Showing posts with label Recruitment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recruitment. Show all posts

Sunday, May 4, 2014

5 suggestions to LinkedIn : To make it much more powerful Recruitment tool



There is no scope for any doubt about Linkedin’s ability to serve as a good recruitment tool but the current problem with Linkedin seems to be that they want to drive all recruitment activities with Linkedin recruiter or Premium job seeker’s account. The reality is Linkedin may not succeed only with paid services option because of the below reasons.

      Linkedin corporate account is far more expensive than the traditional jobsite’s employer subscription (At least in India – when we compare with Naukri.com who stands as no.1)

      Linkedin is not as effective as jobsites, not popular as well. Recruiting with Linkeidn still considered being a special skill and not more than 10% of total hires come through Linkedin in any organization.
This calls for a special attention to popularize Linkedin more as a recruitment tool; this can only be done through normal user accounts. Here are my recommendations to counter the challenge.


Make the "Search" strong


Though the quality of search results improved a lot over the years but still Linked search is not so powerful for both jobseeker and recruiter. I think Linked development team should realize this fact very soon to try and make it much more productive. Have a check for yourself search for any job with location, you will get a bunch of jobs completely unrelated to your search and few are related to your keyword in way but do not match to what you are looking for. It would have been really fine if Linkedin is Search engine or simply a social networking site, but as they aspire to become stronger recruitment tool it hampers the experience of jobseekers and recruiters too. Hence Linkedin needs to limit search results specifically to keywords just like any other jobsite.

Force users to fill up their Technical expertise /Primary Skill set


As of today more than 90% of the LinkedIn profiles are not good enough to at least have a fair idea on the area of expertise of a candidate. It just provides a high level view about employment and area of work. Linked should target to get these profiles at least to the level of providing sufficient information to screen candidates without having to ask candidates to send their resume. We can understand the business pressures of being a social media site, Linkedin would definitely want to keep the registration very simple and cannot force users to furnish details as it might discourage them from creating an account. Linkedin can afford to do this at later stages for ex : if a candidate is applying for job on .net technology and he/she did not specify this as part of primary skill set then Linkedin should throw an error and ask user to apply only to jobs which matches their primary skill or update primary skill set. Of course I am suggesting them to have something called “Primary skill” which must be a mandatory filed to complete in order to apply for jobs. It makes the life of recruiters easy and much more effective search strings can be framed, eventually the quality of search results will increase. Most importantly recruiters will not be spammed,
     
Preferably in a drop down box like below


Endorsements should not be reduced to the level of “likes” on Facebook


Why dedicate so much of space to something which does not have any importance to either recruiter or candidate. Endorsements have become like a formality, a joke as if it is the “like” button on Facebook. You cannot stop users endorsing each other as a favor, but Linkedin can definitely stop endorsing a person without even knowing him at work. There is no validity for endorsements at all; I get surprised when someone I’ve not met in person so far endorses me for a skill. Let people endorse only if they worked together. If you cannot bring this change right away at least give the control to the users whether to accept or Reject an endorsements, so that whoever wants to keeps their profile genuine, they will be able to do so. It helps in having much reliable information on Linkedin.

Give few premium account privileges to normal users


Linkedin perceived to be a platform for passive Jobseekers, it sounds like someone is running a scared charity program to help jobseekers find a good job without their employer noticing it.Now this myth of passive jobseeker is vanishing gradually, everyone is an active jobseeker, we are no more living in world of people serving for years in one single organization. Consumerism is ruling the world not only in the sense of money but work, brand, work life balance etc. Almost everyone considers changing his job provided the criteria are met. So we have Desperate, Selective and very Demanding jobseekers all of them active, just that options and intention to bargain varies. So by making most useful features available to only for paid services which are most likely used by desperate jobseekers you are not engaging the other major chunk.


Linkedin is not a tool for mass hiring, this makes it extremely imperative for them to be more popular by  giving more meaningful services to users, at least to job seekers.By trying to make money for most of the services, there is always a danger of someone coming into the market offering it for free. We are witnessing an explosion of freeware recruitment management systems already.

      

Become more social


It might sound funny asking a social networking site to get more social.Linkedin is most effective for mid-sized organizations and really helpful for special skill sets than generalized .The one ability of it makes Linkedin so desirable for recruiters is it’s capability to help in building market intelligence. You could capture the details of entire team in a given organization, it is even possible to capture the details of almost all employees if it is an organization of less a than 1000 people.

