Top 5 candidate engagement tools & platforms to increase candidate engagement  

Sifting through resumes and cover letters, sourcing candidates, screening them for skills and experience, making a selection process for your team, and hiring a candidate– just to hear the next day that they’re leaving for another job? It’s not something you expected. Still, it’s a problem you see more and more as the job market continues to tighten.

It doesn't have to be an ordeal, though. You can streamline the process and find a great employee—all in less time than it would've taken otherwise! The secret is to offer better candidate engagement!

In fact, more than 80% of candidates surveyed said that a positive experience with the company affected their decision to accept an offer.

This means that how you interact with candidates can help you find the best fit for your company and ensure that they accept your offer.

Here are five tools that can help you to improve candidate engagement and streamline your hiring process and make quality hires; 

Why should you opt for a candidate engagement tool? 

Candidate engagement tools are designed to help you retain candidates and provide them with the information they need to decide. This can anything from interview scheduling to providing more information about your company.  

When you keep the candidate engaged throughout the recruitment process, you can acquire the best talent for your organization. In fact, companies that took the time to develop a positive candidate hiring experience reported an improvement of 70% in the quality of hires compared with those that did not.

Thus, it’s essential to leverage candidate engagement to attract the best talent. And here are the top reason why candidate engagement matters the most during the recruitment cycle,

1. Remember that multiple companies are hiring at the same time

Think from the candidate's perspective. If they are actively searching for a job or a job change, they would probably have applied to multiple job openings. Thus, you are not the only organization that slides to their inbox and offers the chance to appear for the recruitment stage. 

If you don’t notify them of their application status or further schedule, they will fall into the hands of your competitors. On top of that, you may miss a bright talent just because of poor candidate engagement. So, put yourself ahead of your competitors by keeping the talents engaged with all the actions happening throughout the recruitment cycle and keep them excited to work with your company. 

2. Gain access to in-demand talents 

With passive candidates outnumbering active ones, it's becoming harder and harder to find quality talent, as nearly 70% of the candidates are passive. This puts a question mark on acquiring in-demand candidates for a company. 

You have to enhance your candidate engagement strategies to gain an edge over other companies hunting for the best talents. When doing so, you can outperform competitors and gain candidates' trust. 

A strong sense of trust in your brand makes it easier for you to attract new talent and increases your chances of retaining the talent you already sourced. By providing a candidate with information about the company and ensuring they have all the resources needed to make an informed decision, you will improve their experience. This will lead to happier and more satisfied employees in the long run.

3. Cuts your time to rehire a candidate 

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Notably, the average time to hire is three to four weeks, and only 25% of respondents say they can fill open roles in less than two weeks. But if you have a strong recruitment brand backed up by solid candidate engagement, you can reduce your time to rehire and fill your openings shortly. 

If your recruitment brand appeals to job seekers and aligns with the company you are hiring for, it can directly impact their decision-making process. When you leverage this, you can match the perfect professionals to the company that you are hiring for –while trimming up the time to rehire talents. 

4. Creates a balanced recruitment process

When a business engages candidates, its hiring initiative becomes more compelling and organic—rather than the traditional approach that puts off applicants. On top of that, it creates a better candidate experience, leading to higher retention rates, lower turnover costs, and greater employee satisfaction.

By taking a more modern approach to recruitment, you’re also setting your company apart from the competition. You can attract top talent by being creative and leveraging technology in new ways while making the job search experience pleasant for everyone involved.

5 best tools to beef up your candidate engagement 

It’s important to map, monitor, and review your recruitment process to ensure that you are identifying the most efficient ways of attracting new talent.

Now tools can do all the heavy lifting for you, helping to streamline your recruitment process and save you time.

Technology can help streamline the process of engaging with candidates by offering solutions, tools, and platforms. Here are the top five tools you should consider to hand out better candidate engagement:

1. Nurturebox 

Nurturebox helps you put your candidate outsourcing and engagement on autopilot and lets your TA team concentrate more on other matters. With a single-browser extension, you can export vetted candidate profiles to your ATS in no time. On top of that, it helps you create automated campaigns to keep the candidate engagement string throughout the recruitment loop. 

