According to many thought leaders (me included) the emerging battlefield for sourcing & recruiting is no longer the ability to find great talent, but rather the ability to engage them.  Here are some easy to adopt ways you can improve your candidate engagement ratios and separate your opportunity from the noise.

Kill the Stogy Job Description

Its perfectly understandable due to many levels of regulation that job descriptions have to be fairly sterol.  Who says you cannot have the official job description but your “marketing language” can’t be livened up a bit.  Look at how copy is written for consumer facing companies like Groupon and Fab.com…they have great copy around items that already have inherent value.  They do this because it makes the marketing stickier… if you read something witty you have a far greater chance of remembering it.

Create Talent Commnities

What I refer to as talent community is NOT the same as you see often peppered in language sold by Applicant Tracking SAAS companies.  I am referring to a real community… very similar to your own personal LinkedIn, Facebook, and twitter community.  If you can create compelling content and contribute to the audience you are trying to build community on a 10:1 ratio (give 10 times for every 1 referral requested) you have a great chance driving great candidates off the benches and into your company.

Original Content Around Your Opportunity

Your hiring manager is a wealth of potential content.  Hopefully they have an interesting take on what makes working at your company unique, compelling, and rewarding.  Capture this in whatever medium your most comfortable.  Not a writer, do a video blog.  Don’t like the camera, do an internet radio show.  The idea is to be able to glean the culture to the candidate.  Sometimes a cultural fit means even more then skill level to an organization.

Easy Ways to Improve Candidate Engagement

How have you been able to increase candidate engagement?