Can live group chat be used as a way of engaging with senior level talent? Will this audience group be receptive to participating in this social-media style online engagement? Yes, yes and yes again!
If you think that online chat and digital candidate engagement is simply for volume hires, then think again.
Here at Meet & Engage, we frequently run successful group engagement campaigns for clients recruiting for senior level roles within their organisations.
They wanted to engage with their audiences in a more direct (and non-traditional) way, but, crucially, they also wanted to create an opportunity that would allow the most senior figure in their business (namely the CEO) to interact with this important candidate pool.
The benefits are two-fold; candidates have the rare opportunity to ask questions to a senior stakeholder within the confines of the traditional recruitment process, and the business has the ability to actively ‘sell’ the reasons for why joining the organisation is so exciting.
One of the campaigns that we ran, where the industry talent pool for the role was incredibly small, the session was scheduled before the application deadline with an invitation being sent to all suitable candidates who had been identified through a social media awareness-raising campaign.
The client was The National Trust and the chat was with its Director General, Dame Helen Ghosh. Despite the small pool of people potentially suitable, over 20 interested candidates joined the hour-long online session. Dame Helen was able to describe her vision for the role and how she saw it being crucial to the strategic direction of the Trust’s future.
Essex County Council were also recruiting for senior Director level roles and deployed our engagement platform to help get it done right. They chose to schedule a group session for all short-listed candidates across all roles and invited them to chat directly with the CEO of the Council, Gavin Jones. With just shy of 40 candidates attending, it was a busy chat event but the response from both candidates and client was extremely positive and helped bring the new direction of the Council to life.
Gavin loved it. Thanks for your support – most impressive all round.
– Andy Allsopp, Head of Communications and Marketing, Essex County Council
Thanks all, I’ve really enjoyed myself, and asked far more questions than I was intending too! Great engagement.
– Candidate on Essex County Council chat
Engaging with senior level candidates of this nature often has a sensitivity issue around participants’ details being visible. But the Meet & Engage platform allows you to select the privacy settings for each scheduled event.
It’s this that enabled both the National Trust and Essex County Council to hide all participant’s details in the candidate chat view.
Essex took this one step further and, due to a number of internal applicants joining the session, wanted participants’ details to be anonymous to the moderators as well.
In both cases, it meant the participants could freely ask questions without concern for their details being seen by others.
So, no matter how experienced a role you’re recruiting for, being able to offer your candidates the chance to engage with senior stakeholders within the business is the ultimate key to a fantastic candidate experience and helps open the door to employing the best talent.
