With industries constantly changing, their demand is always in motion. It takes a lot of labor to hunt down the right candidates for clients, so staffing agencies come in and work their magic. With tons of recruiters across the globe, its easy to image the various experiences candidates have gone through.
Depending on a candidate’s perspective, their experience can be changed for the better or worse. From a touch perspective, if vendors and recruiters are not careful, their contacts can slip right through their fingers. So much interaction is done online, and so much information is outsourced. Communication through email is not so personal and the touch perspective can go missing. Words and tones can be misconstrued and even the simplest reply has potential to be received the wrong way.
Meet Your Candidates!
Maintain your personal touch! We live in a time where technology can easily take precedence over face-to-face interactions and this hinders candidate experience. Make the effort to sit down and meet with your candidates and get a better feel for who they are as individuals. Not only does that make them feel valued, but it also assists you, as a recruiter, in matching them with the perfect employer and environment.
Say that something may not work out somewhere down the line in the hiring process; the personal connections makes it easier to reach out to your candidates at different levels down the line. The magic happens when you pay attention to the personal side of the business.
Personal Touch with Automation
As automation continues to rocket in technology, the streamline process will continue to grow in convenience. Times have changed from then to now; where candidates would come into the office and spend 2-3 hours filling out paperwork and completing assessments. Of course, we don’t want to backtrack in productivity, that’s why it’s important to be brilliant at the basics with people.
If someone is earning you revenue, and you have their birthday, the date they started working with you, their anniversary working with the company you placed them at, etc., how inattentive is it if they never hear from you? People want companies to care about them outside of the work they do. A very simple action that can make all the difference. Don’t believe me? Take a listen to a webinar presented by Monster focused on the importance of your candidate's experience during and after the hiring process.
Be Proactive, Instead of Reactive
To turn any negative into a positive in the competitive world of staffing, you must show every day that you provide a service that has value. How can you be stronger and more efficient that your competition? At some point, the margins are going to turn and now is the best time to prepare for that next turn.
Complete your mid-year assessment and find out what’s working and what isn’t. Waiting until the years end lessens the probability for effective improvements. Being proactive instead of reactive is key. Here are some forgotten areas to focus on:
- Clients that you’ve lost this year
- Market by market profitability
- Reallocate contracts; from a spend standpoint
A big misconception within the staffing industry is that recruiters are there to compete with the work their clients are already into. This is not true. You are not their competitor. Assure your clients that your job is to expand them in areas that they have not targeted, not to steal the areas they utilize. This is why keeping track of your margins is a key factor; you can asses where or where not to invest your services for a better candidate experience.
No one wants to lose something they work hard for, client and candidates included! Place yourself in you candidates shoes and imagine even the smallest gestures from your own employer that would make your day, then apply them to your candidate experience. Personal touch makes all the difference!
