Communicating with candidates and job applicants is an important part of your job as a recruiter, and a vital part of your recruiting strategy. For every successful candidate that you hire you may have 10s or 100s that are not. Whether that’s due to cultural fit, not having the required credentials or experience, or something else, the candidate or applicant would still want to hear from you.
Frequently Applicant Tracking Systems are labeled as “Resume Black Holes,” but it doesn’t have to be that way. At iRecruit we make it easy to communicate with applicants and candidates. You can set up as many different recruiting email templates as you require to address various recruiting needs.
Email templates can be sent to individual candidates, or sent as a group email blast. All emails sent from your iRecruit account, are also saved to the applicant’s profile page as a history record.
From a corporate branding perspective, there are a few things you can do right now to improve the appearance, open rate, and content of your candidate correspondence:
- Update your subject line. Email subject lines are critical, they give the reader a preview of the content, and can often impact the open rate of the email. Subject lines should be concise and under 65 characters.
- Personalize the email templates with first name. All iRecruit emails can be personalized with mail merge fields like name, application number, application date, job applied to etc. This will save you time when you do an email blast, and make applicants feel like they are not just receiving a Dear Applicant form letter.
- Add a Call to Action. Yes, even for rejected candidates, and to help build your talent network, add a simple call to action such as Follow us on LinkedIn, or other social media network, or check our career page regularly to see available positions.
- Edit for length. Keep all emails short, aim to be “above the fold” so that the applicant does not have to scroll to read your message.
- Make the email more professional looking by adding your company logo, and a professional signature.
- Personalize the “from” Email. If you are sending an email blast to your “Not Selected” applicants after closing a job posting, we recommend you use your standard hr@companyname.com email address. However, if you are emailing a candidate who was interviewed, and later rejected, we recommend that you use your own email address.
Communicating with candidates throughout your hiring process greatly improves the candidate experience and eliminates the Black Hole effect. Here are some ideas for communicating:
- Immediately: Thank You For Applying with ABC Company
- After you review: Another thank you, “We’ve received many excellent candidates, if you are a match, we will be in touch” etc.
- If being interviewed, interview set up email – include any instructions such as directions to your office.
- After interview, Thank you for Interviewing
- No Interview – Simple Thanks, but No Thanks Email, with your Social Media Follow call to action.
All candidate email templates used for correspondence can be saved in iRecruit, we recommend reviewing for content regularly, checking for errors, or typos and keeping your content fresh.
Want to learn more?
iRecruit is a cloud-based Applicant Tracking Software (ATS), that includes Electronic Onboarding. We do demos every day, or call 800-517-9099 or click here to ask a question.
