In order to attract and engage top talent, you need to study them to create a personalised candidate experience.

Crisis, or no crisis, high-performing professionals’ decisions about whether to join a company are often influenced by the quality of the candidate experience.

They tend to prefer a personalised yet swift experience.

Here are some ways to ensure your hiring process delivers this:

1. Personalise your Career Site

Gone are the days when companies could get away with static job listings and a description of their values, mission, corporate culture and talent development programmes.

Instead of showcasing paragraphs of text and a few photos, get existing employees to answer questions via short videos in which they speak off the cuff.

What are benefits like? What are the company’s values? What about the corporate culture?

Have them answer such questions conversationally.

Today, there are even more opportunities for companies to amplify their employer brand on career sites by demonstrating how they’ve stood by their employees during the Covid-19 crisis.

For instance, you can talk to candidates about initiatives you’ve introduced to take care of your employees’ mental well-being during what can be described as a challenging time for everyone.

2. Tailor your Communication to the Candidates you’re Targeting

To personalise the experience further, target candidates’ personas.

A fresh graduate would likely have different expectations from an experienced professional.

Fresh graduates might like to know more about how a job at your company will expose them to varied assignments that could help them discover their interests and strengths.

On the other hand, experienced professionals might want to learn how the company supports continuous learning and development to help even experienced employees deepen and widen their skill sets.

As you strive to build a personal connection with each persona, use data and analytics to help you craft messages for each.

3. Tailor your Job Alerts

Automated job alerts sent directly to candidates via text or e-mail are a must. They are an easy method to engage candidates who’ve shown an interest in working at your company in the past and are still looking for the right position.

However, the alerts should be tailored to each individual. Only send them job ads for positions they are qualified for and make sure your message is personalised. In other words, in your alert, allude to positions they’ve applied for previously and acknowledge that while those didn’t work out, you’re staying in touch with them to ensure they’re aware of new and suitable positions that have opened up.

Your alerts should have a direct link to application forms for the positions. The form should be easy to fill out. We advise that it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. After all, you’ll get a chance to ask more in-depth questions during the job interview.

4. Reject with Empathy

Even among top candidates, there will be those who are not the right fit for a particular job, but they might very well be for a position that opens up later on.

In order to ensure you remain on their radar, give them as much information as possible as to why they weren’t a right fit for a particular position. They’ll be grateful for the feedback and they’re likely to recognise the effort you’ve made to close the loop.

Having positive feelings about your company will ensure they respond to future job alerts and even take the trouble to make referrals if they know of others who might be suitable for a position in your company.

5. Always Follow Up with Candidates who Reject your Offer

If you don’t already do this, you should certainly start. Knowing why a top candidate rejected your offer would provide you with important feedback that could help you refine your hiring process and candidate and employee experiences.

We all have blind spots and often, those with fresh eyes can help us discover important deficiencies that if addressed, could make candidate attraction and talent retention much easier in the future.