Linkedin must build on this ability and partner with other social media sites to provide much more meaningful information to users. For ex: it can incorporate the ratings/comments on employers from Glassdoor when someone is trying to fetch information.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

One side of the Paradox: frustration of a Jobseeker and its anatomy

Google Image
Every Job seeker lives and contributes towards the creation  of a paradox where so many eligible jobseekers are  struggling to find a job they would love to do and on the other side a recruiter is dyeing to fill a position and unable to find a right candidate. Most of the times jobseekers blame recruiters for not replying on their applications and for not returning/answering calls. At the same time on the other side of this world recruiter would be fuming on jobsites for throwing up same search results and resumes they have interviewed and rejected earlier already, desperately getting on to social networks, changing keywords, checking with friends – having a bad day. Why on earth in this advanced technical savvy world connected through internet, a suitable candidate can’t reach the recruiter who needs him, why is it getting really difficult for a recruiter to find right candidate.

This paradox is a result of combined effort of candidate and recruiters/organizations. No one to blame for this alone, Organizations/recruiters would not have a slick recruitment management system, most of them won’t use it even if they have one. Candidates do not know techniques of job search and unfortunately most of the candidates apply for jobs they won’t suit, even worse things is jobseekers does not do a good job of updating their profile on jobsites, sometimes resumes looks shabby, unrelated to the expertise they have.

In India -there is not much information available for jobseekers to help them on how they can update their profiles, what enhances the possibility of their resume appearing on top of search results, unlike Europe, the USA, Indian job market is dominated by jobsites, social networks like LinkedIn are picking up but still not yet contributes to a significant percentage of hires in an year in an organizational context. Candidates need to know few facts to make their whole experience of job searching, fulfilling and smooth.

Do you understand the science of job search?


In order to understand the  art of job search first you need understand science behind candidate search, how recruiters search for suitable candidates?I have heard from so many people saying I " updated my resume 2 months back and did not get a single call so far". To find an answer to this  you need to understand candidate search works , you might be the best brain in your area but if your profile updated on jobsites does not tell that there is 100% chance that your resume will be ignored. It is the medium between you and recruiter plays key than your expertise. Most of the  jobseekers does not write their profile headline properly on Naukri.com, moster.com.They write summary of their experience which is wrong, you need to mention the key words around your technical expertise , if you are java developer just write that along with the technical skill set like, JSP,Servlets,Spring etc and avoid using words likes  “Technologist”, “Innovator” because they are not going get to anywhere, recruiters never use keywords like that.to summaries all you need remember is “How would a recruiter search for resumes” obviously they search for resumes just in the same way you search for information in Google. If you would to know about Tajmahal you will just type that name in Google, let us say if you use “Shajahan” as your keyword the information you wanted about Tajmahal will be somewhere lower on the search results. So keep the headline simple, accurate, very straight forward to cover all the areas you worked on.

Do you need to have a beautiful resume? 

Honestly not, after all you are not sending your resume for a beauty contest! On a serious note no recruiter in the world will fall in love with your resume by the look of it, or for the literary value , neither he/she has time to  read your resume so deeply. Of course it must be in a good shape neatly formatted, no grammatical errors etc. But the key area that catches the eye of a recruiter is “your area of expertise”, skill set summary and your project details – whether the skill set mentioned in summary reflects again in the projects you have worked on. Remember a recruiter takes a call whether to proceed or not in less than 2 minutes by having a glance at your resume. Have those details accurate; repeat your areas of expertise as keywords across your resume.

Curse your co-applicants! 

Not because they are competing with you for the same job but for the reason they applied even after knowing they are not suitable for the position. It is so unfortunate that applications from non-serious, not suitable candidates makes the chances for right candidate meager. Over last seven years, I and with help my team where I worked done an analysis on the response for job postings, we found out consistently that more than 95% of applications does not suit the job. Let me give you a recent example – I posted a job for software architect, we were looking for a person with more than 8 years of Java with distributed systems,multi-threading, strong design and architecture experience on developing highly available enterprise applications. You don’t believe we received application from call center executives, Admin, Finance and freshers in a good number. Now relate this with the life of a recruiter on a given day, he/she would be handling multiple positions and would be receiving resumes from Consultants, employees and direct applicants. Once the recruiter opens up the applications folder and finds a set of resumes not related at all, he get frustrated and move on to another source – he needs to fill the position quickly. So if you are expecting a reply from recruiters - apply for only those positions you suit, ask yourselves twice if you really fit the bill. Otherwise not only you won’t get anything out of it but also you will be killing an opportunity for another suitable candidate.


