Conversational Recruiting: It’s Not All About You

Women in a yellow cardigan smiling at her smartphone

At a current rate of 3.8%, unemployment in 2019 is lower than it has been in decades. However, companies still need workers. Nationwide, thousands of positions need to be filled. Now, with the job market favoring candidates, job seekers can be selective about their next move. That means businesses must do something to stand out. Adding conversational recruiting to your applicant tracking system, which boosts candidate engagement and enables two-way communication, is your secret weapon.

How to Start Conversational Recruiting

If conversational recruiting is not yet part of your hiring strategy, it’s easy to incorporate it into your existing recruiting solutions. In essence, conversational recruiting enables communication between a hiring manager and a candidate. On average, it takes 24 days for a job seeker to hear back from a company about an application. Conversational recruiting, however, significantly shortens that waiting period. Just a quick text or an email can keep a candidate updated and interested. Diversity is the key to success for conversational recruiting. That means advertising across multiple channels and using mobile strategies to reach the most — and most talented — people.

Starting Small

As with any business strategy, starting small is the best approach when adding conversational recruiting to your hiring process. Experts recommend starting by adding small outreach campaign strategies, limited to 50 people or less, to your recruitment system. This helps you manage responses and send personalized replies. Creating automated emails and texts keeps candidates updated throughout the hiring process. This can keep them from going to a competitor. Automating your recruiting system’s messages can also reduce hiring time.

Diversity Is Key

Today, about 80% of companies use cross-channel recruiting to their advantage. If you’re not yet on the bandwagon, you’re missing out. Posting a job in multiple places reaches many more job seekers, including top candidates. Social media is a great resource for cross-channel recruiting. LinkedIn, which is used by 96% of businesses for hiring, is a good bet. Facebook and Twitter are used by about 66% and 53% of businesses for cross-channel recruitment, respectively. In order to make a cross-channel recruitment strategy work, though, you’ll need to make sure your recruiting software can interpret and respond to information you receive from those channels.

Stay Connected

If you’re not social in today’s recruiting world, you’re falling behind. Studies show that about 70% of employers use some form of social media in the hiring process. Nearly half use social media to monitor their current employees, too. When bringing new hires on board, companies use social media to “meet” a candidate, which in turn decides whether he or she is a good fit for the company. Texting, which enables two-way communication and reaches candidates quickly, is another good way to stay connected. You can also get feedback about the hiring process and send out company or industry news through mobile outreach. With the advent of mobile devices and social media, canned emails are a recruiting strategy of the past. Now, engaging candidates using two-way communication is the best way to find talent for a job. Starting with small campaigns and replacing templated emails with personalized responses and texts goes a long way toward finding the right person for the job.