Automation has made many jobs much easier over the past few decades. When we think of the word “automation,” and all sorts of things may come to mind…
✅ Automatic emails generated when you make an online purchase.
✅ Factories with robots performing tasks that used to be completed by hand.
✅ Vacation autoresponders
✅ Pretty much anything from the Jetsons
For the most part; however, automation has always felt entirely robotic - often bringing about notions of bland, generic, templates and irrelevant messages. Certainly automation is unlikely to generate thoughts of thoughtful, highly personalized, well, anything!
How times have changed! In even the last year or two, automation has evolved swiftly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which learns how to generate highly customized, personalized, communications.
So here is our bold prediction for 2019:
Automation will transform candidate engagement -- and ultimately, the staffing industry.
The days of bland, generic automated messaging are over (well, if you choose the right technologies and tools). Staffing technology has risen to the challenge posed by highly selective candidates today. Candidates are tired of receiving impersonal, generic communications in the most inconvenient ways and they will no longer respond to them.
70% of employers have invested or plan to invest additional resources toward improving their candidate experiences in the next year. But it would be wasteful to try to improve everything manually. The truth of the matter is that there are some tasks humans are better at and some that computers can do much better. Firms who invest wisely in allocating the right jobs to the right people (or robots) will be prepared to create and send more, highly personalized messages to their candidate databases and improve their candidate experiences using real data and insights.
Will you take advantage?
Many professionals understand the basic marketing funnel for acquiring and retaining customers. It is a linear path that moves a prospective customer through the classic sales stages from “awareness” to “purchase.”
With your talent, there should be no funnel. Candidate engagement is cyclical and encourages redeployment, referrals, and talent development. Successful staffing firms are nurturing their talent pool at every phase of this cyclical journey, and using automation to do it better.
The recruitment process today starts way before anyone searches or applies for your jobs. And it continues well beyond making a placement, whether it’s with your staffing firm or a competitor. Continual, relevant outreach and engagement with these candidates is what keeps them moving through this cycle, and not dropping out like in a funnel. Candidate communication gets results.
Manual candidate engagement is exhausting.
Understatement alert (!): Your recruiters are busy. While most staffing firms understand and appreciate the importance of candidate engagement, busy schedules make it difficult for recruiters to consistently and personally engage every candidate, regardless of where that candidate may be in the candidate engagement cycle.
Imagine how long it would take just one of your recruiters to send personalized communications to every candidate in the database! And to do the research on when it would be the right time to send them.
Yet, a lack of follow through with personalized messaging can hurt firms tremendously.
72% of candidates who have a poor experience will leave a negative online review or tell a friend.
The latest staffing technology eliminates tedious and time-consuming tasks for recruiters, allowing them instead to create workflows that automatically follow up with candidates using their preferred communication methods, and with personalized content.
Developing Talent Journeys with a tool like Sense helps you automate, personalize and measure the impact of your engagement efforts and ultimately boost both profitability and efficiency.
All while crafting better, more highly personalized content and a more personalized experience for your contractors.
Adhoc emails and phone calls won’t cut it in today’s connected world.
Today’s discerning candidates want to feel that they are uniquely valued by your staffing firm. To accomplish this without spending hours every day crafting hundreds of unique messages, you need seamless communications that are integrated and consistent across all channels.
Whether a candidate is deployed on their third placement with your firm or just came across your blog for the first time, the type of content you deliver to them matters.
With an engagement platform like Sense, your recruiters and contractor care teams can customize Journeys for each candidate segment to ensure the messages are relevant to their skill set, career interests and current stage within the engagement cycle. This way every candidate will receive personalized, relevant content instead of generic mass emails (or worse, no emails at all).
Staffing firms should anticipate that candidates will come in through one channel and move to more than one channel as they progress through the cycle. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that job seekers may peruse your job board on their phone and complete an application days later on their laptop. They might reply via email one day and call a recruiter another.
While you’re anticipating and using automation to reach candidates who move through one online channel, staffing firms should also anticipate and be prepared for hybrid communication. In these instances, automation begins and facilitates the engagement process throughout the cycle; however, staffing firms pivot slightly during the cycle, switching to classic 1:1 communication (perhaps a manual text or phone call). Then, the cycle pivots back to automation, continuing to nurture the candidate relationship.
Your engagement experience needs to feel smooth and well-designed as candidates move between platforms and devices. Your messaging needs to be consistent and on-brand.
More personalization. Better candidate relationships. Increased productivity.
Automation is essential to operating efficiently at scale, and yet in an increasingly relationship-driven world, you can’t afford to give up that personal touch. Implementing smart automation tools like Sense will increase your team’s bandwidth for more meaningful tasks and relationship building, and allow your firm to allocate resources where they can have the biggest impact.
For more on candidate engagement and how your staffing firm can leverage this “superpower,” download our whitepaper created together with ClearEdge Marketing, Evolving Candidate Engagement: The Staffing Industry’s Next Superpower.
