When it comes to determining whether your recruitment marketing efforts are working, your candidate conversion rate is a key metric. This rate measures the percentage of candidates hired vs. advertised job openings in a specified period of time.
In addition to revealing how successful your recruiting efforts are, this number also reveals information about your attrition rate.
To improve your candidate conversion rate, you simply hire more candidates at a faster pace. But that can be difficult to do if you also want to maintain the highest quality standards. Fortunately, these tips will help you do both!
Remove Friction in the Candidate Experience
The job market currently favors candidates — and it does so quite heavily. Job seekers are much less likely to push through activities that are needlessly slow, intrusive, or frustrating.
With this in mind, review your candidate experience closely, and look for these common points of friction:
- Career pages and online applications that aren’t optimized for mobile
- Lengthy applications and assessments
- Frustrating candidate account creation processes
- Demanding personal information from candidates too early in the process
- Lack of timely feedback
Make improvements to chip away at these in order to increase the number of candidates who complete the application process.
Use Automation to Streamline the Process
Thanks to new technologies, brands can now automate many steps in the recruiting process. If you do this strategically, your recruiting team will be able to use the time they save on conversion strategies for more mission-critical activities, such as improving employer branding.
Additionally, automation can create a more engaging candidate experience.
Interview and Assessment Scheduling
What’s the most frustrating thing about applying for a job? Many candidates state that it is the waiting and the back-and-forth communication involved in setting up interviews and assessments. That’s particularly frustrating because this is such an easy thing to automate.
Recruiting tools that are driven by AI technology can give prospects self-service options that allow them to schedule assessments and interviews on their own. By doing this, you can also shorten the recruiting process and reduce the time to hire, thereby increasing your candidate conversion rate.
AI Chatbots
You might have already implemented chatbots on your customer-facing web pages. Maybe it’s time to do the same on your career pages.
AI-powered bots can answer potential employees’ frequently asked questions, offer job recommendations, and collect data that your team can use to upgrade your recruitment marketing efforts.
Resume Screening
ATS software and AI resume screening technology take the tedious resume-screening process out of the hands of hiring managers. Instead, hundreds of resumes can be processed in mere seconds.
Even better, the screening process can be improved over time as the software uses its own data and your requirements to accurately score each candidate.
In addition to accelerating your time to hire, this software can improve your candidate conversion rate in other ways. By removing the human element, you reduce the risk of implicit bias eliminating candidates who deserve further consideration.
The more talented people who make it to the interview process, the better your final hiring numbers will be.
Level Up Your Social Media Recruiting
Social media is just as valuable a tool for converting candidates as it is for converting customers. Unfortunately, hiring teams rarely take advantage of its full potential.
If your team isn’t filling positions in a timely manner, take a closer look at your social media recruiting strategy. Here are some questions to consider:
- Do you have a social media presence that is dedicated to recruiting?
- Are you using convincing outreach techniques, such as employee testimonials?
- Have you made it easy for candidates to click over to your career pages?
- Are you sharing engaging content about your company culture?
Even if a potential candidate learns about your job openings somewhere else, there’s a good chance that they’re going to seek out more information about your company on social media. It’s worth taking the time to make sure you are communicating an attractive value proposition.
Create a Strategy to Recruit Passive Candidates
Passive candidates are people who aren’t actively looking for new positions but are open to pursuing opportunities if they are worthwhile. If you’ve taken all of the steps you need to improve the candidate experience and reach out to active candidates, it’s time to tap into your passive candidate reserves.
Where Can You Source Passive Candidates?
The first place to look for passive candidates would be in your own archives of previous applications and resumes. Even if they weren’t a good fit for other positions, these are people who have already expressed an interest in working for your company. It makes sense to reengage them.
Your current employees are also a great resource. Let them know that they are your best brand ambassadors. Next, create an incentive program to encourage them to reach out to potential candidates within their own circles.
Final Thoughts: The Other Side of the Equation
Are your candidate conversion metrics off because you aren’t converting applicants, or because you simply have too many job openings? If it’s the latter, you are either growing quickly or losing too many essential employees. While the first possibility is definitely a good thing, the second is problematic.
It may be time to take an objective look at your company culture and the things that impact it. These include diversity, CEO ratings, employee satisfaction, and more. It’s worth investing in culture analytics to learn if there might be a disconnect between what you are offering employees and what they really want.
