To quote one of the 1980’s most iconic movies (and because I’m a believer in making quotes from the big screen applicable to everyday life): “I feel the need…the need for speed.” Sure, Tom Cruise was talking about fighter jets, but for Recruitment Marketing and employer brand practitioners, this need for speed is one aspect that many teams aim for — and also struggle with.
With some candidates on the market for a matter of hours or days, a lapse in candidate communications can turn talent away from your open job, and possibly your company forever. Take this data from CareerBuilder: A lack of timely candidate communications is the top reason for a negative candidate experience. On top of that, two-thirds of candidates never hear back on their application status after submission, and 60% don’t hear a peep from companies even after an interview!
These recruiting challenges were all too familiar to the recruiting team members at Intermountain Healthcare. As Utah’s largest private employer with 38,000 employees throughout 24 hospitals and 85 clinics, they were responsible for making about 600 hires each month. This need for high-volume recruiting often resulted in slow communications with candidates, which was frustrating for candidates and not at all what the Intermountain talent acquisition team wanted.
For example, at in-person recruiting events, Intermountain representatives would get feedback from job seekers who had submitted an application (and really wanted to work there!) but had heard nothing back. Some were even driven to Intermountain’s competitors who got back to talent quickly and efficiently.
It was after seeing their application abandonment rate increase and hearing the negative candidate feedback that the team knew a switch was needed to turn around how they communicated with candidates. They set to work at developing an effective strategy using several tools, including text recruiting.
Talent Acquisition Manager Damon Vitangeli and Employer Marketing Specialist Amanda Gold shared insight into their approach in our webinar Candidate Experience Makeover: Intermountain Healthcare’s Remarkable Journey to Real-Time Communications.
Here, we want to share with you how Damon, Amanda and the team implemented better candidate communications through text messaging with candidates. You’ll learn how the team significantly improved how quickly they got back to job seekers, which won them a pretty big industry award!
Go short for the long haul
Text recruiting is all about providing easy and quick communications with candidates. If a job seeker needs to go out of their way to read or respond to messages from a potential employer, it just lengthens the process and could lead to them searching for a new opportunity elsewhere.
To achieve the ease and speed needed for today’s candidate communications, Intermountain created a text short code that encourages candidates to reach out if they are interested in learning more about the company’s open roles. Social media is used to spread awareness of this short code to spur additional engagement and interest, even from talent who is interested in other opportunities other than the position being posted.
Keep it simple
Once a candidate has reached out via text message to Intermountain, their first touchpoint is with TextRecruit’s ARI automated recruiter. Making messaging simple and to the point helps speed up communication by quickly gathering contact info and asking which type of positions candidates are interested in pursuing. From there, job seekers are passed off to recruiters who specialize in whichever “portfolio” or job area they expressed an interest in, and they continue their conversation to find the right fit and move along in the process.
Top notch results
Since launching their text recruiting strategy, Intermountain Healthcare has seen spectacular results in how they communicate with candidates, the overall candidate experience and how they are more effectively able to hire talented candidates.
During the beginning stages of their text recruiting rollout, one recruiter was able to extend 17 job offers in one day! In one text campaign, Intermountain sent messages to 1200 candidates, received 200 responses and immediately identified 16 who were ready to hire, helping to keep their pipeline full. Before developing a text strategy, it took an average of 2 days for candidates to respond to recruiters. With text recruiting, however, that time has been reduced to 2 hours.
And to top it all off, the team won a CandE award in 2018 and were recognized for their efforts on creating a great experience for candidates.
When it comes to improving candidate communications — and their experience with your employer brand — speed is what you need. Text recruiting is a key way to quickly provide talent with the information they are looking for! Don’t forget to check out the webinar on demand to learn more about Intermountain’s text recruiting approach and the other tools they used to enhance the candidate experience.
Note: TextRecruit is a sponsor of Rally and supports our efforts to provide educational content and events on Recruitment Marketing.