The Best Way to Follow Up on a Job Application

Before the actual onboarding of a job post applicant, an organization goes through a step-by-step process to find the most competent candidate to fill a role. Though a search can take time, it is important to not rush into any hiring as it may lead to additional human-resource turnover and missed opportunity costs. And thus, investing in a thorough and detailed hiring process to bring talented professionals who will benefit the company grow, makes a lot of sense.

Finding the best ‘fit’ for an organisation, is very challenging. A right employee recruiting strategy and systemised hiring process can be vital to organisations.

It begins with identifying the hiring needs, planning, creating a perfect job description and then attracting the right talent pool with a good job posting on multi platforms. Once a job is posted, it needs to be promoted well following which begins the Herculean task of analysing and sorting these potential candidates and received job applications.

Following are a few ‘musts’ to-do in any hiring processes in today’s competitive times:

• Get the candidate data systemised and share among all the hiring team members.
• Do a focused screening of prospective resumes for qualifications, work-experience, skill sets and other related compatibility criteria. This will ensure any unfit candidature isn’t being taken forward.
• Pre-screen candidates through a message, email or a telephone call to not only save the interviewing and selection committee’s time but also to check their congruency with the job. Sometimes, a candidate may look good on resume, but a pre-screening interview provides a better picture. Pre-screening could also be done by arranging initial meet-ups and video calls to check on the basics like communication skills etc.
• Also search for potential qualified candidates using relevant keywords on job portals like LinkedIn and related social media. There you may find a candidate who may not be actively looking for jobs, but matches well with your requisites and may turn out to be a boon for your organisation. Nothing wrong on checking on them by dropping a message, mail or call.

Following these will lead to the formation of a comprehensive talent database using which the hiring managers can begin the next step of organising the right interview panel, scheduling interviews and recording assessments to pick out the best ‘fit’ for a job.

Some studies also suggest that the best candidates are off the market in 10 days and thus it's important to act quickly, especially when you know you're interested in a specific applicant. Even if no decision has been made yet, a follow up with the candidate is a must to ensure you're on their radar. Also, respond to their queries and concerns right away to keep them updated throughout the process.

Another crucialpoint to never misswhilefollowing up on a job posting by a recruiter is to keep a track of each hiring stage, assess its information to ensure quick review with the hiring team and forwarding of best candidates for recruitment.

A lot of multi-nationals including Fortune 500s now invest in incorporating Applicant Tracking Systems, to speed up and support the Hiring Team and Managers to focus more on other criticalities related to hiring. With an automatized system in place, the entire hiring process gets more efficient, faster and simplified to bits, starting from multiple job postings, importing data from mail responses, parsing applicant’s resumes, creating candidate databases, segregation on various levels and generation of a fantastic talent pool that can be tracked at every hiring stage and used in the future as well.

One such good option is Resumemantra, that offers a well-integrated cloud-based recruitment software solution and Applicant Tracking System that streamlines the entire hiring process. It helps in structuring a job post, offers customised multiple job postings, resume screening services, tracks the hiring schedule, provides summarily information on open recruitments and their assessments, creates candidate databases and guarantees that you do not miss out any tiny bit anywhere in the whole process.