Articles 
Setting Up Shop
While effective recruitment means using technology to improve processes and transform the candidate and recruiter experience, it can be hard to know where to start. Avature sat down with L’Oréal USA to understand how they are automating engagement to drive efficiency and build more meaningful relationships with candidates over time. Edward Dias, Assistant Vice President, Recruitment Intelligence & Innovation at L’Oréal USA, a top employer worldwide, shares his insights and best practices.[1]
To kick things off, we recognize that automated engagement is still, for many, an abstract concept and that we need to define its parameters within Avature capabilities. Automate engagement with Avature by:
- Automating your workflows, using a wide variety of triggers and conditions that can be very granular.
- Engaging candidates by both email and text, which can be personalized for each recipient.
- Sending marketing campaigns to your entire database on a regular basis to promote your employer brand and keep top talent up-to-date
- Taking talent acquisition to the next level with drip campaigns that send follow-up content automatically based on candidate behaviors e.g. ignore and response rates.
These measures are critical to engaging and nurturing a relationship with candidates over time without draining your recruiters’ time and resources.
“To me, automated engagement implies using technology to assist with outreach and engagement. It is utilizing tools to communicate, at scale, to a number of people with a high focus on efficiency,” explained Dias. “Before Avature, we would be more selective about who we engaged with, given the time restrictions. Unfortunately, this left out a large number of candidates who did not hear back at all from our recruiters about their application status.”
What has automating engagement with Avature allowed you to achieve?
“[It] has helped our organization provide greater visibility to candidates, our recruiters and our employees throughout the entire recruitment process. It has allowed our team to provide the quality, personalized experience necessary in today’s competitive market and quickly communicate a candidate’s application status.
It means our team can operate more strategically, instead of administratively. Our team can focus on finding the right talent, based on experience and future potential, rather than just checking off a list of necessary skills and knowledge.
It has allowed our team to focus on fostering relationships and credibility with our business and building lasting connections with our candidates. Essentially, automated engagement has allowed us to elevate the ‘human’ aspect of human resources.”
Automated engagement can seem pretty daunting, what would be your advice to a reluctant reader?
“Don’t focus on the technical aspects so much, but rather on the experience you’d like to present to your recruiters and candidates. Once laid out, you will be able to identify at which points to bring in automation to communicate with both your candidates and your recruitment teams, as well as other employees if you are looking at automated engagement from a referral program or internal mobility perspective.”
Top Tip: “Once you have an ideal experience plotted out, lean heavily on the expertise and knowledge of your Avature reps as they will know what is possible and can present some creative solutions to help you achieve your vision.”
What are you doing exactly?
“We mainly use automated engagement to relay information to our candidates and recent hires, and use it to cover administrative duties. If we need to design a specific experience with next steps, we’ll look at implementing a workflow to kick off automated responses. [These steps] do not require any interaction from our recruiters until the end.”
Top Tip: “Always include a call-to-action (CTA). Ask them to reach back, to tell you more about themselves or the opportunities that they’re interested in. It’s not just about sending a newsletter or educating people about your organization, but encouraging them to take action: visit a job post or a landing page or complete a form.”
What has been the result?
“Administrative tasks that provide a quality experience to the candidate but don’t directly impact ‘filling roles’ used to burden our team. We’ve offloaded a lot of this responsibility to automation, which has enabled us to be more strategic: the team can focus on higher priority tasks instead.
Not only to free up our recruiters from the minutia but also to maintain a consistent experience across all candidates and to ensure that no one falls through the cracks. Depending on our segment, our average click-through rates are now 60%.”
3 Top Tips From L’Oréal On How to Implement Effective Automated Engagement
1. Ensure your strategy benefits all parties equally
“Think about the reasons for adopting automated engagement strategies, and especially who these strategies will benefit the most. It should not benefit recruiters over candidates because then candidates will have a poor experience. If it benefits candidates more, recruiters will not adopt it, so the candidate will still endure a poor recruiting experience.”
2. Observe how your team works and build strategies around their process
“While there should be standards and a basic level of expectation about a common process, restricting the way your recruitment team can achieve strategies will inevitably reduce system usage.”
3. Keep Things Simple
“Automated engagement strategies don’t not have to be complex and solve all instances. Divide and conquer — break down your process into smaller, more manageable experiences and create a small strategy to solve challenges at each moment. In the same vein, reuse strategies, content and messaging as much as possible. Otherwise, you’ll cripple yourself reinventing the wheel with every campaign and it will use up both time and resources.”
Any final thoughts?
“Adoption is about upscaling and it can’t be a rigid process. You are getting your team to adopt, not a system, but an idea. The system provides the foundation for the ways of working.
As we shift into the new ways of working, one of the biggest things we need to do is more recruitment marketing to make sure that we keep candidates warm and are continuing to attract the best talent to our organization. It’s extremely important to not only build your personal brand as a recruiter but also build your employer brand as a destination for talent.”
To Sum It Up
It can be hard to create a personalized candidate experience, especially when not all candidates are active job seekers or at the same stage in the hiring process. Moreover, a great candidate experience does not look the same for all target audiences and each organization has unique HR processes, so there is no universal solution. Agile recruiting means giving your talent acquisition team the customized tools they need to meet your current and future hiring needs, and automated engagement is a core component of that.
While the future of recruiting may be an uphill battle, implementing automated engagement now can help to secure your standing as an employer of choice for both recruiters and candidates.
[1] L’Oréal, 8th Most Attractive Employer Worldwide, Beauty Tomorrow (2017)
