It’s Time to Humanize Your Recruiting Efforts
During the pandemic, nearly every company embraced digital tools to keep their recruitment efforts on target. Options like chatbots, automated email messaging, and recorded interviews all became viable solutions, allowing hiring managers to evaluate and communicate with candidates even if they couldn’t gather together.
The issue is that some digital approaches to recruitment can be a little mechanical in nature. For example, automated recruitment emails are typically little more than form letters, and chatbots can’t go off-script to answer unique questions.
Additionally, humanizing many aspects of the digital hiring experience isn’t as simple as one would hope. For instance, while you can give a chatbot a name, it won’t engage with candidates in the same way as a real person.
But that doesn’t mean you can add that personal touch to your hiring process. Here are some tips for humanizing your recruiting efforts, including your primarily digital ones.
Streamline Your Application Process
In many cases, candidates spend more time interacting with your application process than you might expect. In fact, the time requirement may even rival the length of an interview, depending on the steps you include. While a lengthy application process may seem beneficial to you as an employer, it’s rarely viewed positively by candidates.
Having to submit a resume and copy the same information into an application, typing answers to essay questions, choosing toggles relating to skills, and similar steps aren’t just tedious; they’re highly impersonal. It can make job seekers feel like little more than cogs in a machine, so much so that some may disengage while they’re completing the application, and others may abandon the process entirely.
If you want to humanize your application process, remove as many of these mechanical steps as possible. Allow candidates to apply with just a resume or a resume and a short, basic questionnaire to capture a few critical details, like names and contact information. Then, save the rest for deeper into the process.
Use Reminders, Not Automated Messages
Aside from an automated confirmation that an application was submitted successfully, forgo form letter emails in favor of personalized communications. Use technology to send reminders to hiring managers or recruiters that it’s time to reach out to a candidate, not to create and deliver the message. That creates opportunities for personalization, humanizing your recruitment process.
When responding to an applicant about their resume or scheduling interviews, add a detail into the message that the candidate wouldn’t get with an automated message. For example, you can mention looking forward to learning more about their experience with a particular skill or the story behind an achievement they featured. That little tidbit lets the job seeker know they’re dealing with a real, live person, improving the overall experience.
Use Videos Whenever Possible
Video makes it far easier to introduce the human element into your hiring process. Whether it’s clips of employees that highlight the company’s culture in a job ad or using video interviews in lieu of phone screenings when engaging with candidates, they add that special touch you don’t get from text or voice-based communications.
Consider how you can integrate video into the equation. Even if you can’t engage with a candidate live, sharing information via video gives it the human element, which ultimately makes a difference.