Do You Know Your Candidates?

Tuesday, January 7th, 2020

Any good recruiter knows you should make a candidate feel special. While the Information Age has made recruiting easier in some ways, it’s also caused candidates to be bombarded with communication. One way to cut through all the online noise is with personalization. While many recruiting firms employ a personalized approach, most corporate recruiting functions have failed to adopt this practice. Today we’ll discuss some steps you can take to make your overall recruiting strategy more personalized.

The Customer Is Always Right

Personalization is a mindset. Most people respond to superior customer service and it’s no different for job applicants. Treating them like customers means taking the time to understand who they are. By learning more about their background education, experience, interests, and more—you have a much better chance of making a personal connection. That’s the beauty of the Information Age: this data is easier to find than ever before, especially due to the rise of social media.

Be More Human In Your Interactions

Communicating with clichés or jargon is rarely going to move the needle with candidates. So while you want to find a balance between remaining professional and being yourself, infusing more of your own personality has the potential to help you connect with your desired audience, especially when you’re communicating in written form. The bottom line is that an overly buttoned-up tone (especially when communicating online) is a thing of the past. It’s going to be hard to make a personal connection without allowing some of your own personality to shine through.

Avoid Cookie-Cutter Communications

Using a personalized approach means that you can’t rely on templates, form letters, or any one-size-fits-all solutions. Sure, these methods allow you to send more communications, ultimately casting a wider net, but the impact is not nearly as meaningful. Email communications serve as a perfect example; candidates’ inboxes are flooded daily, so a generic recruiting email is going to be ignored at best, or immediately trashed at worst. By getting creative in how you personalize your communications—whether online, over the phone, or in person—you have the potential to increase your conversion rate.

Remember: You’re Speaking to Multiple Generations

Your audience can be extremely varied. Much like in marketing, identifying and understanding what motivates these unique audiences can help you personalize your communications even further (and even your offers). Baby Boomers, Generation Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z are potential candidates in today’s market, and you need to be able to vary your approach to account for all of them, which includes how you communicate, as well as, what you’re communicating.

Just like with marketing, trial and error is part of the process, and you’ll learn from your successes and failures. While a personalized approach definitely takes more work, it has the potential to pay off in the long run.

Connect with Waypoint Search Advisors. We have a straightforward goal: with our recruiting expertise and hands-on approach, we pair extraordinarily talented candidates with flourishing companies. In fact, we’re quite passionate about placing top-flight talent in the perfect position. In our minds, the ideal position is the one that provides ultimate career satisfaction for our candidates, and that delivers desired long-term results for our clients. Waypoint was started with the simple idea that making human connections leads to better recruiting—and ultimately to prosperous placement for both parties. From day one to today, we have been committed to creating a premier recruiting service that all clients and candidates alike can trust. Contact us today.