Where are you applying? 

The emergence social media pushed recruiters post jobs everywhere, the biggest weak link here is not many organizations have a strong recruitment management system which integrate all these and stores resumes at one place. As result recruiters get disorganized, always remember if you are applying on the website the chances of you getting call is really less because of reasons mentioned earlier.so whenever you are applying it on the website, it is a good idea to send a note to the recruiter clearly mentioning the job code you have applied for. Another reason for not getting a call would be “unfortunately most recruiters perceive direct applicants as desperate jobseekers who is struggling to find job, hence it becomes less valuable for them, recruiters should get rid of this notion”.

If you are allying on any other source please consider the below:

Lifetime of your application/email is maximum a day: 

If you are sending your application directly to the recruiters, please keep in mind you need to be precise and straight forward, you don’t have to please the recruiter. You need to understand and accept the fact that recruiter has no time to read your entire email to understand whether you are suitable or not. Write in a manner that recruiter will get to know your profile in first 2 lines. While applying on LinkedIn so not simply click apply button and send resume, customize your response in way that your expertise if mentioned there, that will make the recruiter to click the attachment you sent, otherwise it gets in to recycle bin. If you application cannot attract recruiter’s attention that moment or maximum on that day, you are out of scope. By next morning when he comes to office new set of resumes already piled up in his inbox. Grab the attention by what he is looking for – but only if you really have that expertise recruiter is looking for , DO NOT fake it ever.

Sometimes your subject line of the email disqualifies you! 

I am not exaggerating it, it is true – I have deleted so many applications from my inbox after looking at the subject line, and still see most of the recruiters doing it, let us take an example – a recruiter posted a job of “CFO” on LinkedIn or a Jobsite When you reply it changes the subject line as “Application for the role of CFO” all the hundred resumes recruiter receive will have the same subject line, Now let us say if you change the Subject line to “ Chetan_CA,ICWAI_PWC_ application for CFO”, I can guarantee no recruiter in the world will move on without looking in to the resume.


When madness has its own method why not Job search J , follow basics and help recruiters in helping you.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Two crucial aspects HR should focus on - measuring value addition and stop taking undeserved blame



Image courtesy - Google
I was just a college pass out when the most famous (now) critic of HR Mr. Keith H. Hammonds opened up his thoughts on HR professionals and HR as a function to the whole world. I was shocked when I came across this article later, started doubting my decision making skills – did I make right choice by choosing HR as my career? But as time flew I forgot about this like any other young graduate fresh out of college. But now after having spent good time in HR, I strongly feel his criticism is not all true, but there are genuine issues we still need to address and improve on, tragedy is after 8 years of his article we still look the same in few of the areas he wrote about.
It is extremely crucial now that we focus on these areas to sustain this extremely dynamic world where the war for best talent is getting fierce day by day and taking an ugly, brutal shape. The two critical aspects HR should focus on are – creating more value, measuring that value and stop taking undeserved blame.

Does HR really add value? What kind of value is that and how can we measure it?

World called HR and still calls a necessary evil, a bureaucratic setup which kills flexibility and innovation. Few organizations saw and continues see HR as the living system which keeps everything intact, which adds life to organization, which prepares and leads them in to future. As a matter of fact most of the successful companies today have most successful HR department. So then why there are divergent perceptions, where does HR fit in to the pyramid of value addition? Take an example of a mother, who is a “home maker” ( not mean to say mother can’t earn, it is strictly about a home maker) , she ensures everything is in place at home and makes everything available for the family, she guides, consoles, sets up guidelines and code of conduct at home, brings up children, takes very key decisions, helps in decision making, the only thing that misses here is she going out and earning money, it is done by the “father”. So a home maker mother does not earn money on her own but helps the whole family to earn it. I think in an organization’s scenario HR does the same job of home maker (excluding HR consulting, where money generation is directly related), while HR does not earn money on its own it helps the whole organization in doing that. HR helps the organization deliver by delivering in its own area. In business return/Money/Tangible value takes the ultimate priority, where in a family set up there are much more things attached to it than just return/Money/tangible value addition, that is how I think people start perceiving HR as a cost center, non-value adding function. The other side of the coin most of the HR professionals perceive their function as supreme and argue that without HR an organization cannot survive or it will not exist, the fact of the matter is HR exists because of business, and ultimate decision making rests with the business itself, HR for sure will play a key role, but cannot decide what to be done over and above business’s decision, when I say business I meant the one who funds, runs the business with an objective. Coming back to the point - work of HR and its value addition touches every aspect of an organization like the mother at home, so you cannot fit HR at a particular level and spot on the pyramid. It is everywhere. So the parameter for measuring HR value addition should always be what impact its presence will have on the organization rather what felonies its absence can cause.
So when HR is everywhere obviously it becomes extremely difficult to measure its value addition, however we all know what major areas in  HR  makes it as the living blood for the whole system. They are Talent Acquisition, Training & Organization Development, Performance management, HR operations.

