In today's hyper-competitive job market, organizations are facing an unprecedented challenge in attracting and engaging top talent. The increasing competition for talent and skills has made it critical for talent teams to create a consumer-like experience that resonates with candidates. Just as consumers expect personalized interactions and seamless experiences from their favorite brands, candidates now demand the same level of engagement and attention from potential employers. This shift in expectations has prompted talent leaders to explore candidate engagement solutions and rise to meet the evolving needs of candidates.

This leaves talent acquisition leaders facing a pressing question: How can we embrace technology that will help us better compete for the talent and skills we need? Here we’ll explore the latest trends and innovations in candidate engagement technology designed to create a consumer-like experiences that engage and captivate top talent. From leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver more personalized content and experiences to more accurately tapping into the right skills and potential, technology can give recruiting teams a competitive edge in the talent market.

Decoding the candidate engagement tech landscape

Candidate engagement technology is designed to enable talent teams to create a compelling and personalized candidate experience that captures the attention and interest of top talent. By using marketing tools like nurture campaigns, targeted landing pages and conversational interactions (such as text or chatbot conversations), your organization can highlight your unique employer brand and stand out in a crowded talent landscape. Embracing candidate engagement technology allows you to build meaningful connections with candidates, nurture relationships and ultimately attract the right talent for the organization.

But just like the marketing tech landscape, this segment can be complicated, with various vendors using terminology differently, buzzwords being overused and lines blurring between product categories. For our purposes, we’ll look at three main areas, though there is a great deal of overlap between these three camps:

• Recruitment marketing:

  Typically used to help recruiting teams market the employer brand, along with open roles, to candidates, recruitment marketing can include career sites, landing pages, job advertisements and social posts. It almost always includes, and usually centers on, tailored candidate outreach through email, text messaging and other modern communication platforms, like WhatsApp.

  Many recruitment marketing technologies also include candidate relationship management (CRM) functionality, along with text recruiting and chatbot capabilities. But the primary role of the recruitment marketing platform is to enable high-quality engagement with the right candidates at the right time, so the focus will be on creating hyper-personalized candidate journeys that successfully convert jobseekers into applicants and eventually hires.

  Key providers to watch:

  • iCIMS — known for their robust personalization capabilities
  • Phenom — a pioneer in the talent experience space
  • Boostpoint — revolutionizing job ads with AI

• Candidate relationship management (CRM):

  The CRM is the engine behind personalizing the candidate experience. Designed to capture talent profiles and manage audience segmentation, CRMs connect the dots between data so experiences and engagement can be both tailored, and automated. CRMs can help you uncover specific audiences (e.g., front-end engineers who have sales or marketing skills), understand how different audiences react and engage with different content, see who is already being engaged by another recruiter and trigger tailored communications after a candidate takes action, such as visiting your career site. So, in essence, the CRM is often what enables the recruitment marketing features to run effectively.

  Key providers to watch:

  • Beamery — foundations in data quality backed by AI to automate everything including audience segmentation
  • Eightfold — while not your traditional CRM, the focus on talent intelligence set a new precedent for understanding candidates
  • Gem — a modern AI-powered CRM experience

• Chatbot and text recruiting:

  Chatbots and text recruiting solutions supply the conversational interface that makes candidate engagement more modern, more effective and more convenient.

  Chatbots, also known as conversational AI, are revolutionizing the way candidates interact with companies during the recruitment process. These intelligent digital assistants provide a conversational experience, allowing candidates to learn more about specific roles, engage with your employer brand and even apply for a role. Not only does this free up recruiter time to focus on having great conversations with engaged candidates, but also enables passive candidates to engage with new potential employers at any time, opening up wider pools of talent.

  Similarly, text recruiting is modernizing candidate engagement by meeting candidates where they live — on their phones. Text recruiting enables recruiters to connect with candidates directly through SMS messages and other text-based platforms such as WhatsApp. Traditionally, text messages have higher and faster response rates than emails, making them a great vehicle for outreach to potential applicants. And once again, it allows for asynchronous communication which makes it possible for more candidates to take part compared to more traditional methods like phone outreach.

  Key providers to watch:

  • Paradox — leaders in the industry known for the human-like conversation quality and their conversational approach to applicant tracking and candidate engagement
  • Sense — up-and-coming disruptor offering modern engagement with a simplified experience
  • Humanly — AI CoPilot to handle hiring conversations at scale

What trends are impacting candidate engagement technology?