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Nurturebox gives you the advantage of contacting your candidates on multiple platforms without sitting in the same inbox and praying for the candidate to open and respond to your schedules. To keep your team on top of everything, it provides analytics that helps you pinpoint what’s working and what doesn’t base on the candidate’s behavior with your efforts. 

Notably, with the automated workflows and simplified activity log, you can even track what has previously happened with your candidate preventing the error of contacting the same person twice. 

Features of Nurturebox

• Accurate candidate data: With the browser extension and integration, you can import the verified contact details of your candidate in no time. 
• Simple integration: You can integrate Nurturebox with top ATS systems to streamline your screening process and candidate engagement under one roof. 
• Fill your pipeline with potential job seekers: You can pull out potential candidates from platforms like LinkedIn and Naukri with a single click. 
• Multi-touch point engagement: Nurturebox helps you to engage with your candidates through the platform where they are most active. The best part is you can automate everything and let it handle things.
• Automate without sacrificing personalization: With editable email templates, you can simply automate workflows without having to cry over personalization. 
• Track and improve: To stay updated with what’s working and doesn’t, Nurturebox comes with clean analytics that help you track your candidate’s behavior and improvise to bring off better results.

Pros 

• Automate every candidate engagement workflow without losing the personal touch. 
• Ability to contact through multiple platforms without getting stuck with one. 
• Access to hundreds of quality candidates from social media platforms. 
• Accumulates verified data of each candidate into your ATS. 
• Availability of activity log to oversee things that happened with every single candidate. 
• Availability of free forever plan.

Cons

• It lets you integrate only with top ATS systems. 

2. Jobvite 

Jobvite can wear multiple hats and helps you find and stick to the best talents. Jobvite helps you craft a career site and offer exceptional candidate experience by narrating the story behind the brand with personalized content. With the availability of multichannel requirement campaigns, you can get the word out of your job opening and attract the best talents via multiple channels.

Armed with intelligent AI sourcing, you can get into the inbox of qualified candidates and invite them to apply for the job. Moreover, it lets you engage with candidates through multiple platforms ensuring no messages remain unseen. With the analytics feature, you can focus on how candidates engage throughout the campaign and make informed decisions. 

Features of Jobvite 

• Career site with Jobvite: With Jobvite’s career site, you can cater to your candidates with custom engaging content and job recommendations. 
• Supercharged ATS: With ATS and Onboarding capabilities, your team can create a customized process to hire and onboard candidates efficiently. It also comes with referral capabilities—so you can focus on the most qualified talent!
• Keep track of communication: Candidate communication tracking records every exchange between your company and each candidate in various applications within the database.
• Fill the communication gap: Reach your candidates where they are and when it's most convenient for them. Send multiple messages at once without lifting a finger!

Pros 

• The help of a candidate management workflow simplifies the management of your pipeline.
• It eases the process of interview scheduling. 
• Ability to integrate with multiple platforms.

Cons 

• Reporting and analytics features sometimes throw wrong information. 
• Poor customer service. 
• The interface is populated with features, making finding the feature you need challenging. 
• New features won’t work to the best and you will get a spike in your bills. 
• You will get issues with scheduling interviews with your candidates. 

3. Personio 

Personio combines all core HR tasks, like personnel administration and recruiting, in one software application. It ensures cross-departmental processes by seamlessly integrating with other systems so that employees can access the information they need to do their jobs more effectively.

With a few clicks, you can spread the news of your job opening across 600 job boards and fill your pipeline with qualified candidates. Personio’s corporate career pages give candidates a first look at your company and its culture, helping them decide if it’s the right fit. Moreover, it offers people workflow automation that lets you manage multiple tasks simultaneously. 

Features of Personio 

• Effective vacancy management: Personio offers all the tools you need to recruit and manage candidates. Create, publish, and update job listings; get feedback from team members on applicants—all in one place.
• Reach the best candidates: Get maximum exposure with 15+ free job boards, and hire top talent even faster with premium campaigns across 600 boards.
• Unified dashboard: Personio's dashboard lets you analyze which channels work best, so you can leverage them to their full potential. All applicants land directly in Personio, ready for review and processing with ease—saving time while improving efficiency!
• Workflow automation: People Workflow Automation makes it possible for your company to do more with less effort by turning manual processes into automated workflows that connect tools, align stakeholders and act as a catalyst for business growth.

