Recruiting, hiring, and retaining employees are anything but small tasks for HR professionals. With so much already on a hiring manager’s plate, the act of engaging candidates before making a hire often goes by the wayside.  The truth of the matter is in today’s competitive marketplace, employee engagement should begin long before a hire is made. When approached correctly, pre-hire candidate engagement can prove mutually beneficial for both employers as well as potential employees alike, resulting in higher job satisfaction, better on-the-job performance, and increased profitability.

Thanks to technology’s impact on communication methods, candidate engagement is much more important today than it once was just years ago. Not only do candidates anticipate and expect a timely response in communication, they also have all channels of Web 2.0 tools literally right at their fingertips, making it easier than ever to share their experience with your company with an immeasurable audience. Fortunately, there are several simple methods to start improving your company’s candidate engagement today.

• Make your job description memorable. Due to varying levels of regulation, job descriptions typically need to follow a specific format, thus, often reading on the dull side to potential employees. Try to add your company’s own fun marketing language to your official job description to help spice it up. Adding great copy to your already valuable description will help your company, as well as the open position, stick in candidates’ mind.
• Build talent communities. Social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter make it very easy to cultivate an excellent online community full of potential talent. Create compelling content to share with your communities and contribute to the audience you’re trying to attract. This is one of the easiest and most cost-effective methods to driving great candidates to your company’s website, and ultimately, into your hiring pool.
• Share your unique value. What makes working for your company rewarding, unique, or compelling? Capture and share this information frequently in your medium of choice. Consider writing a company blog, posting videos on your website, or hosting webinars or pod casts. Whichever medium you choose, keep in mind that your ultimate goal should be to glean your company’s culture to potential candidates; sometimes, a cultural fit can be even more important than skill level.

In addition to improving your hiring process as a whole, candidate engagement is also a strong indicator of your company’s ability to compete for talent in today’s marketplace. Springborn Staffing has been helping improve the quality of candidate and company matches in Northern New England for over 20 years. If you are ready to improve your company’s candidate engagement, contact Springborn Staffing, the best staffing solution in Portland, Maine!