May 12, 2023

The essence of Candidate Nurturing in the hiring process.

What is candidate nurturing and why is it important?

Before jumping directly into candidate nurturing, let's explore what is exactly nurturing! So nurturing means to help someone or to take care of someone for their growth or development. And that makes the meaning of Candidate nurturing pretty clear, which is to basically look after or encourage candidates to apply for the open positions within the organization. It involves using techniques such as emails, advertising, phone calls, social media platforms, and other forms of communication to build and maintain relationships with potential job candidates over time.

As the talent market is constantly changing, top candidates have several options. It's essential for every organization to attract and hire the best ones, but in order to bring top talent, you need to develop a sense of trust among them. Candidate nurturing is exactly done for this purpose, it develops confidence among the candidates, expands a talent pool, and converts that talent pool into successful hires.

Meeting, greeting and motivating candidates

What is the candidate nurturing process?

The candidate nurturing process involves engaging with candidates through different sources of communication in order to keep them interested and informed by maintaining and building relationships with them for open positions. This process of building credibility among them develops a talent pipeline and converts that talent pool into successful hires.

candidate nurturing process

Figures that show the need for candidate nurturing:

If you don't fully believe in the text and still want to know the exact figures that will show you the importance of candidate nurturing, well we've got you, here are some important figures that show how essential it is to adopt the candidate nurturing strategy in the recruitment process:

  • There are only 30% are active job seekers, the rest 70 % of the global workforce is made up of passive job seekers who aren't actively looking for jobs.
  • 81% of job candidates state that their overall experience greatly enhances when HRs or hiring managers keep them updated or informed about different statuses of jobs or the hiring process.
  • Lack of communication from hiring managers during the job search leads to the growth of frustration of 52% of candidates.
  • 33% of job seekers prefer an automated email to be sent from the company, after applying.

These figures show how important is to adopt candidate nurturing strategies in your hiring process. This brings us to our next topic.

Top 8 Candidate Nurturing Strategies

Here are a few candidate nurturing strategies, that you and your hiring team can adopt in order to engage with candidates, build a sense of trust, towards your organization, among them and attract passive job seekers.

Keep Candidates Engaged

Candidates feel more valued when a recruiter keeps them updated about the hiring process, the open job positions, and other stuff. Keeping job applicants engaged, leaves a good impact on them and improves their candidate journey because they fully understand your company's culture, aims, values, what is expected of them, and what they can expect.

Build Candidate Personas

Candidate Personas are very helpful when searching for an ideal candidate and they connect with a candidate on a personal level. In candidate personas, you provide a clear description of your perfect candidate, you include different sections that have information such as the candidate’s professional aspirations, skills, education, personality, age, gender, goals, and much more. The more precise you can get, the more effective your nurturing efforts will be. As they help the hiring team identify and attract the ideal candidate, this makes the recruitment process more optimized and efficient.

Use the Power of Social Media

Candidates usually visit different social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn and etc to know about the company culture, activities, aims, and values. Keep your social media platforms updated, and spend more time improving them as job applicants explore these platforms, before applying for the role in the company. Moreover, it is the key to engaging passive candidates, because these platforms are where they are mostly. You can add different content, posts, blogs, videos, and pictures on these platforms and include the element of nurturing, and ultimately control the time and place of the interaction.

Rely on the Email Marketing

Receiving an update from a recruiter in the form email helps to boost the nurturing efforts to a great extent, as it eliminates the candidate's frustration of waiting for the hiring or the job status and improves the candidate experience. You can send them different forms of emails, at different time periods, the goal is to just keep them informed. If they are shortlisted, send them an email, if they are rejected, let them know, send them an email after their application, after interviewing them, before the start of their new role, or even send them a reminder email.

Organize Industry Events

Get to know your candidates personally, by hosting company events such as career fairs, seminars, meetings, etc. Meet them face-to-face and build a connection with them, before even inviting them to the company. Promote your company's employer brand and increase its reputation by engaging with the applicants and convincing them to apply for the open positions, in these events or conferences.

