If you found this article, you probably are losing candidates in the recruiting and seeking ways to enhance candidate engagement during assessments. Pre-employment assessments help you get a clear picture of the candidate, and you need to conduct different assessments for different job roles. While conducting pre-employment assessments, it’s crucial to pay attention to how you address and communicate with potential candidates.

Pre-employment assessments can make the recruiting process lengthy and complicated. This might be one of the reasons why candidates drop out during the assessments. As a recruiter, you need to enhance candidate experience by analyzing and changing how you hire and conduct assessments. By focusing on candidate experience, you can easily motivate candidates to stick to your recruitment process and hire top talent.

Candidate ghosting has become a new trend, especially due to recruiters’ outdated methods to engage with candidates.

Recruiters have to go through tons of applications when they post a job vacancy on multiple platforms. Hence, it becomes challenging for them to think about strategies to provide a better candidate experience.

Here are some of the reasons why candidates drop out during assessments:

• Lack of communication
• Long hiring process
• Complicated process
• Poor interview experience

That said, here we will discuss some of the best ways to improve candidate engagement and reduce dropouts during assessments.

Write Clear Job Descriptions

A job description is the first thing that a candidate interacts with, and you don’t want them to get disappointed during their first interaction.

Write a clear job description and provide clear expectations about the job role. Also, it’s essential to mention the total interview rounds and what you’re expecting from a potential candidate.

Your job posting is a great opportunity to give candidates a sense of who you are as a team. It can be achieved by using the right tone – for example, laid-back or formal.

Invest In The Right Assessment Tool

Leveraging an easy-to-use tool is the key to attracting and retaining top talent. Using a complex assessment tool can demotivate candidates and increase dropout rates. To increase candidate engagement during assessments, every organization needs to invest in an easy-to-use tool.

For example, suppose you’re hiring a technical team in your organization. In that case, you need to conduct coding assessments to get a deep insight into the candidate’s technical skills. For that reason, you can invest in Intervue – which is the most preferred tool by recruiters. It uses an auto-grading system that automatically eliminates unqualified candidates.

During assessments, using such tools can help recruiters save time interviewing unqualified candidates and focus on the qualified ones.

Here are some of the features of Intervue:

• Integrated audio/video call functionality
• Supports 35+ languages
• Collaborative interviewer notes
• Conduct remote panel interviews
• Playback your interviews

Keep A Casual Conversation During Interviews

During the assessments, ensure that your candidate is comfortable and relaxed, which will increase the chance of a successful interview.

When asking questions during the assessments, make it a normal conversation between two persons. Also, it’s important to give and ask for feedback. For candidates, feedback after an interview will help them improve their skills and perform better at future interviews. For recruiters, it will help you re-evaluate your existing assessment process and make improvements to enhance the candidate experience.

In this way, you’ll ensure they get a good impression of you and don’t encourage any other candidates to drop off.

Stay Connected With Tech Candidates

According to Talent Board, more than 54% of candidates didn't respond to the company after an interview. Giving no feedback to the candidates can impact your company’s reputation and employer brand.

However, to attract and retain the top talent, it’s crucial to stay connected with the candidates by informing them about their progress in the recruitment process. It will help them to know where they stand and will reduce stress. If you make a good impression on the candidates, they’re more likely to accept your job offer than your competitors.

Also, inform them about any unexpected delays in the process. Don’t leave candidates in the dark for extended periods; they’ll get worried that they’ve been rejected, and you risk losing their interest in your company.

Ask Relevant Questions To The Candidates

One of the main reasons for higher candidate dropout rates is that the interviewer asks irrelevant candidates. 8 out of 10 candidates are eliminated during their assessments when recruiters ask irrelevant questions.

To reduce dropout during assessments, you must ask questions about the job role you’re hiring for. For example, suppose you’re hiring an iOS developer in your organization. In that case, you must ask questions related to iOS development, such as iOS frameworks, libraries, etc.

Create A Great Candidate Experience

Candidates appreciate when they feel valued, and every organization must focus on a candidate-driven approach.

Providing a great candidate experience is directly related to creating a positive employer brand and enhancing online reputation. When candidates have great interview experience with your company, they’re more likely to discuss it with their friends and relatives and might post a positive review on multiple recruiting sites.

Enhance Your Onboarding Process

Once you’ve hired a candidate, keep your onboarding process exciting and interactive to allow candidates to feel engaged and valued. The onboarding process is the first interaction between you and the candidate after selection, and you don’t want them to feel disappointed on their first day at your company.

Improving candidate engagement and reducing dropout rates during the assessment can be challenging for recruiters. It is always better to deliver a great candidate experience from the first round of the process itself.

Most importantly, try to automate your tasks as much as possible and leverage modern tools and technologies to structure and streamline the process.

With the tips mentioned above, you can quickly increase candidate engagement during assessments and retain the top talent in your organization.