Last week’s blog post was about candidate ghosting, including prevention. A method of preventing being ghosted is by nurturing your candidates.
The Process
The goal of nurturing is to maintain the relationships between interested candidates and your organization, and to keep them interested in your organization.
Nurturing can begin from as soon as a candidate chooses to receive information from you (e.g. subscribing on your website) and provides their contact information. Email is the most straightforward form of communication, but texting is also popular. Sending them a newsletter, updates, or the like can keep them interested. The purpose of nurturing is to be helpful, so be conscious of frequency; three times per week should be the maximum.
A useful strategy may be to group candidates by qualities. Determining the qualities in an ideal candidate for the position(s) that need to be filled can help to visualize if a candidate would be the best fit for a position. Highly-desirable candidates are not available for long, so consider them and their qualities to your other candidates, and nurture them accordingly. It will also be helpful for the nurturing process as a whole because it can be tailored to the individual. Sending candidates topics that pertain to their field of work in the updates can keep them interested and engaged. The updates can also be tailored to their stage in the recruitment process. For instance, sending the basics of your organization in the beginning (e.g. core values, mission statement). The prospect of nurturing, tailoring aside, may seem like a daunting task that would take up most of your time. ATSs, or similar softwares, can streamline and automate the process with your customization (refer to the blog post about ATSs for more information).
After an open position(s) has been filled, there are candidates that were not offered the position(s), but still qualified, or interested in your organization. Keep nurturing them in case they will be interested in something down the road. Tailoring an email of rejection to the candidate can communicate a sense of interest in them, or at least respect. For the list of finalists, a phone call can be an appreciated personal touch. It may also be mutually beneficial to offer to those rejected candidates the opportunity to opt in to nurturing. They may be interested in something down the road, especially if they have good qualifications to be a positive influence for your organization. There is a tendency for people to change jobs more frequently, so even if a candidate may miss, or pass, an opportunity once, they may still come back later if there is another opportunity.