Candidate engagement technology is constantly evolving to adapt to key trends in the recruitment landscape. We saw this when mobile devices became the norm — technology vendors started focusing more heavily on creating mobile-friendly and mobile-first experiences to help reach candidates more easily. This next wave of trends won’t be as clear-cut as making the experience more mobile-friendly. Instead, the latest advances in technology will open up countless possibilities to improve the candidate engagement experience. Here are a few to keep an eye on:

• Artificial intelligence (AI)

  Not surprisingly, AI tops the list of trends, but it’s because it has the biggest potential of any technology we’ve seen since the internet to disrupt how recruiting is done. We’re already starting to see the effects of generative AI (GAI) in candidate engagement, including:

  • Data management: Automatic de-duplication of candidate profiles and intelligent merging of contact records help keep CRMs clean and able to power the right experiences at the right time. AI is already making this a reality, improving the experience for candidates while simultaneously simplifying things for recruiters and hiring managers.
  • Data segmentation: AI makes it possible to automatically segment audiences based on traits and attributes, so pipelines are just ready to go when they’re needed. And AI’s ability to get smarter over time means it can recommend audiences based on patterns it finds in the existing data, moving beyond mere task completion robot to become a true assistant to hiring teams.
  • Targeted engagement: Candidate engagement centers on getting the right message to the right people at the right time. AI can help with all three — suggesting the right content, the right audience and timing to engage. For example, Boostpoint uses AI to learn about your brand and your roles to create targeted job ads designed to better engage jobseekers. Meanwhile, many CRMs and recruitment marketing platforms are looking to generative AI to suggest tailored outreach to candidates based on their profile and the targeted role. And AI can suggest the best time to send a message such as an email or text message, increasing the likelihood of response.
  • Always on engagement: AI-powered conversational interfaces, like chatbots, enable candidates to engage with brands at any time, receiving human-like responses when it’s convenient for them. This makes it easier to engage passive talent you might have missed before due to their work schedule and reduces recruiter fatigue. Continued advances in AI, including generative AI, mean that when properly trained, these conversations will get smarter and feel even more human over time, making chatbots a greater extension of the brand and not just a recruiting tool.
  • Better insights: Beyond charts and tables, AI can analyze data to uncover patterns we might never see with human eyes. Advances in predictive analytics will be able to better forecast candidate availability, predict candidate success and recommend optimizations to recruitment strategies by tapping into the most effective candidate engagement tactics. On top of this, AI can help identify and correct bias in our processes, leading to fairer hiring outcomes and greater diversity.

  Right now, the AI behind many of these advances comes in the form of a CoPilot, meaning an AI assistant (i.e., a chatbot) where the recruiter or the candidate engages the system through prompts and questions. In the future, however, be prepared for AI to become more proactive — learning what needs to happen and executing on a plan of action with little more than a quick sign-off needed from a human to get things done. Once this happens, AI won’t just extend human capabilities, it will truly elevate them, enabling people to focus on the most important things while the rest of the work runs itself.

• Skills

  In the past, recruiters focused on finding candidates with the right titles, years of experience and diplomas from colleges and universities of pedigree to fill open roles, believing these factors to be the best predictors of success in a role. However, as job roles and technology have advanced, organizations have found themselves short on the skills they need to move their business forward. This has led many organizations to realize that the traditional markers of a “good fit” candidate have led them to filter out the very skills their organizations need. The new approach to candidate sourcing and engagement is centered on skills.

  • Skills inference: Automatic de-duplication of candidate profiles and intelligent merging of contact records help keep CRMs clean and able to power the right experiences at the right time. AI is already making this a reality, improving the experience for candidates while simultaneously simplifying things for recruiters and hiring managers.
  • Skill matching: Going beyond traditional resume parsing, today’s skills matching recruiting platforms use sophisticated algorithms and machine learning to extract, detect and infer skills for a candidate, even if not explicitly listed in their resume or LinkedIn profile. This empowers recruiters and hiring managers to broaden their talent pipelines, helping to uncover the skills the organization needs most, faster. This also allows for fairer candidate ranking, since it eliminates areas of bias and focuses specifically on the skills needed for a role.
  • Candidate feedback: Candidates today often complain about not receiving high-quality feedback after being turned down for a role they’ve applied to. In reality, most recruiting teams simply don’t have the time to personally review and respond to every candidate that applies to an open role. That’s why so many organizations rely on CRMs and recruitment marketing platforms (or their ATS) to help disqualify candidates that don’t meet minimum qualifications and send them automated rejection emails. But with skills as the focus for any role, organizations can easily let candidates know where their skills fell short of what was needed for the role. Some organizations will even provide candidates with recommended learning paths to increase their chances of landing a similar role in the future. This builds far more credibility and trust with candidates — who may not be a fit for that open role today but could easily be a fit for a different role tomorrow. This gives organizations a better shot at successfully re-engaging these candidates for future roles.
  • Skills potential: With agility becoming the new foundation for business success, the future of skills will go beyond looking at what skills a candidate has today and instead extend into what skills a candidate is most likely to be able to obtain in the future. Organizations want to understand how candidates and employees will contribute to the business today, as well as how they can reshuffle talent in the future to keep the business agile and outpacing the competition. That means they will have to begin to do more than just infer existing skills that may not be apparent, they will also have to tap into the motivations and capabilities of candidates to infer future skills.

