Engaging Disconnected Candidates

A hot topic at our annual user conference last week was how to engage candidates who haven’t connected with you recently. For example, this might be a person who got a certification a few years ago and hasn’t had any contact with you since that time. From time to time, you want to connect to your candidate’s for various marketing campaigns or operational initiatives. These “disconnected candidates” are at risk of missing the message because their contact information may be out of date. Here are a few ideas on how best to reengage with candidates in this situation:

1) Direct contact via email or physical letter – this is the easiest but the success rate decreases with the time since last contact with the candidate.

2) General marketing with incentives – candidates may be interacting with your organization and merely not connecting. For example, they might be visiting your main website for information but just not accessing their certification record. A general marketing message on your website that offered an incentive for the candidate to connect should increase your success rate with cases such as these.

3) Seek help – professional marketing people either within your organization or at an outside firm spend a great deal of energy trying to solve this problem of reaching unconnected people and getting them to reengage. Use their expertise.

4) Validate that its important – contact for operational an operational reason may be less important than for specific marketing and communications issues. For example, getting notice to disconnected candidates that you have transitioned their certification record to a new system probably isn’t as critical as marketing to them to come take an updated exam. The risk in the former case is that they may stay disconnected and have customer service issues if they ever resurface. This pales in comparison to the lost revenue opportunity in the latter.

5) Never let them disconnect – Of course, this is the best answer but deserves its own discussion.

Has anyone had experience with any of the above? What options have worked for you?

Next posting – How to keep candidates connected and engaged.