What Is Candidate-Centric Recruitment?

In the race to fill open positions, it’s easy to focus on placing a qualified candidate in the job quickly while overlooking everything that happens along the way to get to that point. However, in a world where the best candidates are increasingly particular about the types of companies they want to work for, each applicant’s experience during your hiring process is paramount. 

We’ll explore candidate-centric recruitment, which is a strategy that can help you fill vacant positions with highly qualified workers while reducing turnover and developing a strong reputation as a great workplace.

Candidate-Centric Recruitment Definition

Candidate-centric recruitment is an approach to recruiting that prioritizes the candidate’s needs and desires. Rather than the primary focus being to fill open positions quickly, the main objective of candidate-centric recruitment is to develop and maintain long-term candidate relationships. 

Here are some characteristics of candidate-centric recruiting:

• Prioritizes relationship-building over filling positions
• Aims to make candidates feel valued and engaged
• Focuses on what the company can do for the candidate versus what the candidate can do for the company
• Maintains consistent communication
• Treats candidates like customers
• Seeks alignment between company goals and candidate goals

Candidate-centric recruiting contrasts employer-centric recruiting, in which the company’s needs drive activities.

Benefits of Using Candidate-Centric Recruiting Strategies

Candidate-centric recruitment offers numerous advantages that benefit both employers and the candidates they’re recruiting. Adopting a candidate-centric approach to hiring can help your organization:

Attract high performers

Great candidates know their worth, and they can afford to be discerning in today’s market. Nearly half of job seekers in competitive fields like tech say they’ve turned down a job offer because of a negative experience during the hiring process. 

Providing a hiring experience that’s focused on the candidate will help you become an employer that top talent want to work for rather than a company they have to be convinced to join. 

Make recruiting easier

When you focus on building long-term relationships with candidates, they develop an understanding of and respect for your values. When the time comes for you to hire someone with their skills, getting them to apply is a no-brainer. You can also bring in applications faster and at a lower cost when you have an existing pool of nurtured candidates from which to recruit. 

Increase your offer acceptance rate

When you practice candidate-centric recruiting, you can make job offers that are highly in tune with what candidates need and want. This can lead to a higher proportion of accepted offers, which saves time and maximizes hiring efficiency. 

Improve retention

Starting the candidate experience off on a positive note sets the tone for an employee’s entire tenure with your organization. Strong candidate relationships breed strong employees who are invested in being part of your team rather than merely collecting a paycheck. This leads to less turnover and higher retention rates. 

Maintain a positive public image

One of the core concepts of providing an excellent candidate experience is to ensure that all applicants–even those who are not ultimately hired—walk away with a positive perception of how they were treated. Happy candidates contribute to a good reputation, not only among job seekers but the market as a whole, which is beneficial from an overall business standpoint. 

How to Implement Candidate-Centric Recruitment

Follow these steps to establish and maintain long-term, candidate-focused relationships:

Use candidate personas

Candidate personas are like a character sketch of your ideal applicant for a particular role. They drill down into the specifics of the audience you’re trying to reach, outlining in detail their skills, background, and personality traits. 

Using candidate personas helps you stay laser-focused on the type of person you’re looking for when recruiting, which leads to hyper-relevant recruitment messages that resonate closely with the talent pools you’re hoping to connect with.

Seek candidate input

You can’t implement a candidate-centric recruitment strategy without enlisting candidates’ help. Conduct research among your candidate personas to learn what drives the individuals in these groups: their career aspirations, work styles, values, and non-negotiables when deciding where they want to work. You can also tap prior applicants for their input using candidate feedback surveys.

Incorporate the feedback you receive from these groups into your recruitment marketing and strategy at every phase of your hiring process.

Map out an intentional candidate journey

You may have already defined your hiring funnel–that is, the various phases a candidate must go through from the time they learn about your job opening to the time they’re onboarded as a new hire. Each phase should have corresponding action items and messaging points that are part of a broader candidate journey. In a candidate-centric recruitment strategy, that journey may take place over many months or even years, so it should consist of many intentionally designed parts. 

