How to Develop your Candidate Management Strategy: 5 Considerations

Gaining an advantage in talent acquisition is crucial in landing top talents in such a tight and fast-moving labour market. Therefore, organizations must establish a comprehensive candidate management strategy to strengthen their position as an employer and create a welcoming environment for employees.

According to this article on Forbes, candidates who had good recruitment experiences are more likely to reapply and recommend organizations to their professional networks.

However, developing a robust candidate management strategy is no easy feat. A candidate manager will not only have to highlight the benefits of working at their company but also identify key metrics that will inspire prospects to even apply. Most candidates expect the same level of sophistication and speed during their job search as they have experience in their consumer lives.

Organizations must rethink their traditional hiring approach and consider the changing candidate expectations to attract and hire top prospects. Luckily, the business industry already has several models in place that have been calibrated throughout the years to nurture and engage prospects.

In this article, we’ll discuss what is candidate management strategy and provide you with essential considerations to take into account to improve the hiring process.

1. Determine Long-Term Organizational Goals and Requirements

   Organizations hire new talent for several reasons. Perhaps they are experiencing exponential growth, have new goals and clients, or an existing employee is leaving. However, modern recruiters should not wait for one of these things to happen before creating a candidate management strategy.

   Therefore, identifying your long-term goals is critical in establishing a candidate management strategy. This means not only considering the positions that currently need to be filled but also taking into account future changes or growth that might affect your hiring needs. Through this process, you can create a talent pool of candidates which you can turn to, should you need to expand.

   When hiring objectives and expectations are outlined from the start, you can increase the likelihood of creating a candidate management strategy that will highlight a favourable image of the organization to prospects. Considering that roughly 72% of candidates who had bad experiences share their opinions on online review sites and social media, this can be particularly helpful in preventing reputational damage.

2. Analyze Industry Trends

   Understanding the forces working in the industry is an important component of effective strategic planning. Depending on your industry, these forces may include sudden regulation or deregulation, entry of major competitors, technological innovation, and globalization as a result of remote work. With the pandemic creating a seismic shift in the recruitment process, analyzing industry trends helps an individual with a human resources degree to develop a candidate management strategy that will resonate with prospects.

   By evaluating existing recruitment trends, candidate managers can review their current processes and understand the company’s position in terms of landing top candidates. It can also help managers spot threats and opportunities to focus their resources on developing a candidate management strategy that will allow them to gain the separation it needs from competitors.

   In doing so, managers put themselves in a position to attract top candidates that would otherwise fall out of the pipeline unless they are engaged. It is, however, important to also use historical hiring data when creating a candidate management strategy to mitigate risks and ensure all bases are covered. Through historical recruitment data, employers can determine what worked and what didn’t, allowing them to fine-tune their candidate management strategy and maximize results.

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3. Incorporate Automation into Your Strategy

   Implementing automation is one of the premier yet often ignored candidate management tips for forward-thinking organizations. Often, managers ignore automation for the fear that it might add complexity into their processes. However, that is far from the truth as automation can help recruiters improve the overall candidate experience and eliminate recruitment challenges such as data entry errors and lack of coordination between hiring teams.

   Usually, recruiters deal with a myriad of tasks during the recruitment process and it is not uncommon for them to be unable to respond to each candidate email. While this may not seem like a huge deal, failing to respond to messages can have an adverse impact on your reputation and ability to attract top talent.

   Incorporating automation into your candidate management strategy reduces the need to deal with several follow-up messages from enthusiastic candidates who are still waiting for you. This way, you can set yourself apart from competitors and demonstrate to candidates that you value their time. Automation also provides workflow streamlining capabilities that can make it easier to structure data and make every interaction with the candidate more effective.

4. Ask for Feedback from Multiple Sources

   Feedback is one of the most critical components of the candidate management process. Timely feedback allows for candidate managers to gain insights to make informed decisions in creating a talent pool and delivering superior experiences. That said, asking feedback from stakeholders should be a top priority when developing a candidate management strategy.

   A rule of thumb is to talk about open job requisitions, the challenges the organization faces, and the expectations of business executives from candidates to make both of their jobs easier. By aligning these goals and objectives, you can create accountability among all stakeholder groups since everything has been agreed upon even before you start finding candidates.

   It is, however, important that feedback should not be limited internally, which means that you have to look beyond your office’s four walls and take an employee-first approach in asking for feedback. Through candidate feedback, you can determine gaps in your existing candidate relationship management strategy and understand where and when exactly they lose their motivation to engage in the process. In doing so, you can optimize your candidate management strategy and create a talent pipeline full of candidates that are engaged and understand what your organization is trying to do.

5. Take Advantage of a Candidate Management Software

   Developing a candidate management strategy can be difficult and time-consuming with so many metrics to monitor. More often than not, there are so many tedious tasks to perform when recruiting and managing candidates. This includes filling out forms and paperwork, answering emails, and ensuring prospects remain motivated and engaged throughout the hiring process.

   The reality is that hiring employees takes a lot of time that can often discourage and result in top candidates leaving for your competitors. By taking advantage of a dynamic candidate relationship management software, you can allow for streamlined data collection from candidates and improved communication by keeping them in the loop. It can also generate key insights and analytics which employers can use in enhancing the recruitment process and making decisions on the candidates they will add in their talent pools.

   Regardless of its overwhelming benefits, candidate management platforms are a dime and dozen and selecting the right solution requires time and conscious effort. It is not uncommon for candidate management system providers to have a long list of features highlighting how their solution is more superior to others only to fail when you implement it in your current operations. That said, asking for a comprehensive product demonstration and a free trial are critical in ensuring that your chosen solution will provide a bang with your buck and serve your candidate management needs in the long run.

Developing an Effective Candidate Management Strategy

The importance of a candidate management strategy is too hard to ignore as candidate behaviours continue to evolve. Therefore, leveraging powerful recruitment solutions such as Jobsoid is essential in simplifying the recruitment process. Jobsoid is brimming with extensive features such as customer relationship management, free posting, and social media integrations in addition to its free trial and Beginner, Lite, Standard, and Pro packages.