Track the Data and Results of your Marketing

Ask your marketing team to analyze the data and results from different marketing strategies applied and cover the weak areas and see what needs to be improved. Drive the results from email marketing, event marketing and etc to see how they can benefit your company's reputation. You can automate your marketing efforts by using recruitment marketing tools, to organize or update information more quickly and efficiently, and ultimately improve the recruiting process.

Turn on Alerts for your Top Candidates

Turning on alerts or reminders for your top candidates, help you stay connected with them. Job applicants feel valued and motivated if the recruiters keep them updated timely. You can draft personalized emails or messages and send them to give them the latest news regarding open jobs. Alerts help you remember small details, build stronger relationships with applicants and they keep the conversation going, which greatly improves candidate engagement. For example, if a candidate visits a certain job at your company career site, and if you have turned on an alert related to their viewing, you can send a personalized email or message to them, and answer the most common questions related to the job opening, this will ultimately create an interest in them and will encourage them to apply for the role.

Stay in touch with Ex-Employees

If you parted ways with your former employees and you still stay in touch with them, it can help you:

  1. With employee referrals, they might know someone who might be a good fit for the open position and can refer them to you.
  2. Maintain a positive impression of your company, even if they left the organization.
  3. Keeping the doors of rejoining open for them as they might be interested in joining your organization after a certain time period.
  4. By gaining valuable insights into industry trends, you get to know what your competitors are up to and help you elevate your hiring strategies.
8 Candidate Nurturing Strategies

3 advantages of adopting Candidate Nurturing Strategy:

Following are the 3 basic advantages of adopting a candidate nurturing strategy:

Develops a Talent Network

Talent Network

Encouraging candidates to apply for open positions within the organization and building communication with them is the best way to keep the relationship with your talent pool alive, as it attracts the passive talent, who aren't actively looking for jobs. This creates a talent pool of qualified candidates, so when you’re ready to hire, you will already have candidates from within your talent pool.

Keeps Candidates Engaged

Candidates Engagment

Candidate nurturing methods such as emailing, using social media, messaging, and organizing events keeps you engaged with not only the active candidates but also the passive ones. They are more excited to join the organization and feel valued and motivated to apply for the open jobs.

The most important: Prevent ‘Ghosting’

ghost

You don't want to leave candidates hanging in the middle of the hiring process, having no clue or news about the job opening and going back from the career page without applying, right? Keep them updated and prevent ghosting because no candidate would appreciate that, and it will leave a bad impact on your company's reputation. Here candidate nurturing eases your struggle by keeping them informed about all the latest news and job status, through different means mentioned above in the article.

FAQS

What is Passive Talent?

Someone who is currently employed, is likely to have valuable skills and is not actively looking for a job, but has expressed interest in your organization and is open to any new opportunities that come their way. This means if you keep them engaged and updated, and present them with a good opportunity, they might make a move now or any time in the future.

How does Candidate Nurturing help in optimizing the recruitment process?

Candidate nurturing is an essential part of the recruitment process, where there is high competition for top talent, as it uses different methods of emailing, advertising and etc to enhance the overall candidate experience. It basically sparks and maintains an interest in both active and passive candidates.

Candidate nurturing strategy helps you build a pool of qualified candidates, from which you can screen candidates now or later in the future when you are ready to hire. You don't need to search for qualified candidates later for future job openings, saving your recruitment time and ultimately optimizing company costs.

How to stay up to date with candidates?

You can stay up to date with candidates through different means such as emailing, calling, or messaging them regarding the next phases of the hiring process, giving them job updates, or asking for their feedback. You can also ask them for a review after different stages of the recruitment process, such as: how are they feeling after the technical interview? or ask them what needs to be improved? or where did they feel the gap in the overall candidate experience? this shows the job applicant that they are being valued, leaving a positive impact on them.

Postface

Candidate nurturing included in any recruitment strategy makes a great difference in the overall candidate experience and ultimately improves your recruiting efforts. It requires great technique, time, and planning, but creates a strong talent pool for the future and converts them into full-time employees.

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Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier

Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier