What is Candidate Management and Why Is It Essential For Your Business?In this candidate driven market, companies need to make sure that they are doing everything possible to help secure the very best people for the job. This is where candidate management can help, but what is it?
Candidate management is the process of both managing and improving relationships with not only current candidates in the application process, but also future candidates. It covers the entire recruitment process both pre and post application and is a crucial element often overlooked.
Candidates need to feel valued, supported and have an overall highly positive experience with your brand, despite their success in the shortlist process. Companies need to get better at candidate management, or risk losing out on great talent and damaging their employer brand. Not only this, but there is evidence that creating a positive candidate experience (the feelings a candidate experiences from your candidate management process) can also impact on your bottom line. A happy candidate could be a client of the future or can recommend your company to others, so it's vital that they are looked after. There's also another superb benefit. With skills in shortage and good candidates getting harder to find, candidate management can also help create a diverse, engaged talent pool for future vacancies, helping you stay ahead of the competition. How to audit your current candidate management process
So where do you start when it comes to developing a process and what should it include?
The first thing you need to do is identify when and where you need to communicate with your candidates and the easiest way to do this is to put yourself in the candidates’ shoes. Walk yourself through the whole journey starting from the advert, right through to the successful hire. It's important that you do this in the shoes of both a successful and non-successful candidate, so you may need several smaller processes to ensure that every person is supported throughout. Here are some key questions to ask whilst auditing your current candidate management process -
Whilst this is far from a complete end to end list, it hopefully gives you the general idea to enable you to define the questions most suitable to your business.
Communication is key to candidate management
There is an interesting article by The Undercover Recruiter that helps explain how to use candidate management to keep control of your recruitment process. It's worth a read, especially if you are about to recruit.
It highlights the most common complaints from candidates about a recruitment process and these include -
This is valuable information, as knowing the pain points of candidates means that you can develop a candidate management process to help alleviate the frustrations and provide a positive experience. Bear this in mind when creating yours and it should be easy to stand head and shoulders above the rest.
These frustrations can all be solved with a little communication.
Every opportunity to communicate with a candidate can be used to your advantage. Not only to develop a superb candidate experience, but if used well it can also help build your talent pool.
The things listed above are just the tip of the iceberg and whilst it works well for active candidates, there's also some candidate management initiatives you can implement for passive candidates. |
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