How our technology is enabling organisations to deliver outstanding hiring experiences from application through pre-boarding and beyond
We’re excited and honoured to have been voted HR Technology Provider of the Year for 2024, following our win in the same category in 2023, recognising the innovation, recruiter support, and excellent candidate experience offered by our pre-boarding technology.
When announcing our win of the 2024 award, the Personnel Today Awards judges praised Meet & Engage’s tailored approach, which supports candidates from application to job offer, and its appealing social-media inspired platform.
Here’s how our technology is revolutionising the recruitment experience for candidates and talent acquisition teams.
What is pre-boarding and why is it crucial?
“Pre-boarding” is the period of time between the candidate applying for a position, and a job offer being made.
Research and our own clients tell us that this crucial period is often neglected: stretched and under-resourced teams struggle to meet candidate’s expectations, leaving candidates confused and unimpressed with the hiring process.
- 82% of candidates surveyed for a recent Aptitude Research report said they do not trust the recruitment process. 65% said they hadn’t received consistent communications during the hiring process.
- PeopleScout reported in 2023 that fewer than 20% of employers provided candidates with details on next steps of the recruitment process after applying, and that 44% of organisations did not provide an opportunity for candidates to give feedback on their application experience.
We know that the candidate pre-boarding experience is crucial for success: a TalenTeam study revealed candidates who are happy with their hiring experience are 38% more likely to accept the offer.
We also know that TA teams have never been more stretched, and that existing tech solutions were not up to scratch:
- Managing high application volumes with no standardised or automated procedures for communicating with candidates
- Existing ATS/CRM technology only enables email communication, which offers limited personalisation, tracking, and engagement (particularly with early careers candidates)
- No interaction with candidates if they’ve been rejected or withdraw themselves from the process, a missed opportunity to build talent pools and further enhance the employer brand
Candidates who are happy with their hiring experience are 38% more likely to accept the offer
Our solution
Our clients often faced challenges in how to effectively keep candidates informed and feeling confident during the application process in order to prevent drop-outs due to lack of understanding and support.
They are also prioritising their need to ensure all candidates have a positive brand experience no matter their outcome and are looking for ways to continue to provide guidance to those who don’t match their requirements.
Our goal was to create a solution that would give candidates the information and support they needed to feel prepared and confident at each stage of their recruitment journey, as well as continue to ‘sell’ the organisation as an employer of choice.
To make the efficiency gains needed to support busy recruitment teams, our solution needed to be fully automated, using ATS status updates to move candidates through the journey.
We provide a web-based, social-style portal experience through which candidates can engage with relevant and personalised EVP content as well as interact with modules built around the candidate experience. It’s designed to support candidates from the point of application through to offer or decline.
To make this a successful solution, we needed to ensure we could get the right pieces of information to the candidate at the relevant stage of their application journey. To do this, we pull through information from the client’s ATS. This allows us to update the user’s content feed depending on their ATS status, thus providing the guidance they need at the time they need it. Each update triggers email, app, and/or SMS comms to nudge candidates to log back in. And if a candidate is declined, they are moved to a dedicated package of content packed full of useful advice for their future job-hunting endeavours.
The portal delivers its content in a familiar, fully-branded, social-style feed which includes wall posts, videos, images, links and attachments, to name a few.
Candidates log in when convenient to them, and if they don’t, then our automated emails are triggered to gently remind them.
We also embed Meet & Engage’s other technologies into the platform. For example:
- Auto-registration for upcoming Group Chat virtual events
- A ‘Recruitment Helpdesk’ using our 1-2-1 Live Chat
- A Chatbot to answer FAQs
- Create instant messaging threads through Channels
Personalisation
Through the integration with the ATS and the custom questions asked at the point of registration, we can pull known information through about the candidate that we then use to tailor their content. This may be the role they’ve applied for, e.g. graduate vs. intern; or DEI related, e.g. gender, ethnicity.
We then build bespoke content to be shared solely with those candidates who it’s relevant to. This could be as simple as sharing one or two extra posts in amongst the general content, but it could also mean we drop the candidate into a dedicated package of content aimed specifically at their requirements.
The results are outstanding
- To date, we’ve seen over 100,000 candidates register for pre-boarding platforms using our technology
- On average, 95% of candidates said the content shared was useful in helping them prepare for their next recruitment stage
- A high-volume client with a lengthy recruitment process saw a reduction in candidates dropping out of the process – from 47% down to 36%. It also helped them reduce their time to hire from 10 months down to 8 months
- A global banking client used Meet & Engage technology for their early careers candidates. When analysing the offers they made, 94% of their apprentice offers and 100% of their intern and graduate offers had engaged with the portal during the hiring process
- One client found that those who had registered for the portal were 17% more likely to complete the first assessment stage, with 17% more likely to go on and pass that stage
- Another client saw a 74% increase in black heritage candidates succeeding through to the second stage of their process
- ‘Declined’ package users spent an above average amount of time engaging with the content and left positive feedback scores as a result, creating positive brand advocacy even amongst candidates who were unsuccessful
A high-volume client with a lengthy recruitment process saw a reduction in candidates dropping out of the process – from 47% down to 36%. It also helped them reduce their time to hire from 10 months down to 8 months
The benefits are wide reaching
- There is little to no further input needed by the client once deployed
- It allows recruiters to spend their time focused on supporting candidates in other ways
- It provides a consistent experience for all applicants regardless of location or business area
- It supports candidates to be their best at each stage, reducing drop-outs and increasing success rates
- It provides support at a time that suits the candidate, often outside of office hours
- It increases brand advocacy and work-readiness
What our clients say
“Our partnership with Meet & Engage has been one of the most exciting vendor collaborations to date. We have been impressed at what we have been able to achieve together in such a short time – not only have we accelerated use of candidate-centred technologies – launching a number of new tools which help us reach and engage with a broader audience – but Meet & Engage have helped us to truly embed a more candidate-focused mindset into all that we do.”
(Group Emerging Talent Lead for a Global Bank)
Our partnership with Meet & Engage has been one of the most exciting vendor collaborations to date.
Want to find out more?
We run regular events covering key issues in the talent acquisition space – check out our upcoming events here and recordings of our past webinars here.
If you’d like to discuss how our technology can help you create an outstanding hiring or onboarding journey, get in touch to arrange a consultation.
