Creating a Recruitment Communication Strategy

Your recruitment communication strategy is hugely important throughout your recruitment process. Here we discuss why, and the best tactics to improve it. 

 

Speed and proper communication and two of the biggest essentials HR professionals need to balance during the recruitment process. They are also some of the most challenging to implement.

 

Why is communication important in recruitment?

An effective recruitment communication strategy plays a role in boosting your recruitment’s effectiveness. By zooming in on the right candidates and making the onboarding process seamless, you contribute to creating a better overall candidate experience. Having a good candidate experience comes with a wide range of benefits:

 

Your employer brand

Around 72% of candidates who have a negative experience of your brand will tell others about it. A poor employer brand may actually put off talented candidates from applying for roles at your business in the future, creating unforeseen damage in the long-term. So it’s well worth treating each and every candidate with respect and communicating clearly, and that includes those who don’t get the job.

 

 

Retaining talented candidates

The most talented candidates tend to already be in employment, and are only passively searching for a new role. This means you need to impress them at each stage of your recruitment process, and create an unforgettable candidate experience. A good recruitment communication strategy helps you do just that, and keeps these candidates engaged and interested in your opportunity.

 

Alternatively, if you’re providing a sub-par candidate experience, this increases the chance of talented individuals dropping out of the process, and a lower quality of applicant you eventually hire.

 

Talent shortage is a massive issue today and almost 73 per cent of employers report difficulties in filling positions. At the same time, employee engagement is lower than ever before. Disengaged employees cost businesses up to 550 billion dollars per year – a massive amount that can be reduced through better communication about expectations and roles on both parts.

 

Recruitment Communication Strategies

So, what does it take to make the recruitment process more informative, more tailored and more effective? Here are some of the communication strategies that HR professionals can rely on to improve their communication efforts.

 

1. Data Collection

Good communication with candidates is heavily dependent on going into every meeting fully prepared. This can be difficult if you’ve got various documents and clutter for HR professionals to go through, from CVs to completed tasks and cover letters.

 

Luckily, there are now various technologies available today that digitise and optimise the recruitment process. These can help you gather relevant candidate data, and organise it in an easy-to-sift-through way.

 

A good recruitment management system will manage all your recruitment documents and processes from one single platform. This helps reduce the amount of time you spend on administrative tasks, and allows you to prepare easily over the course of the recruitment process.

 

2. Online Communication

Everyone is online – this is a fact that recruiters need to account for when communicating with candidates.

 

Think about it – a large majority of the best applicants are often only passively searching for a new role. These candidates are more than likely present on a variety of online spaces, so ensuring you are also present there, and are communicating using these resources is invaluable.

 

It’s wise for recruiters to be present across online platforms to streamline and speed up the collection of information. Social media platforms like LinkedIn for example have already become the standard in the recruitment realm, whether that’s reaching out to potential candidates, or supplying important, engaging information about your brand online.

 

Another common but effective practice is for companies to employ live streaming and video calls. These make tasks like scheduling interviews much easier, as digital interviews give you much more room to work with. With the worldwide coronavirus pandemic changing the way we live and the way we work, this has had a profound effect on the way interviews are being carried out and onboarding is occurring.

 

Using the digital technologies at your disposal is ultimately a great recruitment communication strategy to boost your communication with candidates in a cost-efficient, tailored way that all businesses can benefit from.

 

3. Automation for Immediacy

Automation is becoming more and more prominent in the recruitment space, and certain parts of the candidate communication process can be effectively automated. This is hugely beneficial, as it frees up human resources time for more strategic tasks needed.

 

When a human being has to manually go through every single step, some processes can be needlessly prolonged, and the chance for human error increases. This is where recruitment technology can be employed and give HR professionals a breather.

 

A very simple example of how communication automation can be used is:

After a person has sent in an email with their application, they could receive an automated response. The automatic email can shed a bit more light on the company culture, the onboarding process and the additional steps that the candidate will have to go through in case they’re considered relevant for the position.

 

While this is a very basic example of how recruitment communication can be automated, it paints a clear picture of how everything can be sped up and simplified for the purpose of simpler, quicker and more efficient processes.

 

Due to its popularity, a number of recruitment platforms and software now come with automated response functions built-in as part of the product. This is great value for money as an extra add-on to other useful recruitment features.

 

4. Always Have a Timeline for Replies and Processes

Many people who apply for specific positions complain that they never hear back from recruiters or that they hear back too long after the initial contact. In fact, a Talent Board report found that 53% of candidates say they don’t receive a response from employers until 3 months after applying.

 

 

This shows the importance of setting strict timelines for responding and for staging out the recruitment process.

 

Using automation as a key communication strategy will take a lot of the administrative burden off your shoulders. This way, you can focus on setting a timeline for responding and completing every single step of the candidate filtering out process.

 

While such timeframes are more or less guidelines, they create a sense of urgency and move the communication forward. Our minds are wired to perform better when a deadline is in place and the rule does apply to corporate communication.

 

5. Clarifying Roles within the Hiring Team

The final strategy is purely organisational, but it can have some impact on the quality of communication within the recruitment team itself, as well as with candidates.

 

It’s very important to clarify the role of every single member of the human resources department. Very often, there are implied roles and responsibilities that may be taken on by more than one person. Not only are such processes ineffective, but they can also lead to reduced productivity and serious mistakes down the line.

 

If there’s a lack of clarity, the department will need to address this internally before a recruitment campaign is initiated. What’s the role of the hiring manager? Does the team have a senior leader at all? Who’s leading the interview process and how are they communicating with everybody else?

 

These are just a few of the key questions that need to be addressed for proper responsibility allocation. When recruitment team members have a clear idea about their role in the department, they can start communicating more effectively with everyone involved in the process.

 

Improved communication can speed up recruitment and save a company tons of money. The recruitment team must work to address any ambiguities as soon as possible. Such processes are far from expensive and when carried out correctly, they can contribute to profound operational efficiency in the future.

 

What’s next?

Improving your recruitment communication strategy is just one part of the puzzle to an overall improved recruitment process. For more tips on how to create a fully optimised recruitment process, download our eBook on 10 Ways to Optimise your Online Recruitment!