Real outcomes of effective candidate engagement

August 12, 2025

 

Alex Oliver

11 min read

Competition for top talent is fierce. Candidates get bombarded with messages from potential employers across email, social media, and text every day. To stand out, you need to move beyond posting simple “help wanted” ads to building genuine connections with candidates.

We’ll show you how effective candidate engagement techniques impact your bottom line and how to make it effortless in your recruitment process. From key metrics to the right tech, you’ll learn to build candidate relationships that turn into long-term employee commitments.

Did you know? According to a CareerBuilder study, 78% of candidates say your hiring experience reflects how you value your people. Great candidate engagement isn’t just about finding talent — it’s about showing them you’re worth staying with for years.

Realistic outcomes of successful candidate engagement

Strong candidate engagement helps you hire faster, spend less, retain employees longer, and build a stronger employer brand.

Faster time-to-hire

Engaged candidates respond quicker and move through hiring stages faster since regular, courteous communication keeps them interested. This speeds up your entire process because recruiters complete back-end tasks, like interview scheduling, more efficiently with responsive candidates.

For example, Vista, a private aviation company, used better candidate engagement alongside new recruitment technology to cut its hiring process time by 48%. One of its biggest changes? Providing frequent application updates to candidates and letting them self-schedule their interviews.

Pro tip: Try segmenting time to hire by different engagement types to understand which ones drag or boost your hiring speed. If candidates respond faster to messages through email than your recruitment portal, then email should be your go-to communication method.

Lower cost-per-hire

The more time your recruitment team spends engaging qualified talent, the less likely they’ll drop out of the process before reaching the offer stage. And fewer dropouts mean less time, effort, and money spent finding replacements.

Even when new hires don’t work out, your engagement efforts build a talent pool you can tap later, lowering your cost per hire by saving on advertising, assessment, and agency fees.

For example, AmTrust Financial, a property and casualty insurer, revamped its candidate engagement strategies with better recruitment tech that simplified the application process, resulting in $13 million in cost savings.

The average cost per hire is about $4,700 according to 2022 SHRM data. If yours is much higher, learn how to analyze cost per hire and finally improve it.

Better candidate fit and retention

Meaningful engagement during recruitment helps candidates understand the role and your culture better. A Gallup study found that among employees who changed jobs recently, those with great candidate experiences are:

• 3.2 times more likely to feel connected to company culture.
• 3 times more likely to be satisfied with their work.

Effective engagement shows candidates you value them, reducing early turnover and highlighting your commitment to their satisfaction.

Improved employer reputation and reviews

When you treat all candidates with respect, including those who don’t get hired, the more likely they’ll develop a positive image of your company.

This investment pays off through great Glassdoor reviews and positive word-of-mouth exchanges on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok.

Pro tip: Send feedback surveys to candidates during your recruitment process, even to those who dropped out or didn’t make the final cut. The best times to send them? Send surveys directly after candidates complete an application, when they drop out of the recruitment funnel, and after they are hired for the most insights.

Measuring outcomes of candidate engagement with the right metrics

Candidate engagement affects nearly every recruitment metric, including time to fill and quality of hire. To improve your efforts, let’s focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that reveal insights into the applicant experience.

Defining the right metrics

Below are some key candidate engagement metrics to start:

Most applicant tracking systems (ATS), like iCIMS Hire, track these automatically. Check your ATS’ analytics module to see what data is already at your fingertips, so you can start improving.

Translating metrics into actionable steps

Now that you have the right metrics, you’ll need to know what “good” looks like and make improvements on areas that aren’t up to par. Try these steps to start:

1. Establish benchmarks: Look for benchmarks by industry, role, size, and location as well as your historical data from the past six months to a year to establish your baseline.
2. Identify metrics to improve: Pick the metrics that are below industry standards, are trending down, or are tied to business outcomes like faster hiring.
3. Design interventions: Determine what factors could be negatively impacting the metric, a reasonable intervention, and a target goal to determine success.
4. Monitor and adjust: Track your progress toward your target goal over a set time (monthly or quarterly), adjust strategies as needed, and repeat with other metrics.

Example: Let’s say you’re noticing your application completion and candidate response rates decreasing month over month. We’ll use the steps above to diagnose the problem and develop next steps.

*Note: These are approximated benchmarks from various sources. Look for benchmarks for your industry from reputable sources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, SHRM, or iCIMS Insights.

