Attracting Top Talent With Candidate Experience Software

Your public sector organization may be a great place to work, but does your candidate experience show it? Learn how government CRM software can help.

Article Highlights

• Problem: Poor candidate experiences make it challenging to hire top talent
• Solution: NEOGOV’s HR recruiting software
• Benefits: Create a faster and more positive recruiting experience for qualified candidates

From the moment an applicant reads a job description, candidates begin to form opinions about the type of work environment your agency provides. And in today’s quiet hiring crisis, where applications for public sector roles have decreased by 74% in the past six years, every interaction matters. That’s because candidates who have a poor experience during your hiring process can choose to pursue work elsewhere. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the factors that contribute to a poor candidate experience, then explain how NEOGOV’s candidate experience software, Attract and Insight, can help your public sector organization overcome these roadblocks and hire qualified professionals.

Problem: Poor Candidate Experience

Today’s candidates conduct thorough research to determine whether a potential employer meets their needs for flexibility and a culture of respect. If you lack the tools to promote a positive and consistent employer brand, individuals may decide you’re not the agency for them – before you even get the chance to share a conversation. 

Any outdated, manual processes you use to track candidates further impede your ability to create a positive candidate experience. Without access to a centralized, cloud-based system to manage candidate relationships and track applications through your recruitment funnel, your hiring process grinds to a standstill. Time-to-hire in the public sector is already an average three times longer than in the private sector, and candidates aren’t going to stick around for a lengthy recruitment process. 

Your communication throughout the hiring process also contributes to candidate experience. Individuals who receive feedback on the same day of an interview are more likely to continue their relationship with the organization than those who don’t. Conversely, any of the following poor approaches to communication reduce your chances of securing talent: 

• Not communicating next steps 
• Not informing candidates about delays or where they stand in the process
• Not offering feedback if you reject a candidate
• Not leveraging candidates for other jobs they may be a better fit for

To sum it up, the less proactive you are about facilitating an efficient hiring process and keeping individuals up-to-speed, the more likely it is for candidates to become frustrated with their experience and drop out of your hiring process.

Solution: HR Recruiting Software

There’s a straightforward way to make your hiring process more competitive. NEOGOV’s candidate experience software, Attract and Insight, facilitate positive encounters at every stage of your recruitment process.

Attract: Government CRM Software

NEOGOV’s government CRM software, Attract, helps you source quality candidates by: 

• Showcasing employer branding efforts 
• Capturing candidate leads
• Managing relationships
• Automating communications 

You can use Attract to support your employer branding efforts with custom landing pages for your website. By highlighting the vital work of departments and advertising events or other agency initiatives, you make a positive first impression and generate interest in your organization. Attract also ensures you don’t lose any of these leads by capturing candidate information with forms and calls to action. This lets you leverage new channels for recruitment and source both active and passive candidates. 

Because you can also use Attract to manage leads in one single, cloud-based location, this government CRM software reduces the headaches associated with tracking candidate information. Rather than searching through file folders or notebooks, use this candidate relationship management software to tag candidates and organize them into easily-searchable talent pools. This system frees up time for you to focus on the critical work of developing deep relationships, rather than trying to remember what position you thought a candidate would be a good fit for. 

When the right position opens up at your organization, contact candidates directly using Attract’s personalized messaging system. You can also launch email campaigns to notify individuals or entire groups about job openings, upcoming job fairs, or other events, ensuring you’re maximizing your talent pool. Because Attract allows you to maintain proactive communication with candidates throughout the entire recruitment funnel, talented professionals feel eager to apply to work at your agency when jobs come available.

Insight: Applicant Tracking Software

NEOGOV’s applicant tracking software, Insight, integrates with Attract so your hiring process can move seamlessly from sourcing to active hiring. As individuals apply to your organization, Insight screens and ranks candidates by score. These weighted scores and rankings are based on screening protocols, tests, and interviews so you can quickly narrow down candidates and see the best fit. Our applicant tracking software even screens through minimum qualification requirements according to specific job questions, drastically reducing the time needed to sift through applications. 

You can also maintain proactive communications and give candidates a sense of control with Insight’s candidate self-service portal. This portal provides essential features to promote transparency and streamline communication between applicants and human resources, including the ability for applicants to: 

• Self-schedule written exams, oral panel interviews, and other performance tests. 
• Review the status of applications and monitor where they are in the hiring process.
• Add references to their candidate profile.
• View HR emails sent to their job seeker inbox. 

Insight demonstrates that your organization respects candidates’ time by facilitating a straightforward application process. The features listed in the table below work in tandem with GovernmentJobs.com, NEOGOV’s job portal, to increase the size and quality of your applicant pool. In fact, when you use GovernmentJobs.com, your agency is 177% more likely to attract a qualified hire than on LinkedIn, and 67% more likely than on Indeed. 

Benefits

NEOGOV’s government CRM software and applicant tracking software foster an efficient hiring process that prioritizes the candidate experience and enables you to move effortlessly from sourcing to recruitment. Because you can integrate Attract with Insight, you don’t need to spend time manually tracking candidate information or entering information twice. Instead, HR professionals and hiring teams gain back valuable time to spend on more critical initiatives and objectives, like cultivating deep relationships with candidates. 

Since you have more time to focus on these proactive communications, you keep candidates engaged throughout the entire recruitment funnel. These streamlined processes also help you move candidates through the hiring process quickly, so you lose fewer talented professionals to the private sector (and other competitor organizations) as a result.

Final Thoughts

NEOGOV’s CRM software for local government promotes effective candidate sourcing, improves candidate communications, and speeds up the hiring process. Schedule a no-obligation demo today if you’re ready to learn more about how Attract and Insight ensure candidates have the best hiring experience possible.