Meet & Engage

Live Virtual Engagement Tips And Tools

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Connecting on campus, through the recruitment process and beyond

With Coronavirus on everyone’s horizon, and newsfeeds being chock full of updates about large-scale events and travel plans potentially being cancelled, some serious gymnastics will be needed in order to successfully deliver recruitment events and processes that would previously have been conducted face-to-face.

It’s not news that candidates crave the personalised approach, and that priorisiting this in your recruitment activity often gives one job or university offer the edge over another. So, a great deal is at stake over the next few months, as opportunities to meet in person dwindle, or need to be abandoned altogether.

LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and others have reportedly restricted or banned travel in the light of the ongoing outbreak, with LinkedIn giving candidates the option to conduct their interviews virtually, or to reschedule until attending in person is possible.

Dan Kaplan, of Korn Ferry, suggests that – for interviewing – in countries where the virus is reaching a critical mass, companies should consider shifting to a short-term reliance on phone and video screening as a precaution.

It looks increasingly likely that it’s just a matter of time before this is the new landscape in which we are all operating.

Moving your selection processes online is no mean feat, but keeping your candidates engaged and informed via well-planned virtual offerings will be just as important.

In a poll conducted at the ISE Student Recruitment conference 2019, Budget and Time came out top as the biggest challenges to improving candidate experience in a normal landscape. But what about in this landscape? Will recruiters need to look to tech to provide the candidate engagement, and can it really be more than a poor alternative in a recruiter’s hour of need?

At Meet & Engage, we are seeing a number of our clients begin to think creatively about how they can bring their engagement to life via our virtual platform. For example, some are looking to move their outreach and keep warm events online:

  • Using live streaming to provide access to a keynote delivered by the CEO
  • Pre-recording video material that can be shared in the moderated live chat room environment to continue to bring the employer brand to life
  • Setting up polls to find out from the gathered candidates which topics they would most like to hear about from current employees, in a live streamed Q&A
  • Breaking out into regional chat groups to meet other candidates – albeit virtually – who’ll also be starting out in that regional office or team, to hear from soon-to-be colleagues and hiring managers about culture and expectations.

You haven’t got your candidates this far only to lose them due to a lack of engagement points.

Making sure that you are very easy to contact, even if your recruitment team is thin on the ground will now be especially important to candidates.

In addition to the more predictable FAQs around what to wear and what to expect, candidates approaching their start date are likely to have additional questions about the impact of Coronavirus on sick pay and flexible working, and that’s just for starters.

Using our live group chat to enable you to proactively address candidates’ shared concerns will go a long way to reassure candidates and gain their respect, whilst doing this in a 30-minute session with 40+ candidates is an excellent use of recruiter team time.

So, a lot can be done virtually to minimise the impact of losing face-to-face interaction as a weapon in your candidate engagement arsenal and, with the right tools in place, you can ensure that your candidates have plenty of easy ways to reach you, and opportunities to gather virtually, so they continue to feel that you are keeping them close, in spite of any enforced self-isolation that’s on our horizon.

If you would like to know more, please message me at kathy.johnson@meetandengage.com  or click here to request a demo online.

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