In my last blog post I talked about the possible end of cover letters; summing up the post, the goals of a cover letter can be achieved in simpler and much quicker fashion. More and more hiring managers are turning to social medias to research their candidates to review over anything that may not or cannot be captured in a resume or even cover letter. Candidates know that most hiring managers don’t look over cover letters and to them seems like an inefficient use of time writing one for a job, whereas they could spend that time applying to maybe 2-5 more jobs. In this post, part of the Recruiting Millennials series, I will discuss engagement with millennial candidates. 
Engagement with a candidate is such a vital part of the recruitment process. It keeps the candidate interested and updated with their status. On the flip side, millennials like to be engaged and if you can do it on a little bit of a personal level it’s all the better. One thing I mentioned in the previous blog post is how often millennials are on their mobile devices, Recruiter.com states that 79% of smartphone users have their phones on them 22 hours a day. So why not be mobile and interactive with candidates via their phones or tablets, it also doubles as a personal interaction. Being Mobile helps you stay connected with candidates and in turn enhances their experience, some great ways that you can engage with candidates is by following up and giving them updates on their post-interview status, send friendly reminders to have certain forms or documents filled out or to even send a reminder and address for an interview. Text Message alerts/notifications are a great way to directly engage and contact a candidate, we are seeing more and more companies send job alerts or status notifications via texts and having that open line of “direct” communication offers a sense of transparency along with the feeling that the company and its employees are reachable. There are ways to have texts automated and there are some products out there that offer this, but the great thing with ATS OnDemand is that we have a homegrown text messaging feature that allows our clients to not only automate but also communicate with candidates. No need to find another system to integrate your current process with, just contact us to find out more about this as well as other great innovative features the team here at ATS OnDemand have to offer!
