Mining Salesforce, your next insurance agent candidates may already be contacts in your database. Building a contact conversion capability can easily make any contact in Salesforce into a candidate for hire. It is important to build a new workflow so as to not confuse your relationship or put a sale at risk; beyond that, the possibilities are tremendous.

Turning Salesforce contacts into candidates with a talent community

If you don’t have a cache of potential candidates already in your Salesforce org, one way to build that list is to develop a talent community. A talent community is a forum that enables you to connect with candidates who don’t see an available opportunity with your company that aligns with their interests or aren’t ready to make a move but who want to develop a relationship with you. Simply put, it’s a hub where candidates can submit information to your company, express general interests, and access your thought leadership and career development tools — and all without applying for a specific position. 

If candidate data can live in or be accessed by Salesforce, this integrated data view helps with understanding the historical relationships between new hires and future targets. Done correctly, you can enable an intelligent account planning strategy for each new hire, possibly aligning people with markets where they have existing relationships. Embedded Salesforce relationship mapping and contact management can help this to become reality. And when integrated with your onboarding or HR system, this can provide quick click solutions to bring data to critical back-end systems and help enable and ease the accuracy of onboarding.

Improving the application and interview process for both parties

Once your candidate is ready to pursue a specific opening, you can begin the formal application and interview process. If you have implemented a talent community, you can leverage the same platform. If not, it is time to give your candidate a platform to engage with your talent team. Here are the actionable steps to consider:

Enable an electronic intake process

• Allow a candidate to create a profile within the community and reduce the data entry required for your candidate. We see so many businesses with redundant data. This leads to inaccurate data and loss of resource time. Implementing a solution that enables the candidate to upload their resume and have the information automatically pushed into specific fields and objects in Salesforce is a huge timesaver. Allow the candidate to review the mapping before submitting to ensure the accuracy of their data.Another option would be to integrate with LinkedIn to automate the process of bringing in resume-like data for candidates that do not have an updated resume.

Streamline the interview process

• Build an interview tool to allow for easy scheduling for all parties. Your interview tool should have calendar access for interviewers and online scheduling capabilities. Having a centralized calendar in Salesforce increases visibility and efficiency when HR departments are attempting to schedule multiple candidates’ time slots at once. Opening up the schedule to allow a candidate to select a time that works best for them alleviates administrative burden.
• Send automatic confirmations via email/text to candidates. Candidates want to receive communications via their preferred method. You can support this by enabling automatic emails or texts to both confirm and remind candidates of interview times, locations, and other relevant interview details (however they prefer).
• Pre-assign candidates to specific interviewers. Align candidates to the right interviewers with specific skill-based routing. Over time, you can use interview scorecards, hiring decisions, and agent success to gather insights about the quality of each interviewer to improve the overall success rate of agent hires. It’s expensive to recruit and evaluate candidates. A company must ensure they have a quality interview process, which includes having trained, effective interviewers.

Optimize the interview day itself

There should be some discussion about in-person interviews vs. remote interviews. If doing a traditional in-person interview day, you can add an automated electronic check-in process to your candidate community. This includes the following abilities:

• A candidate can check in when they arrive
• Anyone involved in the process is notified of the candidate’s arrival
• Confirmation of interview time slots

If holding interviews remotely, similar checkpoints should exist:

• The candidate is informed of the overall interview schedule
• The candidate and interviewers can access any/all virtual meetings
• Confirmation of interview time slots

A more efficient post-interview process

Automate the reminder to interviewers to provide feedback after the interview takes place, as well as automating the thank you message to candidates for participating. This should include potential next steps based on interview status, and for instance, could be continued throughout a multi-day, multi-step interview process.

Additionally, have a scorecard in your database for multiple interviewers and HR to view. If multiple interviewers need to share comments and feedback on the candidate, create a scorecard that can be attached to the candidate’s interview record to increase collaboration. This can also be used to set the status for next steps in an automated process.