Adding bodies or pumping in Talent?

Talent acquisition attracts a great deal of attention whenever somebody wants to evaluate HR effectiveness, but traditionally for years the way we measure recruitment effectiveness by number of positions filled, time taken to hire, source mix  which does not reflect the real value addition of recruitment function. Parameters mentioned earlier reflects activities performed by recruitment team not the value, take an example of driving a car – if you drive a car with a speed of 100 Km per hour and reached a place in 30 mins, that is a great driving performance, not the real value, you will know value when you compare with what is that you wanted to achieve by driving, if you have reached a different destination that of you wanted to reach the effort is mere waste. Hence while measuring the value of recruitment we should get in to the very purpose of recruitment, why do we recruit people? to add great talent in to organization so that we deliver a great service/product. If this is not met, you probably are not recruiting the talent your organization wants, now how can you measure the value here, would you attribute every product success or profitability of the organization to recruitment? Answer is no, there are much more critical aspects which contribute to success and profitability. It is wise to take the data of employees recruited in a year and analyze – what percentage of people left early, how many non-performers you have from this group (for both cases they could be various other reasons why people leave, can’t perform – you would know those reasons for sure – so do not include them while measuring the value of recruitment), how many of these employees are star performers, what percentage of these have been already identified having potential to move in to the next level or perform more difficult job, take feedback from manager against each role he filled in his team, as to check is he able to get the what he wants from this resource, he might have recruited one with an aim of adding a new skill, if that skill is not added, your recruitment failed of course there is a contribution from that respective manager too for that failure. After having done all this exercise identify those areas where recruitment team needs to focus for next year, pat on their back for the areas they have done well.

Performance management – shake its fundamentals; make it fairer, understandable

I have a fundamental problem with the whole idea behind performance management, the entire HR fraternity is in love with bell curve and forced ranking may be because it looks to be scientific and more because it serves various purposes, like it helps identifying and cleaning up bottom-line, it also helps manager to satisfy their vengeance. So essentially with the model what are we expecting from employees, we are clearly telling look folks only 20% of you will make it in to the top performers so you must compete and do better than your colleague. But imagine what happens to the whole team performance, what happens to the organization, that’s where organizations fail and also results in your best guys leaving. Imagine if everybody on Indian cricket team competing to do better than the other rather striving for team’s success, will we ever win? just imagine Sachin Tendulkar and Virat kohli competing to score a run more than the other, that will result in one guy not giving strike to other, will we ever win. Might looks funny but this exactly what happens on the floor, employees look really amicable and helping each other but majority of them will not share the big ones he is working on because he does not want to give share in the salary hike/bonus to his colleague. It is time we re look at the overall philosophy of performance management and change it in a way that drives team’s performance, like let the whole organization decide what are the most valuable deliverables they had for this year – award all of those who are in those projects, couple it with 360 degree performance management for every employee , so that everybody knows and cognitive of the fact that his colleague’s feedback has value so he/she better cooperate and co-exist to succeed, not in way of Quid-pro-co, any way each feedback should be justified with examples and tangible activities. Take feedback from every employee on performance system at the end every performance management cycle. Improve, innovate it consistently.

Training or capability building?

