The art of persuasion takes the right timing, context, and messaging techniques to engage qualified candidates with your open opportunity.
The long list of benefits and perks you’ve prepped may seem like enough ammo to bolster the job’s appeal and fit in a candidate’s career, but paired with a well-targeted marketing plan, your recruiting strategy can hit the ground running.
Try these tactics to get started.
Make sure recruiters have multiple touch points with candidates.
Outreach doesn’t stop at sending the first, personalized message to candidates. Recruiters can continually boost their presence and better engage talent by employing various channels of communication that helps potential hires remember a company’s name, branding, and to encourage them to take action – responding to an email, checking out open opportunities, or sharing roles with other qualified candidates in their network.
It may be tempting to move on to the next batch of talent when your first outreach attempts return zero responses, but by continually engaging candidates on multiple outreach channels, recruiters can build interest in their company, improve their employer branding, and learn what type of communication is most effective for connecting with prospective hires.
Ask this interview question to encourage candidates to envision themselves in the role.
Dubbed by Lou Adler as the “only interview question that matters,” asking candidates this question can give recruiters insight to their qualifications, skills, and fit for a position: “What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?”
By giving an explanation of the specific duties of a role and how they affect a company, then following up with this question, candidates will get excited and share why they think they’re qualified for the part. It’s an open-ended question that drives candidates to pick the best representation of their talents and to share the work process and logic that went behind executing it.
Don’t forget to sell the role, not the company.
Remember your employer brand? It’s an aspect of the recruiting and engagement process we’ve continually rooted for, and it was also a hot topic at this year’s ERE Recruiting Conference. Your employer branding strategy is at the core of selling the role and getting candidates excited about your open opportunities. Share what its like to be the nuts and bolts behind creating the company’s product or service (the employer brand), rather than sharing the nitty gritty of the company’s product or service (the company brand). Candidates are interested in learning how their skills and experiences fit within the scope of what the company’s current employees are doing and how the role will help the candidate reach their overall career goals.
Getting candidates excited about an open opportunity at your company requires continued, multi-touch engagement that encourages talent to envision themselves working with a team focused on creating a product and supporting employees’ professional paths.
What engagement techniques does your team use to attract talent? Share them with us in the comments and don’t forget to download our eBook on effectively messaging candidates to boost your outreach strategies.
