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3 minute read

How to Attract and Engage the Digital Candidate: Part 1

This is the first edition of a three-part series on attracting and engaging today’s digital candidates.

The way candidates apply for a job mirrors how anyone would buy a product or service today. They go through a similar brand discovery journey, starting from brand exposure to being an engaged customer, with the majority of the touchpoints being online. HR and talent acquisition leaders need to start thinking like consumer product marketers and start using data-driven content, engagement tools, branding campaigns, targeting and retargeting strategies as well as online advertising and social media tools to attract the best talent.

So how should companies adapt to shifts in candidates’ expectations in this age where everything is digital, and reinvent their talent acquisition and engagement strategies?

1. Compelling Job Postings

There is a fine line between a job description and a job advertisement. It takes more than a summary of the company’s business and one sentence about the job to attract good talent. Singaporeans are known to be passive online users — scrolling through their feed and only stopping once in a while to read and quickly moving on. This is a critical hint for hiring managers to change things up – from bland bullet point descriptions to animated, stylised advertising copy. We can no longer estimate the power of compelling job descriptions in inciting interest, inquiry and a response from a potential candidate.

Candidates want to know more about the role, what is the specific job scope and what can they gain from it. Therefore, you should include information such as salary, employee benefits (e.g. work from home policies), team structure and organisational culture where possible to make the job advertisement more appealing.

2. Partner with a recruiter

The 2017 Randstad Employer Brand Research found that 55% of job seekers in Singapore prefer to partner with a recruiter when looking for a job. While this may be surprising to most companies, job seekers in Singapore understand that a specialised recruiter can help them open many doors. This means that the recruiter will most likely be your first point of contact with your potential talent. For this reason, we often advise companies to work exclusively with one recruiter to ensure a quality candidate who is already committed to the job from the very beginning.

When a candidate is approached by multiple recruiters for the same role, their experience with your brand becomes diluted and fragmented. Through an exclusive partnership, recruiters embed themselves into your company culture and are equipped with the right knowledge to communicate your brand and culture consistently to potential candidates.

3. Branding for the future

Another way to ensure a steady pipeline of talent for the future is to participate actively in campus roadshows and career fairs. As most candidates start their search journey online either on the company’s career page or on job portals such as myCareerPortal, it is important to have a strong online presence, and this starts from the very beginning.

Whether or not you are hiring at all, it is important to have a presence at these career fairs (online and offline) to build awareness and consideration for your employer’s brand. These job seekers may become the talent that you seek, which is why some companies invest time and resources to engage these candidates — which will help pave the way for future talent acquisition initiatives.

This article is contributed by Randstad Singapore.

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