Pros 

• Availability of multiple features that help you hire the best talent. 
• Best customer support that helps you solve your query fast. 
• Comes with multiple integration options. 

Cons

• Recruiting part is less intuitive compared with others. 
• Implementation costs you time and effort. 
• Clunky UX. 
• No multiple communication gateways to establish candidate engagement. 
• Some features have only basic functionality. 
• You have to deal with periodic bugs with the workflows. 

4. Phenom 

Phenom covers everything a talent acquisition team needs, from candidate sourcing to analytics analysis. It comes with AI intelligence that pinpoints the talents by prioritizing their top skills needed for the job opening. 

By leveraging the personalized career page and chatbot, Phenom helps you capture talents without losing them at your fingertips. You can also run automated campaigns that help you to convince candidates to apply for the job opening. It also has the SMS feature with automated interview scheduling tools to enrich candidate engagement, which helps you eliminate repetitive tasks. 

Features of Phenom 

• Career site: This helps you maximize your hiring effectiveness by creating a personalized career site that matches candidates with jobs based on skills and interests.
• CRM: TA professionals can use talent acquisition software to build, engage, and track candidate pipelines. The system also provides actionable insights that enhance productivity by automating the process of creating dynamic lists.
• Campaigns: It makes it possible for talent marketers and recruiters to personalize recruitment campaigns through automation, thus increasing the number of qualified applicants who apply to a job posting.
• Automate campaigns: Phenom allows you to automate scheduling and rescheduling of interviews and provides more room for your team to focus on things that matter the most.
• Video assessment and analytics: With video assessment, you can enhance the efficiency of your hiring process without sacrificing candidate engagement. Moreover, analytics helps you stay updated with everything that happens with your recruitment process, allowing you to make informed decisions. 

Pros 

• Ability to detect passive candidates in your pipeline. 
• Customizable marketing campaigns for a specific group of candidates.
• It helps you communicate seamlessly with the candidates. 

Cons

• Some users have reported that the reporting system is challenging. 
• No availability of multichannel communication to enhance candidate engagement. 
• Cumbersome operations. 
• Poor customer service and slow loading issues. 

5. Talenthub 

Talenthub helps companies build a positive reputation in the eyes of prospective employees. It offers a platform for candidates to share their experiences working with your company, which can be accessed by other candidates looking for opportunities. This allows you to learn about what works well in your recruiting strategy and where improvements need to be made.

They collect candidates' data, analyze job ads, confirmation emails, and rejection emails, and present the results to others. This can help you make more informed decisions about your recruiting efforts, which leads to better hires.

Features of Talenthub

• Job management: It helps you collect all your job postings under a single roof and manage them effectively. 
• Feedback: With a custom survey, you can collect feedback from your candidates and refine your strategies according to the scores. 
• Analytics and reporting: Let you oversee your campaign's performance in a simple dashboard and refine strategies accordingly! 

Pros 

• It allows you to get more accurate feedback from candidates.
• It makes it easier to identify trends that can help attract more candidates and reduce turnover.
• It gives you a better understanding of what candidates are looking for in an employer, which helps improve your overall recruiting strategy. 

Cons 

• It takes time to implement and manage, making it difficult for small organizations without dedicated HR departments. 
• It doesn’t have enriched features to enhance candidate management. 
• Only have selective features to help you get the feedback from candidates. 

Stick to the best and boost your performance

The competitive marketplace, shortage of talents, and the need to build a creative workforce put the pressure to beef up the hiring process. The only way to hook the talents until the end cycle is to provide them with better candidate engagement. Even though you can narrow down the software available in the market, it’s tough to find and stick with the right software that exactly solves your issue with candidate engagement. 

To narrow it further and pick the best, look at each software's features along with its pros and cons. When you weigh features' pros and cons, the best software is Nurturebox. The reason?

It acts as the one-stop solution with multiple features you need. From sourcing candidates from multiple platforms to keep them engaged throughout the process, it got you covered which only selective software can offer. With notable features and a simple interface, you can differentiate your organization between candidates and make the best talent yours! 

Still, wondering whether Nurturebox serves your needs? Test it yourself by starting with free credits or booking a demo to explore its potential. Remember that candidate engagement is the key to your recruitment success, and Nurturebox will give you that edge!