As discussed in my last post, the best method for engaging disconnected candidates is never to let them disengage. We’ve seen a variety of methods for this, however the basic approach is to keep your program top of mind for the candidate. If they are thinking about their certification often, they are likely to interact with you, your website, and your program’s initiatives on a regular basis. For this post, I’ll focus on engagement for candidates who are in process of getting their certification.
The easiest method to keep in-process candidates engaged is to bound the time they have to get certified. If their pursuit of certification is open ended, it’s more likely that candidates will drift through the certification process without actively pursuing the requirements. We have clients where the candidates have a timeframe, 3 years, to earn their certification from the time they started the process by completing the application. If the timeframe elapses without the candidate certifying, the candidate must start over. Usually this means they have to recomplete the application and pay the application fee. A simple deadline is often enough to keep a candidate focused and on task toward completion. The energy and expense associated with starting over is a motivator for candidates to finish their certification in a timely manner. This timeframe has the additional benefit of ensuring that the process you designed and approved for the candidate is the one they actually experience and is still relevant. (I’ll discuss this relevancy issue more in a later post.)
Another option to motivate candidates is to have visual, incremental steps in your program. If the candidate sees that they are making measured progress toward certification, its probable that they feel successful and will continue to pursue your certification. You can use different statuses for each step in the process to give the candidate a visual demonstration of progress. After each step, let them know how far they have come and how little they have left to do.
A final tool is to find candidates who are in danger of disengaging and market to them quickly. These candidates are at risk of leaving your program. If they take this step, they are unlikely to come back. As such, incentives and discounts may make sense as reduced revenue earned from these candidates may be better than the nothing you’ll get from them if they disconnect. However, finding these candidates takes some sophisticated reporting. Adding the incremental statuses as mentioned above can help with this as it provides greater insight into the progression of your candidate population. You’ll need to do some trend analysis to determine the inflection points where candidates are unlikely to continue if their progress stalls. We’ve had some fun investigating this with some of our clients and its been exciting to see analysis results that generate actionable data to drive a marketing project.
I welcome your thoughts.
Next posting – Keeping certified candidates engaged.
