How Can Recruiters Personalise a Candidate’s Experience

Recruiters should view marketing as a means of making personal connections. You should encourage people to follow you on social media and chat about your service with their friends.

What recruiters should know about personalisation?

If you’re a candidate, which do you prefer: a generic mail or a personalised offer? Most will pick the second one since it means that you took the time to learn and understand their needs. As a recruiter, using the second approach will make your job offers stand out.

Consider this Forbes article regarding millennial jobseekers.  According to the report, millennials are attracted to companies that share their philosophy. Also, while compensation is important, many millennials are willing to start with less pay to attain their dream job. This means making sure that your job posts will reach the right people. You can make this goal easier to achieve if you personalise a candidate’s experience.

Five steps for personalising your recruitment campaigns

You don’t need to create unique content for each of your potential candidates. A template will suffice. However, the process involves more than inserting a name in an email greeting. Here are the five steps to personalising your recruitment campaign.

1.   Develop your client’s brand

Strengthen your client’s image by writing a persuasive message to attract your target candidates. Also, include a value proposition sufficient enough to engage prospective job seekers. Incorporate that message in your: 

• Career pages
• Job postings
• Website

2.       Analyse the data 

You must gather enough information about your ideal candidates. For example, you can ask the following questions: 

• Where does your target audience look for jobs?
• What kind of platforms do they use?
• What is their motivation for accepting your job offer? 

3.       Segment your audience 

Segregate your candidates using various factors, such as behaviour, interest or the kind of work they do. Remember, the message you convey to executives is different compared to sales or IT personnel. It’s also essential to create separate messages for your candidates during the different phases of the recruitment process.  

4.       Connect with them 

As a recruiter, you’re going to reach out to different kinds of job seekers, which can range from college graduates to professionals. You can get in touch with your target audience through networking, social media, and referrals. You could also reach out directly to promising candidates even if they are not seeking the vacant position. 

5.       Engage with the candidates 

After making the first connection, you can now strengthen that interaction through various means, including:

• Emails
• Social media
• Phone calls

You can also inform prospective candidates about vacant positions through newsletters or social pages.

Know your candidates

The best way to convince suitable candidates to take your job offer is to address their needs, as well as the problems and fears they have about the position. Here are the most common methods for addressing their concerns.

Provide all the relevant information in the job post

Content often plays an essential part in recruitment. In your job post, make sure that it has all the information a potential candidate will need. Listing a job offer is not enough. You also need to include the details that will assure them of your client’s trustworthiness.

Make the job post easy to find

It’s common nowadays to create fancy job titles, such as ‘Client Engagement Consultant’. However, if you do so, that position may not appear to candidates searching for ‘Accounts Manager’ positions (they are the same). When posting vacant positions, always consider how job seekers search for them.

Streamline the application process

A 30-minute online application process may seem fine for your client. However, you’ll need to convince candidates why they should invest that much time. It won’t be easy, especially if you’re targeting high-quality candidates who are currently employed. Since they are still in the application stage, asking them to send a resume will do. It will speed up the process while allowing you to obtain as many candidates as you can.

Consider your candidate’s time

Attracting and engaging prospective candidates takes effort and time. Don’t let that go to waste by dragging out the interview.

Often, many of your job seekers are currently employed. So consider setting the interview in a convenient location before, after working hours or on lunch breaks. Such a gesture will show the candidates that you value their time.  

Build your candidates’ personas

 To better personalise a candidate’s experience, you should consider creating candidate personas. Candidate personas represent the ideal employee for your client. It’s a representation that allows you to determine if a job seeker is qualified for the vacant position. In addition, it can help you:

• Write better job descriptions
• Choose the best channel to recruit target candidates
• Select the strategies that will obtain suitable talents

How to create a candidate persona

1. Research

You need to use actual and relevant data. You can get them from your client and their employees. Obtain their input to create a picture of their ideal employee. Some of the questions you can ask include:

• What makes the job appealing?
• What motivates them to work for the company?
• What is the corporate culture?
• Where do employees spend their time during breaks?
• What skills do employees need to excel in the position?
• What are the primary career goals of the employee?

To obtain accurate data, you’ll need to ask three specific groups – the client’s employees, hiring managers and the candidates themselves.

2. Analyse your research data

This process is critical, especially if you’re creating more than one persona. It allows you to detect common or unique trends for every role. For example, you may find that all sales and marketing personnel are result-driven with college backgrounds. You can now include this detail in all sales and marketing personas.

3. Create a persona story

After the research and analysis, you’re now ready to build your persona. Consider the following as an example:

Position: Marketing manager

Educational background: Has a degree in digital marketing

Experience: Worked in the same role for two to five years in a rival company

Skills: Content marketing and social media management

This is a simple example of a candidate persona. You can create a more elaborate one depending on your client’s needs.

Take Away

It’s now essential for recruiters to make the candidate’s experience a personal one. However, this doesn’t mean that you have to create unique content for every candidate. It’s enough to show your candidates that you value their time and effort to reach out to you. Personalising your services is also beneficial to your recruitment business. It allows you to build a candidate persona for your client’s vacant job positions. By creating a representation of the ideal employee, the recruitment process is shortened, and the best candidates can be selected.

Personalising your recruitment service and building candidate personas can be a time-consuming and challenging task. If you need help, give us a call here at Recruitment Traffic. We can help personalise your recruitment SEO and Google Ads.