward further steps.

You can also use chatbots to continuously communicate with the talent pool. Following this step is of utmost importance to boost candidate engagement.

5. Schedule Interviews at Comfortable Timings

Just because a job seeker is unemployed when applying for a job doesn’t mean they’re available at any time. 

Just like the interviewer, the interviewee, too, might be busy. Therefore, scheduling interviews when both the candidate and the recruiter are comfortable is essential. 

Moreover, you also automate the interview scheduling process. At the backend, recruiters can select when they are comfortable, the candidate can do the same, and the interview will be scheduled accordingly.

6. Communicate After the Process and Get Feedback

Once the interview is done and the recruiter is clear about hiring the candidate, get back to the candidate and let them know about the results. 

55% of candidates believe it should take at most two weeks for the recruiter to declare the results. Don’t let your candidates think you have ghosted them. Job applicants deserve to know the hiring process results even if they are not selected. 

If the candidate is selected, send them a warm onboarding mail to welcome them and gather feedback on how your candidate engagement process worked out.