If your company is getting tons of quality candidates for open positions, you’re probably less concerned about candidate loyalty and more concerned about taking steps to meet candidates’ needs. When your company is struggling to find great candidates or just wants to ensure that the best candidates are being hired, however, candidate loyalty becomes more important and desired. Here are some steps you can take to improve candidate loyalty and be sure that the candidates you want also want you. 1. Reduce application length and complexity. Top candidates are not going to bother with an application that takes hours to fill out and that asks for a lot of irrelevant information, so you should make your applications as short and simple as possible and put it online for convenience, too. There are back-end processes and tools companies can use to ensure that unqualified candidates do not slip through a shorter application process, so everybody wins. 2. Educate candidates about your company. Using all communications with candidates to explain what defines your company and makes it different from others in the field will help candidates buy into the experience and understand your company better. Do not make it all about you, though; use these communications simultaneously to learn about the candidate and form a relationship, and you will be on your way to greater candidate loyalty. eBook: How to Attract Top Talent Using Inbound Recruiting – Find out how to harness the power of an inbound recruiting strategy in order to attract, hire, and retain top talent. 3. Do not make promises you cannot keep. It’s natural to want to make your company sound even better than it is, but making promises you can’t keep will be a huge turn-off to candidates and destroy relationships by killing the trust that has barely even started to develop. Promising what you cannot deliver also leads to negative word of mouth, which you want to avoid at all costs. 4. Keep in touch by any means necessary. There is nothing more discouraging to a candidate than not hearing from a company regularly during the interview and hiring process. Even if you have to assign someone outside the hiring team to update candidates regularly, it is worthwhile to do so. Otherwise, a candidate may have moved on by the time a decision is made. 5. Be helpful even when it does not benefit you. If you see an opportunity to help a candidate in any way, take it even if it does not directly benefit you or pertain to the position for which you are hiring. Some examples of this might be to offer constructive feedback about interview skills or resumes, to refer the candidate to another employer if you do not plan to hire him or her, or to suggest applying for another position within your company. Not many companies go out of their way to help candidates in these ways, and it will come back to you in many ways, positive word of mouth and referrals being just two of them. Being generally helpful attracts people to your company because (unfortunately) it is unusual, and it will set you apart as one of the good ones to work for over time. Thrive TRM plans and tracks interactions and contacts with candidates, which can improve the candidate experience through increased contact at regular intervals. Discover solutions for executive search firms, VC / PE firms, and in-house recruiters to attract more top talent and turn them into loyal employees.