I continue to be amazed when speaking with hiring companies how few of them will search their current applicant tracking systems for previous candidates when starting a new job search.
In some cases, companies have literally tens of thousands of previous applicants in their ATS that they have spent thousands of advertising dollars to acquire, but they don’t re-access them for future searches. When I ask most recruiters "Do you search your current ATS when starting a new search?”"they mostly respond with "No…"
The common process when new jobs come into the recruiting group is to get them out to the job boards – and spend more money – or burn up your job posting allocations to try and drive new candidates to apply, and only process applicants as they come in.
Here are some of the reasons that companies we’ve spoken with don’t pursue previous applicants.
1. Most ATS systems have horrible candidate searching abilities.
a) The keyword searching abilities don’t support even the most basic abilities – so finding candidate in the last year with a certain skill and/or education level isn’t possible – so they just give up.
2. The assumption that previous applicants were bad.
a) Most recruiters think that any previous applicants must all have been turned down for positions, and are therefore are bad candidates. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. 80% or more candidates aren’t considered for certain positions because they didn’t match the specific job, which could mean they didn’t have the specific skills, or were over/under qualified for that specific job only.
b) Also, many great candidates are on and off the market so quickly that most larger companies just couldn’t get them through their hiring cycle fast enough – and lose out on hiring great candidates. This shouldn’t mean that you stop marketing to those great candidates however! Candidates situations can change rapidly within just months of taking new positions at different companies, and a tap on the shoulder down the road would impress the daylights of a top candidate should companies get more strategic in communicating with these candidates.
3. Searching, matching, and communicating with candidates is hard work.
a) Even if a recruiter was able to search and find a list of possible candidates, going through the process of building a list of candidates for a job, building an email introduction/catch up message, and sending it out to candidates can take a lot of time, which most recruiters just don’t have. That’s why they just post new positions, and assume that the job boards will have all the currently active candidates in the
market apply for their jobs - but unfortunately those active candidates are applying to everyone else’s jobs at the same time.
b) Most ATS systems don’t have the ability to build group lists of certain candidate types – so building ongoing marketing lists within the ATS system to quickly broadcast a certain type of job or position is very difficult.
c) In some cases – candidates won’t want any future calls or communication from a hiring company – but ATS systems make it hard to flag candidates (or enter notes) regarding avoiding future communication.
4. Companies are afraid to look desperate if reaching out to candidates.
a) Most companies think that re-recruiting candidates for certain jobs might make them look desperate (which most of them are…but like to hide it) which would turn off candidates.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Most candidates are impressed with companies that actually remember them, and inform them frequently about opportunities at their company. The best companies not only communicate job information, but updates on their employment culture via newsletters and important updates within the company – which could be easily communicated to their candidate community.
How can you change this?
While we hope to have convinced you to start logging back into your own ATS to start re-sourcing candidates, there is an easier and more strategic way to communicate with previous applicants on an ongoing basis. This can help you leverage your investment in that candidate pool you’ve created, and help you recapture their attention for future positions – or leverage them for referrals to their network of friends who can view your positions, and refer them to join your candidate community online.
At Jobs2Web, our job marketing technology not only gathers new subscribers to your companies career site – but we can also import your previous applicants into your candidate marketing database, and segment them by job category and locations so that they are notified automatically of new positions as they come up.
Your website will become your best “virtual recruiter”.
With each new position that is posted on your companies career site, we will automatically match and email the positions to your candidate database – inviting them to re-apply for positions within your ATS, or tell their friends about the positions, which will drive more candidates to your career site, and help you build a strategic job marketing engine, and helping you do more direct hires versus paying money every time a new job posting comes up.
The startup phase of this type of effort isn’t as hard as most people think, as we work with your ATS expert (internally or externally) to pull your database, and determine what categories and locations candidates are allocated to for the initial setup phase. This can be based on their current resumes, or previous jobs they’ve applied to.
Once they are setup in the system, they will begin receiving email notifications of your job postings (branded to your company) along with an explanation of why they are getting the job notifications (because they have previously applied to your company) and are given the easy ability to update the categories and locations of interest – so that they can self update the categories/locations of interest, or unsubscribe from your list which prevents any future problems with spamming the candidates etc.
Avoid spamming and keeping your database clean.
The Jobs2Web solution also handles all email bounces (hard and soft) and/or reply emails so that you don’t have to deal with cleaning the email database (which can get overwhelming) – and also gives your
job marketing efforts the best practices for email marketing.
Companies also have real-time access to their candidate marketing database within jobs2web and can add, edit, or delete certain candidates from their system. This means that you can “de-list” undesirable candidates from receiving future email notifications.
How re-recruiting can recapture previous candidates.
The irony is, I think most candidates assume if they’ve applied one time to any company, that they are “on file” with that company, and should there be future interest in them – then the company will call (even though we know that companies aren’t using their ATS in this way.)
This will certainly prevent them from applying for future positions – and to assume they will remember your company months or years from now – and revisit your career site to search for jobs and re-apply isn’t a good assumption.
However, should a previous candidate get an email from your company with a matching job 10 months after they applied – inviting them to re-apply for a new position, and things aren’t going well with the company they decided to take their current job with instead of yours, bingo – you are now on top of your re-recruiting game, and leveraging your past applicants to become future candidates and employees with your company.
Cheers--
Doug
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