My high school baseball coach used to preach the importance of making the routine plays. His mantra was, “If we focus on the routine plays, the rest will take care of itself.”
The same is true for recruiters. In a time when the industry is bombarded with buzzwords like “social recruiting,” “candidate experience,” and “company brand,” the routine plays can be neglected.
But it’s in these details where you set yourself apart. One such practice is providing feedback to interviewees who are rejected for a job opening. In fact, a 2014 Talent Board study shows only one in five candidates received significant feedback from recruiters or hiring managers after an interview.
As a recruiter, you can’t let this happen. Not if you want to solidify yourself as someone who cares about the candidate experience.
Approach recruiting from the candidate’s perspective
Zoho Recruit lets recruiters shift the landscape of their workdays through custom workflows so no task, email, or phone call slips through the cracks. By automating communication with candidates after an interview, you can take care of the basics and ensure your candidates feel valued.
Let’s approach this from a candidate’s point a view. Say you’re working at a company you like in a career path you love. One day, a recruiter approaches you through LinkedIn or email about a job opportunity.
You haven’t thought about working for another company, but you decide to apply. You spend a couple evenings after work updating your resume and online profiles. You send your information to the recruiter, fill out an application, and low and behold, they want to bring you in for an interview.
You take half a day off of work, go in for a two-hour interview, and leave feeling confident.
Days or even weeks go by and you don’t hear a word. Finally, the recruiter reaches out and tells you the company went with someone else without any supplemental information.
How would this make you feel? Would you respond to this recruiter if he or she contacts you in the future?
Stay connected with candidates with automatic workflows
In the automation section of Zoho Recruit, recruiters can create a workflow rule to trigger a series of actions or tasks when a predetermined condition is met.
So in our scenario above, you could stay in touch with each candidate after an interview by creating a workflow rule called “Interview Feedback.”
This rule can then trigger up to three different actions when a candidate’s status changes from “Interview in-progress” to “Rejected by Client.”
An email alert – Create a custom email template informing the candidate they did not get the job and the recruiter will contact them soon with feedback about the interview from the hiring manager.
A task – This can be a phone call or email task assigned to the recruiter telling them to contact the candidate with feedback.
A field update – Change the status of a candidate to “Rejected by Client” so recruiters know that individual is available for future job openings.
Utilize the interview feedback form
If you’ve invited a guest or hiring manager to conduct an interview, Zoho Recruit lets you send him or her an interview feedback form at the conclusion of the interview that you can then relay to the candidate.
After scheduling the interview and inviting the guest, choose the specific interview inside the Interviews portal and click the “More Actions” tab. The drop-down menu lets you select “Interview feedback form” which provides you a link you can then share with the interviewer.
Go one-step further and automate the process by creating a workflow rule to email the link the interviewer at the completion of the interview.
Whether at a staffing agency or internally at one’s company, recruiters know building a strong candidate pipeline is valuable the same way a steady supply of leads is valuable to a sales team.
By letting Zoho Recruit automate your everyday recruiting tasks, you can take care of the routine practices to make sure candidates know you value their time.
Even when they aren’t hired.
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