Pro tip: The goal isn’t to overwhelm your recruiters but to find a good balance between quality candidate engagement and pipeline efficiency. Choose one to two metrics to improve first and scale gradually.

How to dramatically improve candidate engagement

Start improving your candidate engagement by leveraging the candidate relationship management (CRM) and recruitment marketing techniques below.

Communication strategies that boost candidate engagement

Communication breaks down when messages don’t reach candidates at the right time or place. With so many outlets vying for candidate attention, your communications need to reach candidates where they gather.

• Diversify channels: Use email, chatbots, phone, and text recruiting to reach candidates on their preferred platforms.
• Increase message frequency: Send follow-ups at reasonable intervals.
• Align your team: Coordinate who contacts candidates when to avoid confusion.

Automation is the key to putting the above strategies into practice without burning out your recruitment team. An advanced recruitment platform, like iCIMS Talent Cloud, usually comes with built-in automations and templates to start increasing candidate communications with little additional effort.

Personalize every message

Sending templated, impersonal messages is a surefire way to increase your candidate dropout rates. But, personalizing messages to each candidate showcases you value the time and effort they’re dedicating to your recruitment process.

Go beyond emails starting with “Dear [Candidate Name]” by:

• Using preferred names and pronouns: Some candidates prefer being addressed by a nickname or with specific pronouns. Confirm their preferences, and stick to them in every interaction.
• Referencing assessment accomplishments: Note what stood out to you in follow-up conversations to demonstrate the care you put into evaluating their work.
• Mentioning standout interview responses: If there was a response, skill, or quality that resonated with you during an interview, note that in follow-ups, especially if it aligns with your company’s goals.

While this seems impossible, especially if you’re an enterprise with high-volume hiring, there are ways to make message personalization a reality.

Platforms like iCIMS Engage, for example, accelerate this process with templates that include placeholders to add that personal touch every time.

Optimize the whole recruiting process for engagement

From brand awareness to offer acceptance, your entire recruiting process should keep the candidate experience front and center to increase engagement and decrease candidate ghosting.

• Attraction: Create marketing materials that highlight your employer value proposition (EVP) and source passive candidates.
• Application: Simplify with chatbot assistants, mobile-friendly forms, and easy-apply options.
• Screening: Be upfront about assessment expectations and grading criteria.
• Hire: Send offers or rejections quickly with clear next steps.

Pro tip: Use structured hiring to plan engagement elements before posting roles. Besides aligning stakeholders on their responsibilities, you’ll reduce the chance of a disjointed candidate experience.

Strengthen long-term candidate relationships and use talent pools

Candidate engagement doesn’t end at job offers. Continuing to cultivate relationships with silver medalists and other qualified candidates who didn’t make the cut makes it easier to source talent for future roles.

Even better, it strengthens your company’s reputation since candidates with a great hiring experience are more likely to refer you in their networks.

A candidate relationship management platform is great at organizing candidates into various talent pools and sending relevant communications that keep pipelines hot.

For example, iCIMS Employer Branding allows you to create and send email newsletters, videos, and updates to candidates based on their skills and interests, so they’re always aware and ready to jump on your next opportunity.

Blending technology and the human touch for ideal candidate engagement

Great candidate experience requires technology that organizes and automates messaging while maintaining a personal connection.

Combine automation with authenticity

Automation doesn’t mean impersonal — it’s quite the opposite. It means you can address every candidate instead of ghosting some while nurturing others. This actually protects your employer brand and improves overall engagement.

Advanced recruitment tools allow you to interface with candidates more frequently and organically while maintaining a personal touch.

For example, iCIMS’ career site chatbot uses AI for human-like conversations and helps candidates find fitting roles. Meanwhile, its multistep email campaigns allow you to target different talent segments while showcasing your culture.

Pro tip: If you want to instantly sound genuine and authentic in your messaging, be transparent when you use automated versus human-reviewed messages. Candidates appreciate the honesty; plus, it builds trust.

See how iCIMS transforms candidate engagement

Basic ATS features like application receipts aren’t enough to keep candidates invested. If recruiters handle all engagement manually, you’re creating bottlenecks that hurt time to fill and cost per hire.

You need an all-in-one recruitment system that combines ATS with CRM tools that increase candidate engagement before, during, and after hiring.

iCIMS provides a customized, AI-powered platform with advanced automation, analytics, and user-friendly interfaces to scale recruitment without sacrificing quality interactions.

Ready to transform candidate engagement in your recruiting process? Schedule a demo today.