How leading companies drive candidate and employee engagement using text recruiting platform Grayscale

5 mins, 16 secs read time

When business plans are in flux, it can be extremely easy for communication to break down between key stakeholders: from candidates to furloughed employees, to current staff and hiring managers. It’s now more critical than ever to prioritize a structured process and lean into clear, effective communication.

Let’s explore how Greenhouse customers across different industries are tweaking their candidate and employee engagement strategies to address challenges that may arise during a shifting economy.

How Centria Healthcare is addressing their acute hiring needs

Whether you’re experiencing an uptick in applicants or a slowdown in hiring, it never hurts to be prepared. For Centria Healthcare, an in-home healthcare company operating across 10 states, the pandemic has brought with it an urgent need to recruit critical field staff.

Many of Centria’s clients are challenged with conditions like respiratory failure, so it’s paramount that the team is able to keep clients out of the hospital during this time; not only for their own safety, but to keep hospital beds free for an influx of new patients.

Brandon DuBois, Centria’s Director of Operations and Healthcare Recruiting, feels it is extremely important to keep an active and engaged candidate pool during this period, and he sees texting as an ideal channel to do so.

“We’re needing to not only hire new staff, but to ensure continuity of care for our current staff who may have to quarantine,” says Brandon.

We’re utilizing the ability to text at all hours of the day to follow up with our recruited and onboarding staff for interviewing and documentation status. We wouldn’t be able to keep up with our current pipeline and interview volume, not to mention the onboarding of new hires, without text messaging.
–Brandon DuBois, Director of Operations and Healthcare Recruiting at Centria

Lesson learned from Centria Healthcare: When your business is hiring rapidly, moving with agility is key.

If your business is facing acute hiring needs, a texting and automation tool can help your team address these challenges in stride.

How EyeCare Partners is managing communication with candidates and employees

These are uncertain times – and if you’ve recently found yourself in the unfortunate position of needing to pause hiring or furlough employees, you know what a tough decision that is.

EyeCare Partners, a Greenhouse customer with nearly 500 retail eye care locations, put all of their 100+ open roles on hold the minute their retail locations were unable to operate amid the pandemic.

Their Director of Talent Acquisition, Kirby Cole, was determined to keep a warm pipeline of talent, despite not having any open positions. This would allow them to move quickly, as soon as their retail locations start to open back up.

“We want to keep our talent warm, engaged and ready to go as soon as we can start hiring again,” says Kirby. “We found texting to be the ideal channel to nurture relationships with candidates and keep them up to speed during this season.”

Kirby also found texting to be the best method for giving real-time updates for their staff. “We’re communicating with our staff via SMS, keeping them updated and informed so everyone is in the loop and key communication isn’t overlooked.”

Here are some best practices Kirby recommends keeping in mind when leveraging texting as a candidate and employee communication channel:

• Candidates are experiencing a lot of uncertainty, so make sure you clearly communicate what you know and what you don't
• Set expectations and communicate updates as often as possible
• Open up a line of communication for candidates and employees to text your team directly with questions
• Use this time to highlight your employment brand, company mission and values

If you’re currently experiencing a hiring slowdown, once things get cranking again, you’ll want your candidates to be ready to go – updated, engaged and excited to get to work immediately. Texting is an ideal channel for keeping in touch with existing staff and keeping candidates ready to go at a moment's notice.

How Upwork is doubling down on candidate experience

Companies like online talent solution company Upwork are currently doubling down on their candidate experience, providing them a huge competitive advantage in-market.

Dan Collins, Upwork’s Director of Talent Acquisition, implemented texting with the goal of positively impacting candidate survey scores and reducing time-to-fill.

Dan and his team have automated much of their communication to create a high-touch experience throughout their process, whether a candidate is selected to move forward or not.

We were looking to automate our communication to candidates and hiring managers as much as possible, while keeping the recruiter in the driver seat
–Akilah Hicks, Talent Acquisition Operations Manager at Upwork.

The recent global pandemic has only increased Upwork’s use of texting, as they find new and creative ways to engage their talent, keep candidates warm and automate more of their process. In the first 30 days of adding texting to their strategies, it was clear to Dan that they were seeing the results they set out to achieve.

“We have already positively impacted candidate survey scores on our process and time-to-hire metrics,” says Dan. “Both of these metrics are due to faster communication cycles and leveraging a best-in-class, low friction tool. Adding texting to our toolbox has been the best investment of the last 12 months.”

Using a channel like texting and automating critical communication points in your hiring process, helps deliver a consistent, high-touch candidate experience that scales to meet the needs of your business – however those needs may evolve over time.

Start texting within Greenhouse

These are challenging times and recruiters need the right set of tools to effectively navigate them. Using a conversational recruiting platform like Grayscale makes it easy for recruiters to engage candidates, automate workflows and deliver a high-touch candidate experience, directly from within Greenhouse.

While the use of channels like texting will become increasingly important over the coming months, don’t get overwhelmed and feel like you need to make sweeping changes to your process. Start small by looking for the most value-add use cases for texting at this moment.

For Greenhouse customers whose hiring has been impacted by COVID-19, Grayscale is offering a 20% discount on its texting and automation platform to help you keep your candidates warm and your furloughed employees up to speed. If you’d like to get started or want a quick demo, you can sign up here to activate the Greenhouse + Grayscale integration.

Sign up here