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Email templates to help you manage candidate communications during difficult times

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Download these free email templates to manage your organisation’s recruitment and communications with candidates.

What email templates are included in the free download?

Notifying candidates recruitment is on hold

Use this template if you’ve implemented a recruitment freeze, to keep candidates warm and let them know you’ll be in touch again when you’re back up and running.

Online video interviews

Use this template if your recruitment process has changed and you’re using video interviews to prioritise the healthy and safety of your team members and candidates. It provides interview information for candidates, including when the interview is scheduled, what to expect and how to prepare.

Growing talent pools

Use this email template when you’re running recruitment campaigns to grow your talent pool and prepare for when recruitment resumes. It tells candidates you’ll notify them of upcoming opportunities, how you’ll engage with them in the future, and encourages them to share a sign up link with others.

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Managing seasonal recruitment in retail

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Is your organisation coping with seasonal recruitment demands? Seasonal recruitment is common in retail. You may need more team members before Christmas, or during summer. For fluctuating recruitment demands, here are the best strategies to manage seasonal recruitment. 

Being able to meet customer needs when your business kicks into “seasonal overdrive” is critical. To ensure this year’s seasonal shift is as cost-effective, stress-free and productive as possible, use these strategies to manage seasonal recruitment.

Put a number on it 

Start by identifying the number of team members you will need in which locations and departments.

Use key learnings from past seasons

Understand which areas of your business will need extra support based on data from previous years and factor in growth throughout the year to create a plan. Consider issues you’ve faced previously and set a plan to plug these holes preemptively.

Create an attraction and hiring strategy

Implement sound attraction and hiring methods. Because seasonal employees may not remain in your business over the long term, advertising, hiring and onboarding costs through traditional methods can sometimes outweigh returns. But there are a number of strategies to cut down on the time and resources it takes to attract, screen and hire candidates.

Some smart attraction and hiring methods you could use include:

  • An employee referral system – offer rewards and incentives to current team members for every successful referral they make to you (after all, great talent knows great talent!)
  • Advertising in-store – a low-cost way to win applications from customers who already know, like and trust your brand
  • An effective Candidate Management System – allowing you and your hiring managers to work collaboratively to screen candidates with ease in a single location
  • Talent pooling – reach out to candidates who have previously expressed an interest in working with your organisation
  • Delegating tasks to your front-line managers
  • Use Group Assessment Days to assess and hire candidates in bulk.

Use the right technology 

You may need to screen hundreds of applications, so being able to digitally screen, compare and invite candidates to be interviewed will save you time and effort when recruiting high volumes. Using a Candidate Management System will go a long way in saving you time and making your processes more efficient.

Use screening tools 

Lastly, ensure you’re hiring the right person for the role. Hiring the wrong person whose values do not accurately match your company can cause massive issues and negative brand consequences. This, combined with the stress of the seasonal period, means you can’t afford to suffer from mis-hires or allow customer service to deteriorate.

Consider using behavioural and skills testing, and reference checks to feel confident in your hiring decision.

Effectively screen candidates to ensure their values and experience matches what you are looking for. Ask quality questions to gain insight into candidates’ character and how they will perform in your team.

For more information about talent attraction, recruitment technology, or screening solutions, contact us at info@employmentoffice.com.au or on 1300 366 573.

Candidate Shortlisting for NFP and Healthcare: Hiring for Attitude

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While for some industries their main recruitment issue is attracting talent in the first place, for industries like healthcare and the not-for-profit sector, there is a huge pool of potential candidates. The problem with this, is the need to reduce the candidate pool significantly. So how can we do this?

It is a misconception that in the NFP and healthcare industry, it is easy to find the perfect candidate. Yes, there are plenty of people within the talent pool that have the right hard skills to do the job; but many are similar as the required qualifications are so niche to their industry.

This is where softer skills come into play; however, these are difficult to determine from a resume alone and when you could easily have fifty-plus applicants attracted to one job advert, you could spend hours with candidates determining their softer skills.

How can you filter your candidates down before face-to-face interviews?

We’ve come up with some shortlisting techniques that might help you narrow down your candidates and identify those who have the best attitudes ready for final interviews.

1. Phone Interviews

Conducting phone interviews are a much quicker way of directly speaking to an individual and getting a gut feeling of their attitude to the work they will be doing if they were successful. While this is certainly an option that will take some time, it will be significantly less time consuming to speak with each individual over the phone briefly than to organise individual interviews that could last the good part of an hour.

2. Group Interview Days

Split your candidates into a few groups and organise group interview days. By setting tasks and discussion points, you should be able to quickly determine which candidates have the softer skills you are looking for and those who would suit your organisation. The added benefit is seeing how they interact with other people when performing tasks, their potential for growth and their ability to think on their feet.

Shortlisting tip: When figuring out how many candidates you should invite to group interviews, multiply the amount of people you want to hire by 3 and invite that number. This gives you a nice range of candidates and a better idea of how many resumes you need to screen before finding those candidates.

3. Behavioural Testing

This is where behavioural testing could be an excellent option. Using a Candidate Management System (CMS) you can immediately filter through the candidates that will not fit your preferable behavioural style upon initial application. So those who qualify for their hard skills but whose behavioural style doesn’t fit your desired ethos would immediately be apparent.

“This all sounds great, but I don’t have the time to do this!”

We know hiring for healthcare and the NFP industry can be demanding and time consuming. That’s where we come in. Employment Office can comprehensively screen all of your applicants and determine the best talent from the pool for your vacancy so you can save time and expenses.

If you’d like to hear more about how we can screen your potential hires, contact us today on 1300 366573 or email info@employmentoffice.com.au.

Why to Perform Some Type of Test on Applicants

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At Employment Office, one of our most sought after and successful services is our behavior testing service. We also offer skills assessment, and other forms of testing that can have a profound impact on your recruitment success.

But why is testing necessary? Testing is certainly not a part of traditional recruitment, where most employers simply focus on the resume and interview. What is it about testing that makes it so valuable as a method of evaluating and collecting talent?

Benefits of Testing Applicants

There are actually many different benefits of testing – beyond even the information that you gather from the test itself. The process of testing is, in its own way, beneficial, and can help you greatly improve your own employment practices. Some of these benefits include:

  • More Information – You can’t legally put someone to work for free, see how they do, and then decide to hire them. So barring that, you’re working with limited information in most recruitment settings. Testing gives you more information, and more information is always better. No matter the test, whether it’s behavioral testing, skills testing, etc., you’re gaining information on the applicant that you would not have otherwise, and that information can help drive decisions.
  • Commitment and Ambition – Testing is also a form of self-selection. How badly does someone want to work for your company? How willing are they to put in hard work? These are important qualities in a great applicant, and any type of test or additional work helps show that the individual has that drive and motivation that is going to make them a good employee.
  • Driving Questions – Finally, generally you’re going into interviews fairly blind. Skills testing, behavioral testing, etc. – these types of tests provide you with more ways to ask questions. If you see someone is lacking in a specific skill, for example, you can ask questions to get a better idea of whether or not that person can learn the skill, or if they have the talent to make up for not having it.

Testing applicants may seem like an extra step, especially when compared to traditional recruitment practices, but there are a lot of reasons that it can be valuable as a part of your recruitment strategy. At Employment Office, we have testing solutions that are extremely affordable and will help you collect a lot of valuable information on your applicants. Check out our testing services today, and start integrating them into your recruitment strategy.

For your recruitment and branding concerns you can contact Employment Office at info@employmentoffice.com.