For example, let’s say a candidate applies for a position and is screened out after a phone interview. In a traditional recruiting program, that candidate might be sent a polite rejection email and never contacted again. In a candidate-centric recruitment strategy, however, that’s just the beginning of their relationship with the company. You might:

• Send that candidate tailored feedback to provide additional context on why they were screened out
• Provide resources to help them become a stronger candidate in the future
• Nurture their interest with testimonials from happy employees
• Invite them to a webinar where they can ask questions about employment with your company 
• Keep them informed about new openings that are a match for their skills and encourage them to apply again

The second experience is much more thorough, not to mention enjoyable, for the candidate. Rather than sending them away disappointed and potentially discouraged, you’ve cultivated an engaging relationship you can leverage to fill future openings.

Craft regularly scheduled, tailored messaging campaigns

As you can see, a candidate-centric approach requires a heavier lift in terms of recruitment marketing content. You’ll need to stay in touch with candidates using a regular cadence of messages that are relevant to their situation and interests. 

Email is a great place to start, but you don’t have to rely solely on written content in emails. You can also leverage:

• Blog posts
• Social media
• Video
• Text messaging
• Webinars
• Podcasts 
• Infographics

Pretty much any form of content can be useful in engaging and nurturing candidates, provided that it’s appropriate for their stage of the candidate journey. 

Related: Best Recruiting Messages to Enhance Your Candidate Outreach

Be accessible

Candidate-centric recruitment isn’t one-sided. In order for your target audiences to feel a meaningful connection with your employer brand, they must be able to communicate with you–and actually get a response–easily. 

Being accessible might mean using a recruiting chatbot to provide answers to frequently asked job seeker questions, hosting a virtual hiring fair to connect with prospective applicants face to face, having a presence at events within your industry and community, and being responsive to replies on any of your recruitment marketing campaigns. 

Actively manage your reputation

The beauty and the downfall of the internet is that anyone can say anything for the world to see. This also applies to your employer brand. Selective candidates are paying attention to what’s being said, and you should too. 

Reply to questions and comments on social media posts, and be tactful in your engagement. Thank commenters–even negative ones–for their input and publicly respond to any concerns they’ve raised. For example, if your organization receives a less-than-glowing review on a site like Glassdoor, don’t just leave the negative comment unaddressed. Post a calm, thoughtful response that emphasizes your employer value proposition and outlines steps you’re taking to remedy the issue they’ve pointed out, if any.

Drawbacks of Candidate-Centric Recruitment

Candidate-centric recruitment has some downsides, and it’s important to be aware of these when deciding on the best approach to your goals. 

Time-consuming

As we’ve touched on above, building relationships and catering to candidates’ needs requires a high level of communication, personalization, and engagement, much more so than if you’re sending generic campaigns to large segments of your talent pool. This can mean more time is spent on each individual candidate.

Resource intensive

Tailored messaging means more content must be created, and specialized software is required to distribute it. This can necessitate added resources in the form of recruiting personnel, training, and technology. It can also be challenging to scale, making it difficult for enterprise-level organizations. 

Reduced emphasis on fit

By necessity, there are times when candidates’ and employees’ needs must take a backseat to the demands of the business. One example is culture fit; not every employee is a good fit for every organization, regardless of their qualifications. Prioritizing candidate needs above all else may lead to a reduced emphasis on important aspects of a strong hire, like culture fit. 

Unrealistic expectations

If the experience of actually working for a company isn’t as great as the experience of being hired, there will be problems. Candidate-centric recruiting can’t exist in a silo; it must be coordinated with equally intentional initiatives for employee engagement, development, and retention. 

If you believe your organization could benefit from a more candidate-focused hiring method, a professional staffing firm can help you shift your approach. The team at 4 Corner Resources can help you with activities like building ideal candidate personas, crafting compelling job descriptions, and maintaining consistent communications with candidates for an enjoyable and engaging candidate experience.

Get in touch with our experienced recruiting professionals to begin reaching qualified talent today.