• Internal talent

  As organizations push to become more skills-based, internal talent has emerged as a key piece to the skills puzzle. Organizations that offer employees career development are able to retain talent longer and now they can also nudge employees toward skill development that serves the needs of the business, creating a win-win scenario.

  As the focus on internal talent has increased, so has the realization that managing talent in siloes doesn’t make sense. To this end, we’re starting to see organizations push for technology that spans both internal and external talent, bridging the gap between traditional talent acquisition and talent management/development. Most CRMs today now include external candidates (as they always have) alongside internal talent (existing employees), giving hiring teams insight into the best talent, regardless of where they are in relation to the organization.

• Experience

  It’s no secret that candidates (and employees) are consumers, so as the consumer world has advanced to deliver experiences tailored to the individual, candidates have come to expect (or at least want) that in their interactions with employer brands as well. There are a few ways the candidate engagement technology space is working to keep up with these demands:

  • Reduce friction: When it comes to helping talent connect with their brand, most organizations are looking to remove friction. That’s why most of the modern engagement solutions (CRM, recruitment marketing platform, chatbot) do not require candidates to create passwords or profiles the way traditional ATS platforms have. This reduces applicant drop-off and helps organizations capture more talent.

  • Giving back: In the consumer world, when effort is put into something (such as filling your shopping cart, or filling out a form), the expectation is that you’ll get something in return that makes that effort worth it. But candidates often take time and effort to fill out an application and craft a tailored cover letter, only to be auto-rejected moments later, or worse, never hear back from anyone again. This leads to frustration, drop-off and mistrust of the brands they’re applying with.

    To combat this, some organizations are redesigning their candidate experience to ensure candidates get something in return for their efforts. While the ultimate prize is getting the job that’s a great fit, giving something back when a candidate is turned down for a role helps build trust and start a relationship with that candidate (who could be a great fit for a different role in the future).

    Technology is supporting this by helping organizations give back to candidates. AI and skill-matching capabilities can power personalized feedback to candidates that aren’t quite a match for the role they applied to. AI-powered screening can help candidates understand not only why they’re not a fit for a specific role, but also where they could be a better fit inside the organization. Candidates that go through assessments can be provided with insights into their personality, their work style or other observations that can help them navigate their career more successfully. Designing these moments to give something back to candidates goes a long way to building trust and brand admiration across the talent universe you’ve worked so hard to build.

  • Personalization: In the consumer world, brand communications can be so highly personalized it borders on creepy. But overall, consumers expect brands to reach out to them with offers, updates and events tailored to their preferences.

    With advancements in AI, candidate engagement can be personalized to consumer-like levels by analyzing candidate data and behavior. Candidates can be automatically segmented into talent pools based on interests, preferences and engagement levels, enabling recruiters to deliver targeted and relevant content through personalized emails, job recommendations, landing pages and social media interactions. Just like consumer advertising, where you see the same ad more than once before you act, recruitment marketing warms up the candidate audience until they’re ready to fully engage (by applying for a role).

  • Nurturing: Just like submitting an application into the abyss and hoping to someday receive a response is a terrible candidate experience, so too is the experience of receiving communications only when a potential employer wants something from you. To overcome this, today’s candidate engagement technology leans heavily into the concept of nurturing. This means reaching out to candidates regularly with updates, information, employee stories and even events that might be helpful and beneficial to the candidate. That way, when the right role does arise, a recruiter reaches out to a candidate who is not only aware of the brand but starting to feel like part of it already.
  • Recruiter experience: Like many of today’s workers, recruiters are overwhelmed with technology, resulting in systems fatigue and low adoption for many solutions. To improve this experience for recruiters, while also boosting adoption rates, many technology providers are designing their products to show up in the flow of work. Instead of the recruiter logging into one more system, they’re prompted to review or act from inside their communications platform (i.e., Teams or Slack). These “headless applications” reduce systems fatigue while helping recruiters better manage their funnels.

Conclusion

The future of candidate engagement in recruitment marketing, CRM, chatbot and text recruiting is marked by a shift toward consumer-like experiences and personalized interactions. Organizations are recognizing the importance of giving back to candidates, nurturing relationships, reducing friction and focusing on skills. By leveraging advancements in AI, recruiters can analyze data and behavior to deliver targeted content and elevate human capabilities. Organizations today have the opportunity to embrace technology and innovative approaches to compete for the talent and skills required in today's hyper-competitive job market. More importantly, these efforts are focused on creating better relationships with talent. Advances in technology work to make these experiences more personal and human, at scale, creating better connections than were ever possible before.