At the time of their invention, applicant tracking systems (ATS) introduced recruiters to an incredibly efficient way to organize candidate information. But since then, and especially since the events of 2020, applying to jobs is an almost entirely digital process, and remote work is the default for knowledge workers — throwing recruiters for a loop as they quickly adjust their approach to candidate relationship building.
In a remote recruiting environment, recruiters don’t have ready access to those small touchpoints they previously used to build rapport with candidates, such as meeting them before interviews to answer questions or running post-mortems at the end of an interview panel. Employers face pressure to customize and personalize the process to keep in-demand candidates engaged, but find themselves without the staffing or resources they need to do so at scale.
There’s a big payoff for recruiters and hiring managers who can overcome these challenges and successfully build and manage relationships with remote candidates: a warm pipeline of talent that keeps an enterprise organization operating smoothly. But in order to achieve this payoff, recruiters must update some of the traditional best practices they use for building candidate relationships to build remote candidate relationships.