Candidate engagement helps recruiters understand candidates better.

Recruiting isn’t all about the competency or being fit for the company. Recruiters today are, in many ways, in sales too, as personnel in sales and recruiting must probe clients and candidates to learn their unique needs and assets. The more you probe and question the candidate, the better you know them.

Once I questioned an applicant: “Walk me through your career.”

The applicant replied, “It’s all there in the resume.“

I was like, “Seriously?“

Surprised, I further asked the applicant to tell me what’s not on the resume. Without hesitating, he quickly replied, “Hire me and find out.“

You guessed it right. The interview ended there.

Would it be possible to engage with all the applicants just to filter out the unsuitable candidates when time is working against you? As a recruiter, you need a tool that helps you screen out applicants before the actual in-person engagement.

Convergence Crisis

What recruiters really need, I think, is convergence between rapid increases in jobs and hireable resources. Worldwide, more and more people are entering the job force than ever before, and across the board, new candidates have higher levels of education and experience than at any point in history. It’s a blessing for firms, but a curse for recruiters who must grapple with large numbers of superior candidates. These days, the recruiting process is itself an edge companies gain over their competition.

And the changing, globalized world has only made a recruiter’s work more challenging. Especially when time frames are tight. Reaching out to every applicant is a herculean task. Indeed, most of a recruiter’s time is spent on engagement.

Semantic candidate suggestions in an applicant tracking system can help. And these suggestions depend primarily on parsed content from the candidate’s resume. Yet, resume parsers guarantee an accuracy rate of only 60% to 70%.

But, what if the skill that you are looking for is in the unparsed content and the candidate is not suggested by the semantic algorithm? These are very pricey chances you don’t wish risk taking.

Assessments

According to the Qualigence International HR Glossary, “a career assessment test gives an opportunity for an applicant to reflect over current career, educational and professional training, accomplishments and career advancement.“

Zoho Recruit offers “Assessment” as a pre-screening tool. You can create pre-screening questions, and then associate them with the candidate application form. The tool provides a mechanism for pairing relevant questions for each candidate to a particular position.

Consider a sample question:

Where do you prefer to work ?

a. Los Angeles

b. Chicago

c. San Diego

d. London

There’s no right or wrong answer here. Rather, the question provides the candidate options based on preference. The organization might have offices in those locations, but the vacancies are only in Los Angeles and Chicago. Thus, candidates are rated on scale of 1 to 5 according to their answers, and recruiters can proceed first with those candidates who’d selected those cities.

When we conduct advanced searches at Zoho, we look for candidates with precisely five to six years of work experience in their field. Accordingly, the option for five years can be set as a “qualifier” while six years is given the maximum weight. And these are just two examples of how smart technology can make the work of HR easier, and better.

Today’s recruiters face a hiring landscape more complex, and higher pressure, than ever before. Yesterday’s hiring strategies just won’t cut it anymore. But the right tools can support HR, as HR in turns works to support the larger organization, ensuring that the right candidates are sourced, hired, and on boarded.