02/29/2016  //  By deanna kane  //  Recruiter Best Practices
[socialwrap][socialicon name=”linkedin”][socialicon name=”twitter”][/socialwrap]An engaged talent pipeline isn’t about luck, it’s a direct reflection of the effort you put into nurturing this group of potential future employees. Follow this March recruiting checklist to manage your pipeline and grow your talent community. Complete these five items by the end of the month to reinvigorate your hiring efforts this spring.

Treat candidates like customers

One of the best ways a talent acquisition team can shift its hiring approach is to walk a few departments over — to your organization’s client success team. Observe how the client success team interacts with customers and mirror that same approach when interacting with candidates.

Carry it throughout the year: Meet with the client success group to learn insights on best customer relations practices that your recruiting team can adopt. Measure the candidate experience to understand how potential hires view your company and how to continue to improve your client engagement strategy.

Engage with your talent community

Investing time in your talent community is a “work smarter, not harder” approach to ensuring your pipeline is warm when it’s time to make key hires. Keeping your talent community engaged will help develop your talent brand, keep college students engaged until graduation and help facilitate personalized communication.

Carry it throughout the year: Ensure you have continual touch points with your talent community, by sending them regular communication that might include updates on company awards or accolades, open position updates, industry events or networking opportunities.

Focus on inbound recruitment marketing

Re-focus your recruitment marketing efforts on one-to-one communication, instead of posting a job and waiting for candidates to come to you. Tailor your communication to each particular candidate, be authentic, and highlight your company’s career paths and growth opportunities. Instead of selling your company to candidates, get to know them to understand if they are a culture match for your organization, if they fit into your company’s long-term hiring goals and if they can fill any potential talent gaps.

Carry it throughout the year: Build an inbound recruitment marketing strategy to keep your company top of mind for potential candidates. Ensure your online presence is up-to-date: make sure your career-focused social media sites are managed, respond to any outstanding comments or feedback on career sites like LinkedIn, Glassdoor or The Muse, and update your careers page to ensure it reflects your current recruitment marketing efforts.

Create an end-to-end candidate journey strategy

Use the start of the spring season to develop your company’s “hello” to “hire” candidate experience plan. Possible components could include building a talent community, creating a candidate communication plan and working with your interview teams to ensure your in-person interview candidate experience reflects your company.

Carry it throughout the year: Implement talent relationship management software to handle the heavy lifting of managing the candidate experience. Leverage this software to scale your recruitment efforts, including building talent communities, folders, email campaigns, workflows, resume parsing and candidate sourcing in one central place.

Prepare for a successful fall recruitment

It may seem like a long ways away, but preparing for fall career fairs now can ensure you have a plan in place to win top talent. Identify the most beneficial hiring conferences to attend, create an email series to warm up your talent pipeline, create a candidate communication plan and automate your processes.

Carry it throughout the year: Identify your top challenges, and invest in talent acquisition software to help you overcome those roadblocks. If you have historically experienced challenges managing the volume of applicants post-hiring conferences, invest in event management software. If your challenge is managing candidate data post-event, interest in a talent relationship management system.

Are you looking to take your recruitment strategy to the next level? Download our Talent Acquisition Software Buy-In Guide to receive a customizable email template, presentation points and goal template to present your business case to your leadership team.