In today’s job market, where every organization is hyper-competitive on who will bring the most talented candidates.
It’s crucial to understand candidate experience automation as timely communication, transparency, and personalization can make or break your reputation.
If you are in between switching from manual process to automation, here is how you can improve your candidate experience with automated communications.
Table of Contents:
What is Candidate Experience Automation?
Candidate experience automation refers to using AI-driven chatbots and an automated process for managing personalized interactions during the hiring process.
Unlike traditional methods, recruitment automation in candidate experience helps improve communication through timely updates, feedback, and support.
Also, these can be done without burdening the recruiters and HR teams regardless of the hiring volume and retirement stage.
Why Consider Automated Communication in Recruitment?
Automating the candidate and HR communication contributes to major advantages, such as:
- Removes the Bias: Automated communication helps eliminate biases or inconsistencies in informational delivery. It also ensures every candidate receives the same professional treatment, enforcing inclusiveness in your talent acquisition strategies.
- Reduces Drop Off Rates: Slow updates or silence from employees is one of the reasons why 22% candidates abandon the hiring process. By automating, it can provide instant updates and keep them engaged to reduce the drop-off rates.
- Improves Reputation: Having a positive candidate journey also impacts an overall employer reputation, attracting more talent from the pool. Also, candidates who feel respected and informed are most likely recommended, even if they aren’t hired.
- Reduces The Overall Burden: Since HR and recruiters must spend most of their time handling manual tasks such as sending emails, following up, or scheduling and sending reminders, the automation can handle these on their behalf, allowing more time on what matters.
How To Improve Candidate Experience with Automated Communication?
Here are some of the top ways for improving the experience using automated communication and HR technology:
Map Your Candidate’s Overall Journey
Visualizing the end-to-end candidate experience can help in pinpointing the touchpoints where automated communication may be needed.
It can include:
- Application confirmation
- Updating the resume reviews
- Scheduling interviews and setting reminders
- Feedback post interview
- Offer or rejection like communication
- Steps for onboarding
Once you have mapped out your candidate’s journey, pick the gaps where a lack of communication may usually occur.
This is where you need automation to create an immediate impact.
Adds Personalization to Automation
When automating your communication make sure it doesn’t sound too generic or impersonal.
Using HR tools can help you in adding smart personalization to your texts and emails, even if it’s automated.
For example, you can add the names of your candidates, their job titles, and recruiter names, and insert tailored steps for them.
Automate The Scheduling & Reminders
For HR teams, coordinating interview schedules is one of the biggest time wasters.
Here, you can use calendar integration tools to let your candidates book their slots depending on availability and convenience.
Automating the reminders for at least 24-48 hours before interviews help in reducing anxiety and the chances of missing to show.
Also, it provides enough time to prepare and to be ready for the interview.
Plan A Strategic Timing for the Message
To set up automated messages, it’s important to trigger in real-time actions while aligning with your ATS or applicant tracking system.
Also, sending consistent updates, even though they are small ones, can help foster trust and prevent uncertainty.
It can be:
- Sending ‘Thank you for applying’ after the candidate sends their submission.
- Updating them on every stage of the interviews.
- Sharing a quick reply to let them know their profiles are under the reviewing process.
- Providing feedback or rejection emails as the hiring process is completed.
Use Key Touchpoints for Collecting Feedback
Automating feedback forms can help in collecting data after each interview round or different key touchpoints of the candidate journey.
Also, it can be used for sharing more about their experience, providing a better idea and insight on where to fill the gaps and improve.
Add Human Touch Where It Matters
When automating your communication, make sure you are using it as support, not to replace the human aspect.
The right balance can help in improving the quality of the interview process and adding versatility, which results in 70 % of job seekers having a positive impact on accepting the role.
For example, automation is ideally suitable for updates, reminders, and handling admin tasks. Whereas crucial moments like job offers, feedback, and onboarding conversations should have a human touch.
7 Tips on Boosting Candidate Experience Using Automated Communication
After you understand the ways of improving the candidate experience, here are some of the tips to improve the overall process and add hassle-free solutions:
- Rather than using static stages for sending communication, you can use candidate behavior for triggering automated messages. For example, send a gentle reminder if an application has not been submitted.
- Consider using different multimedia for your automated email to break the monotony without losing the professional touch.
- Use multiple language templates and accessibility features, such as screen reader-friendly, or choose a general neutral tonality.
- To reduce the anxiety in your candidates, you can send what they can expect next right after their applications are submitted. It can be FAQs, information on who they might be interacting with, or estimated timelines.
- Dropouts are natural and bound to happen regardless of how well your process is. But ensure you are allowing your candidates to re-engage with your company.
- Not all candidates need to have the same level of content. Providing prep material can differ based on role-based segmentation, and using this for automation can reduce hassle.
- Also, gamify your pre-assessment communication. It can help in sending prep emails to make the process more interactive and less intimidating.
Conclusion
Using automation in improving candidate experience isn’t limited to on-time updates and transparency.
It plays a crucial role in providing the right balance of efficacy with empathy in the recruitment process.
Using the key points to seamlessly integrate the automation can help in reducing budget-causing bottlenecks for the HR teams. Also crucial is to equip your team with the right tools to boost your talent acquisition strategies.
This is where HROne offers you automated communication workflows along with a personalized candidate journey. Transform your recruitment process through our HROne software to add a competitive advantage to your HR team. Try HROne for free