How to Keep Top Engineering Candidates in Your Recruitment Pipeline

Since the global pandemic, remote-first has the norm around the world and that means the candidate pool has widened because on-site recruitment has become less stringent. With organizations now taking on remote engineers on a worldwide basis, it’s now more important than ever to strengthen dark spots in communication. 

Staying in constant contact with engineers around the world can drastically improve the candidate experience. In fact, 51 percent of candidates say poor communication from potential employers is one of their biggest frustrations. Furthermore, 81 percent of job seekers state that if companies communicated status updates to them, it would improve their overall recruitment experience. 

What is Candidate Nurturing?

Engineer candidate nurturing is a process that helps your organization attract, engage and convert engineers through personalized messaging. This is usually done through a sequence of emails that are designed to keep engineers in your pipeline but the most effective method is to target candidates with tailored messaging across multiple channels. 

Passive candidates make up around 70 percent of the workforce and that means you should double down when nurturing passive talent. Data is essential to effective nurture campaigns; forms and scores from coding assessments can provide valuable insights when targeting passive candidates when positions become available in the future. 

Why Nurturing Is Key to Your Recruitment Strategy

From candidate selection, all the way to onboarding, it’s essential to nurture your engineers into the right position. Furthermore, leveraging passive candidates that are currently in employment or engineers that may have dropped out due to inefficient screening processes can be put back into play. It all works to keep your candidate pipeline juiced up with top talent. 

Reasons to nurture engineering candidates:

• Develop engineer pipeline: To reduce your time to hire and cost to hire metrics, recruiters need to implement a relationship-centric strategy that’s focused on personalizing the candidate experience. Find out which channels your engineers spend most of their time on and create a suitable nurture campaign to keep in constant communication based on their interests. You can also incorporate value-based two-way communication like FAQ sessions, webinars, social media contests and group coding challenges. 
• Cultural fit: Remote work has allowed the talent pool to widen and that means cultural alignment has become even more important. Provide candidates with a glimpse into your organization prior to the hire that will help to familiarize them with the company’s mission and core values. 
• Top talent: Every organization wants the top engineers coding for their company but how do they achieve it? Online presence and social media play a huge role in accomplishing a reputation that attracts the best of the best. Nurturing top talent can be done by reinforcing positive messaging through social media channels to display a desirable company culture. 
• Avoid candidate dropouts: Inefficient screening process can drive candidates to drop out prematurely; having a knock-on effect on your time to hire and cost to hire. As previously mentioned, the lack of communication is one defining point that makes engineers abandon ship and either seek a job elsewhere or stay with their current company. Keep candidates engaged through regular updates and valuable content to pique their interest and show them how they will be an integral part of your organization. 

Keeping the Pipeline Fueled

To keep your engineers engaged in your company, it’s all about strong communication and how you present the available opportunity. Dean Delpeache, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Fiix Software states how a nurture campaign helps to eliminate the communications black hole. 

Dean says “We identified every step of the process in our candidate experience. One of the biggest challenges was, how do we keep in touch with candidates, even if they didn’t get hired. How do we keep in touch with those candidates on a continuous basis, just in case another role comes up. We did not have any tools to do that.”

Using technology to automate processes and “keep the spark alive” between candidates and recruiters can be a great way to keep engineers in the pipeline for future jobs.

Tools such as Codility’s recruitment platform can be a pivotal part of your recruitment strategy because it optimizes coding assessments and sends them out to engineers at the right time. Nurturing candidates can also be done by positioning coding tests as a way to enhance skills, in addition to entry into the candidate selection process. This ensures that engineers feel more valued and invested in, as opposed to tested and challenged.

To learn more about this topic, view the webinar, “Confessions of a Talent Acquisition Director: How to Create More Efficiency in your Hiring!”