Candidate portals are the epicentre of the recruitment experience for your candidates. The dedicated area of your recruitment website provides them with a place to access their own data, change their preferences and follow the progress of their live applications. It puts them front and centre throughout the recruitment process, which is exactly where they should be!
The good news is, candidate portals benefit more than just the candidate – they can streamline your recruitment process and ultimately make your job a lot easier too.
Let’s take a look at how a candidate portal benefits the recruitment process...
1. Keeps compliance documents up-to-date
Every good CRM will already have a water-tight compliance workflow in place that prevents you from placing candidates that don’t have the right documentation. But when you add a self-service candidate portal into the mix, together these two features can make your recruitment process slick and seamless.
Through the candidate portal on your website, candidates can upload their own compliance documents, taking this responsibility off your desk. That way there’s no more waiting on a candidate to call in to scan their documents before their compliance expires. It’s also a much more GDPR compliant way of sharing and accessing crucial data.
2. Candidates can personalise their job alerts
Within their candidate portal, every candidate has the freedom to personalise and tailor their own communication preferences. They can subscribe to receive job alerts daily, weekly or monthly and can even build bespoke job alerts tailored to the positions they would like to see.
This is a fantastic feature for recruiters as it helps keep your SMS campaigns and job alert emails hyper-tailored to the type of jobs a candidate actually wants to see vs spamming them job alerts for roles that are totally irrelevant! This functionality has the added bonus of updating in your CRM every time a candidate changes their preferences.
As soon as an inactive candidate starts engaging with their job search again, you’ll be the first to know so you can contact them quickly (before a competitor does!).
Knowing exactly which roles they're interested in saves you the hassle of sending them irrelevant jobs before picking up the phone for numerous unsuccessful follow-up calls.
3. It's available 24/7
Think of your candidate portal as a recruiter that’s works 24/7, so you don’t have to! With a self-service candidate portal candidates are free to log-in to update everything from their CV, to references or browse suitable jobs at a time that suits them.
Better still, with a place to track their progress, you’ll quickly find that you save a lot of time you’d otherwise spend taking calls from candidates who want to know the status of their application. It’s no secret that Hiring Managers can be slow to send over feedback or move the process along – with this in place your candidate will always have a timeline to keep coming back to.
4. It builds a positive candidate experience
In an increasingly competitive landscape, providing a great candidate experience throughout your recruitment process isn’t just good practice – it’s the only way to compete for top talent!
A bad candidate experience could get you ghosted, but a good one could lead to referrals, a testimonial and the candidate coming back to you when they next move roles. So how does a candidate portal improve that experience? It acts as the ultimate candidate management hub that's accessible, transparent and manageable.
With a modern piece of tech to go to for the majority of their needs, this positively impacts the overall candidate experience and helps build a trusting relationship between you and your candidate – crucial in today’s market!
5. Keeps you and the hiring manager on the same page
Another major perk is that a candidate portal allows you and the hiring manager to stay on the same page (without even picking up the phone!). Every time a candidate makes that all-important change in their portal, notifications are sent to both of you so you can act accordingly.
Better still, these notifications will automatically pull-through to your dashboard to ensure you never miss a beat. Automation such as this can have a huge impact on your productivity levels. You’ll spend less time calling candidates out of the blue, and more time focusing on the tactics that bring you money.
