Presented by Hiretual

In today’s world of talent acquisition, personalized pipelines, outreach campaigns, and candidate experiences are fundamental to the success of an organization’s recruiting and hiring efforts.

Ask any recent hire why they accepted an offer, and they’ll likely mention their personalized candidate experience. In fact, 75% of people currently working at companies where they had a positive candidate experience said that it influenced their decision to accept their offer.

With job seekers having greater options and expectations from companies, recruiters and hiring managers must be positioned to meet them at a personal level in order to thrive in an extremely competitive market.

Hiretual’s 2021 Recruiting for Recovery report found that 66% of talent acquisition professionals introduced a new tool to their tech stack in the past year. Those that adopted AI solutions were equipped to streamline their recruiting process while obtaining personalized candidate data across their ATS talent rediscovery, open web search, and engagement efforts without upending their existing platforms.

If you’re still outside of the majority, it’s time to consider A.I.-powered talent acquisition technology to blend personalization into every aspect of your recruiting and hiring strategies.

Identify best-fit candidates and former applicants

With heavy competition, the Great Resignation, and other talent market shifts, the margin for error when recruiting talent is much smaller than before. Companies can’t afford to be caught behind the curve with generic recruiting and hiring strategies that fail to meet the expectations of the common candidate.

In an evolving era of talent acquisition, traditional profile matching from legacy platforms that lack automated functionality isn’t enough to generate meaningful results. The use of AI-enabled ATS talent rediscovery  gives companies an avenue to identify best-fit candidates by enhancing the depth of their ATS data with profiles that match those that are already in their existing talent network.

It also allows recruiters to differentiate the value and relevance of specific keywords and titles in a search query, such as “remote work” or “neurodiverse.” With contextually relevant search returns, recruiters know they are adding (and engaging with) best-fit candidates to their ATS that may even date decades back.

After identifying past applicants, the solution blends their internal candidate data (insights from previous interactions) and external candidate data (new, AI-generated insights) within the ATS, which can be leveraged for talent assessment accuracy. Then, it goes a step further by providing simplified insights on why those candidates were rendered a match — highlighting how their skills and experience align with the job description.

Boost engagement with customized outreach

Email campaigns are critical to candidate hiring; however, many recruiters struggle to weave personalization into their strategy. Simply referencing a candidate’s name in an email is proven to increase their response rate by as much as 23%. Furthermore, recruiter responsiveness after applying was a top candidate experience-based metric influencing hiring execution.

With AI-powered solutions, recruiters can streamline customized outreach by automating personalization into single and sequence email templates. Take candidate names for example. Rather than manually typing the names of individual applicants into hundreds of emails, the solution will insert name fillers — either first, last, or full name — into both the subject line and body of the email.

In addition, AI-powered solutions can automate personalized responses to applicants within predefined time windows, and also segment lists of candidates in an ATS by location or industry so targeted emails can be sent when a matching job opening surfaces. The enriched data of rediscovered candidates adds another element of personalization, enabling recruiters to reference their previous interactions and new experiences within targeted emails to former applicants.

Meanwhile, companies can assess key engagement metrics to understand how email sequences are performing through automated tracking for open, click-through and reply rates — all of which are displayed on a simplified reporting dashboard.

Beyond engagement productivity, personalization also means prioritizing inclusivity. Outreach can be tailored to meet the communication needs of neurodiverse and disabled candidates by investing in technology, like Outlook’s screen reader or Google’s TalkBack for visually impaired professionals. With these additional capabilities, companies can make significant strides toward exceeding their long-term goals of inclusivity.

Using personalization to better attract professionals

Manually tracking and responding to candidates in the pipeline at any given time is challenging for a recruiting team of any size. In today’s age of digitalization, creating unrivaled levels of personalization within your ATS and candidate experiences cannot be accomplished without the use of advanced technology. From the initial point of contact to the final offer, AI-powered solutions are the critical component to recruiting and hiring personalization.

Steven Jiang is CEO/Co-Founder of Hiretual.

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