With every applicant in your ATS that gets dispositioned out of the hiring process, a company has the opportunity to decide whether or not they want to engage with this candidate in the future.

Every company should use this opportunity to let the candidate walk away from the applicant process with a positive feeling about their experience. If their resume is dispositioned out and then that data is left to simply die, I will guarantee you that they have not had a positive candidate experience.

For those candidates where you want to engage with for possible job opportunities in the future, they should be offered at this point the option to sign-up for your company's career newsletter and job alerts.

These are simply candidate targeted email newsletters. Because you have there applicant history, you know what jobs and job families they are interested in and you know what locations they are interested in working at. This information determines what messages they get in the future.

When similar requisitions open up in the future, based upon how you pipelined each candidate in the past, that is the content that determines what information to send to these prior applicants with the hope of making them future applicants once again.

Don’t simply send out mass emails, but rather categorize and segment candidates based upon:

• Their skill sets against your needs
• Companies/competitors they work at
• Jobs they have previously applied to
• How far they progressed in your hiring process
• Industries they work in
• Geographical locations.

I believe these types of candidate information best determine their matches for your current and future reqs. Also, track email marketing type metrics. Such as open rates, click through rates, and click-to-apply rates. This is a great way to measure your outbound candidate engagement.

This type of metric reporting also allows for recruiters to proactively follow through on critical talent groups. Email alerts, by themselves can have a great impact, but there will be times when follow-up calls are required by recruiters. Viewing previous engagement with specific and targeted talent can help prioritize the recruiter's calls that they need to make each day.