With a more demanding candidate market than ever, candidate engagement is the biggest differentiator for recruiters in 2023.

Candidate engagement is the practice of interacting with potential candidates during the entire recruiting process in order to build relationships and create a positive candidate experience.

Candidate engagement is about involving candidates in your company brand, mission and job positions through several touchpoints in the recruitment funnel.

Candidate engagement platforms, also known as talent engagement platforms, are software platforms that hiring companies and their recruiters use to inform, educate and nurture candidates with the right resources at the right time in the funnel so candidates can make informed decisions on joining a company.

Engagement is typically facilitated through a set of features enabling the hiring company to send automated messages, follow up messages, share content and send notifications to the right candidates on scheduled or triggered moments so the candidate can be engaged, nurtured, re-engaged and the relationship with the candidate can grow.

We have listed the best candidate engagement platform so you can make a better decision about which platforms to further explore.

These are the best candidate engagement platforms for 2023:

1. HeroHunt.ai
2. iCIMS Talent Cloud
3. Bullhorn
4. Sense
5. Gem

1. HeroHunt.ai

HeroHunt.ai is the talent search and engagement platform that enables recruiters to find 1 billion candidates worldwide and engage them with highly personalized automated outreach.

HeroHunt.ai delivers profiles from untapped talent pools with rich information on skills and experience, contact info and allows recruiters to send automated sequences of messages over a period of time.

HeroHunt.ai is used by recruiters worldwide to find new candidates based on their job description. Every step in the sourcing process is highly automated with HeroHunt.ai, from automatically generating your search from your job description to the automatic generation and sending of personalized messages.

Best for: talent search and initial engagement - finding new profiles, sending personalized messages, message sequences

Ideal user: small, medium and bigger companies with a hiring need

Free trial: yes available (get free trial)

Features

• Real-time candidate search: Find 1 billion candidates worldwide in a variety of online sources like LinkedIn, GitHub and Stack Overflow with real-time and always up-to-date profile data
• Contact finder: Find verified personal email addresses for 90% of profiles on average. Find social media links of the candidates from dozens of platforms.
• Profile enrichment: Extensive analytics on candidate skills and experience to provide additional screening insights for the recruiter.
• Hyper-personalized outreach: Highly personalized outreach messages that are automatically generated for every candidate that you find. Sending your personalized outreach message is one click away.
• Automated messaging: Send several automated messages like emails and follow up emails to candidates over a period of time.
• Workflows: An automated workflow to execute on what used to be manual tasks, like finding contact details, sending several messages over time and saving candidates to your ATS.

2. iCIMS Talent Cloud

iCIMS Talent Cloud is a talent relationship management platform that helps to continually engage with candidates in the talent pipeline. 

You can send targeted, automated text and email campaigns that get candidates to apply faster, host virtual career fairs to cut costs and expand your reach and get powerful recruitment marketing reporting and source analytics that help you measure ROI and efficiency.

Best for: recruitment marketing automation - multi touch campaigns based on your current ATS contacts

Ideal user: large companies with a big and well maintained ATS system with lots of contacts

Free trial: not available (demo)

Features

• Marketing automation: Nurture the candidates who are most likely to convert by using campaign personalization and lead scoring.
• Tracking: Track and score candidate interactions so you can engage candidates who are most interested in your employer brand, track engagement for all content pieces and score actions based on intent.
• Personalization: Automate personalized recruitment campaigns so your candidates receive the messages that interest them most.
• Nurture: Keep candidates active throughout the recruitment journey with several drip campaigns and touchpoints including notifications and status updates.
• Re-engagement: Reactivate passive candidates who have shown intent for your company in the past.
• Pipeline management: Select candidates based on their engagement scores so you know who is cold, warm and hire-ready.

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