I think this is the most difficult part when it comes to measuring value, like the recruitment most training departments traditionally measure the activity rather than value, you speak to any L&D professional they talk about how many employees participated in a training program, what percentage of total employees they covered in a year, how many hours each employee spent in training which is again a transactional piece. It is like a person going to most sacred place 1000 times and remain as what he was before, you might visit amaranth 1000 times in your life time but what is the use if it does not make you a better human being? Measuring the value of training department should start from asking are we doing the right kind of trainings that organization really needs?Do an objective analysis do not do trainings that does not add value , over a period of time it will reduce the importantance of whole training function altogether, after every training we ask for feedback asking how was the trainer, environment, facilities provided rather asking the important question – where do think this training will help? Which part of your job you will be able to perform better after this training?
Let us go back to the point of how do we identify right set of trainings to be delivered over the next year, take an example of a software firm having a product, at every release which part of the product you will find more bugs? UI side, Database? That is the area you exactly need to focus and get your resources trained. Track individuals who attended training whether he/she able to contribute in a better way in the areas he got trained, does he still needs someone helps even after getting trained? If this happens on a large scale it is time to look at the whole training function and start fixing it.

HR is not changing at the speed the environment it operates in changing, we need to catch up with the pace and keep reinventing ourselves, after all said and done sometimes HR role looks like a wicket keeper in cricket , you catch 99 balls and drop one, the whole stadium stands up and says his wicket keeping skills are bad, the only way to stop this undeserved blame is keep updating ourselves and being proactive before business comes back to us.



Sunday, April 28, 2013

The "Csquare" of Recruitment - Providing best experience to your candidates and client leads to the real success


In this post I am not going to discuss about the widely used smart ways of managing, convincing candidates or clients – I would like to bring up the point of how important is it is to make client and candidate experience part of the overall recruitment strategy for the  super success of the recruitment function.

Everybody in recruitment today witnessing the transformation of staffing function in to a much bigger strategic activity, from one of the HR activities to in a way it is emerging as a separate function altogether. As the war for talent gets fierce day by day – it is extremely crucial for every recruitment team to shift their focus towards two important stake holders, who can influence the overall success of the recruitment function. It is time now we start re looking at our efforts towards redefining and enhancing recruitment experience for our client and
candidate.

Recruitment managers and recruiters should not forget the fact that recruitment is a service -irrespective of whether you are in a staffing services company or you are in an in-house recruitment team, it could be a IT services organization or a product development company. We are business enablers – we are not the business and most of the times we represent an organization. As Dave Ulrich said “Value and quality of the service it determined by the receiver not by the giver”. Whenever we start looking at the overall success of recruitment function we consider parameters like source mix, Turnaround time, Conversion ratio, Quality of Data and market intelligence, Offer decline percentage, Employer branding activities and to an extent verbal feedback from your clients which is greatly influenced by that particular moment and personal interactions. We all miss the “candidates” who are the focal point of the entire recruitment process and we also miss “Client” because of who we exist today. Few might argue that we receive feedback from clients/internal business regularly and work on it – but please do understand this is always about one single open position or it could be on why delay is taking place in filling positions etc, but we never receive constructive feedback on overall recruitment nor we put an effort to streamline and put up a robust feedback mechanism.  Now this is the costliest miss – this will lead to the danger of recruitment teams being perceived as transactional pieces. Let us see what needs to done and how that can we bring a paradigm shift in the way your client and candidate perceives recruitment and how it will lead to overall success.

Client: Diagnosis, not post mortem! Recruitment team needs to be proactive to provide better experience – get involved from day 1

Most of the times recruitment teams fail to meet the expectations not because they are not good enough but it is because they don’t really know what business exactly expecting, business or recruitment team alone cannot be blamed for this, in the conventional thinking recruitment is always a support function and comes second. as a result of this recruitment team receives requests to fill once business finalized their budgets, projections and deliverables, business has a deadline for each project to be delivered and to meet these they need people as of yesterday – without people they cannot meet their deliverables. So they push recruitment team and get pushed in return – it will become an ugly web where brick passing happens to and fro. There is flaw here.

There is nothing called closely aligning recruitment strategy to business strategy - recruitment strategy must be part of the business strategy


You have different metrics – Different deadlines – make it one: 
Almost all the time, business wants to deliver things at pace which is different from the pace at recruitment teams aiming to fill positions. See below

Technology team plans to deliver a product in next 2 months but SLA for closing a position for recruitment team still remains 90 days. So what will happen in this case – it will be similar like “operation success but patient dead”, recruitment team will try and fill positions in 90 days, but technical team will not able to ship the as per the plan. Now here we need tackle this problem from two ends – one, Recruitment head must be involved while Technology teams trying to put deadlines in place for their delivery and consider staffing problems to have achievable targets for future. From the other side – for recruitment team SLAs must not be “writing on the wall” – they should be flexible enough to adjust their SLAs as per business requirements – reason is if business fails there is no relevance for anybody’s existence.

