Personalizing Candidate Experience: Tailoring Automation For Engagement

4 practices to refine recruitment automation and elevate candidate experience

Posted on 11-20-2023, Read Time: 6 Min

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Highlights:

AI streamlines recruitment tasks, saving time and ensuring focus on top-tier talent, enhancing the hiring process.
AI-driven follow-ups prioritize candidates, achieving an impressive 50% response rate.
Opting for a smaller applicant pool enables tailored interactions, highlighting quality over quantity in recruitment.

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To help you enhance your recruitment automation while ensuring a personalized and engaging candidate experience, we have gathered insights from seven HR (human resources) and recruiting leaders.

From the art of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for recruitment automation to the use of augmented writing tools for personalized outreach, talent acquisition managers and recruiting managers share their strategies and examples of how they have customized automated interactions to create meaningful connections with candidates.

Leveraging AI for Recruitment
Art of the Personalized Follow-up
Generative AI for Customized Tasks
Augmented Writing Tools for Personalized Outreach

Leveraging AI for Recruitment

At Pivot Workforce, we believe that recruitment-process automation frees up time for our talent acquisition professionals to focus on creating a better candidate experience.

One of the central ways we do this is by leveraging artificial intelligence. We have ChatGPT write the core of our job descriptions and leverage this tool to assist with SEO to give our posts more reach.

We also use an artificially intelligent recruiting assistant to manage our calendars and screen qualified candidates at scale.

The automation of these two tasks alone frees up many hours each week for our TA Professionals to focus on finding the best quality talent and jobs for our clients and candidates.

Image showing Steven Brown of Pivot workforce LLC., wearing a formal shirt, short black hair with beard, smiling at the camera.

Steven Brown, Talent Acquisition Manager, PIVOT Workforce LLC.

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Art of the Personalized Follow-up

In a world where everything is commodified, sadly, recruiting is no exception. As talent advisors, we want to deliver a personalized experience, yet sourcing is a numbers game. How do we square the two?

The art of the follow-up.

Like dating, the first interaction in recruiting is crucial; too often, we overshare how great the position and company are. With automation, we often simply add two boring follow-up emails to a legacy approach.

To stand out from the crowd, make it about them, not you, and do not waste precious attention with notes that only "follow up!"

This AI research sequence has a 50% response rate:

Introductory email that shows I looked up their background and their work and invites them to chat.
Email with an AI-themed dad joke. (I get amazing replies!)
Final outreach with a short AI-themed poem.

Great candidates will do their homework instinctively. Do not waste precious space oversharing about your company: delight your prospects and ignite their curiosity.

Image showing Russell Pompea of Topaz Labs, wearing a blue t shirt, short brown hair smiling at the camera.

Russell Pompea, Recruiting Manager, Topaz Labs

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Generative AI for Customized Tasks

In our recruitment process, we employ generative AI, specifically GPT-4, to adjust our interactions based on the candidate's provided data. When a resume or cover letter comes in, the AI picks up on specific facts and data points.

For example, if someone applies for a content marketing role and mentions experience with A/B testing, the AI adjusts our test tasks accordingly. In one case, a candidate detailed their success in A/B testing for email campaigns. Leveraging this, our AI-crafted task asked them to design two different content strategies, and later, we discussed which would be more effective and why.

Image showing Eugenia Syrytsia of Editorial Link, with long brown hair, wearing a yellow striped blouse and smiling at the camera.

Eugenia Syrytsia, HR Expert, Recruiter, Editorial.Link

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Augmented Writing Tools for Personalized Outreach

Augmented writing tools tailored specifically to recruiter communications can be hugely impactful, increasing efficiency and engagement while preserving the voice of the author and personalized feel. I have seen recruiters firsthand say it gives them more confidence when doing cold outreach to executives and that they get more and better responses from their outreach. This is a great example of AI having a positive impact on people and processes, leading to better outcomes for recruiters.