Do not forget you are sailing in the same boat:  
Recruitment team often forgets that you and your business are working hard for the same purpose – “they need people more than you”, but when you forget this both sides will end up in an argumentative mode.in my experience so far I did see some serious flaws from business’ side which makes the life of recruitment team really difficult – but as we all know, we are business enablers and we are in service – so diagnose the problem and place reports in front of the business like a doctor – let this decide whether they want to get it fixed or not. If the recruitment team is date driven and come up with solutions, business will agree – reason being the same – they need people more desperately than the recruitment team.

It is not just Recruitment team’s problem – it is Organization’s problem: 
Most of the times recruitment team hides issues from business, It is the biggest mistake, let the business see problems through your eyes. You might not have a great brand name, your business model may not be really appealing to candidates – let business know, give them first-hand information, let them understand your exact issues, then only your client will be able to agree with you and empathize and realize as organization’s problems rather criticizing recruitment team.

Let your client be the owner of you success: 
Not for the sake of it – truly recruitment teams succeeds because of their client, the kind of insight they provide, the amount of time they spent with you play an incredible role in recruitment team’s success.
Never hide failure, shortcomings – I know of recruitment managers who asks their team to hide offer declines from the business till the last moment – by doing so you are losing credibility, no matter how many wonders you might do in the future, your client will not trust you.so let them know the moment you have a bad news.
Provide market intelligence regular, give an update about your competitors, and provide metrics around how you are performing. Let your client know your strategy, take their feedback embed them honestly – communicate the back up plans too – by doing so you are building the trust.
Never ever use the tone of an outsider when you are communicating to your client irrespective of whether they are within your organization or outside. Hard fact recruitment owns the problems of their client – you are solving their problem – hence you are “your client”  

Candidate: he is the solution for the problems you have

That company’s recruiters do not have a clue on what they are looking for!
They made me wait for one hour in the reception!!
I am done with the interview – but never heard back!!!
Interviewer did not have manners- he kept on speaking on his mobile while I was in the interview room!!!!

The above are few comments I have heard from my friends and colleagues who have attended interviews with various companies. It is sad that the most important stakeholders in recruitment process is not treated well. It is astonishing how recruitment team can forget that “the candidate is one who decides their success or failure”. We need to treat each candidate as a guest, I know and worked with few companies where the candidate is pampered starting from providing fine breakfast to pick and drop for the interview. Not all companies can afford to do that, because of the fact that not all of them are rich. To give the finest experience to a candidate you do not have to pamper him with nice lunch or cool drinks always, to be honest that not  is the purpose why candidate visited your place. Hence it is always a bonus to pamper candidates with nice stuff but is not mandatory to provide them great experience.

Provide consistent information about the opening and organization: 
Recruitment team must team make sure that information shared over phone should match with what is written on your careers page and wherever it has been published. Most of the times in a hurry recruiters post a very brief JD on the Jobsites, which will mislead candidates – must be avoided.

Let it be the memorable day:  
Candidate needs to be at his best during the interview , make him feel comfortable, receive them well with warmth, inquire if they want anything, provide them a special closed room for few minutes so that they can unwind themselves from their work related issues.Tell him how long the interview will take, run him through the JD and explain the background of interviewers,If candidate needs to wait for long – this happens when you have interviews lined consecutively, provide them some snacks – nobody likes the feeling of an empty stomach.

Let them know:  
Not telling candidates about the status of their application or interview is the biggest sin, in my view a recruiter who misses this frequently is not fit for his/her role at all. You may not be the only company that the candidate has applied; this status update will help him to take crucial decisions. Make sure you communicate the status – positive/Negative without miss, a recruitment who does this at 100% hit will be the most successful team.

Conduct a Survey with your candidates: 
There are so many free tools available on the internet to conduct surveys; Recruitment should conduct a candidate experience survey every quarter and analyses their shortfall, should implement measure in the next quarter to make it better. Ideally every candidate should be part of this survey. Make candidate experience part recruiter’s KRA, and give it good weightage.
Candidates are the ones who will build your brand – they speak, they write over internet, they refer and recruitment team succeeds.

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed in blog are purely personal and has no connection to the organization I worked/working for.