Job Alerts - What are they?

As part of the Registration process, candidates are usually asked what their job preferences are.  These preferences typically include their preferred work location, job type, function/department/industry, salary range and distance they're willing to travel.

These preferences are very often used for Talent Pooling and Reporting purposes.  But, if the Candidate opts in to receiving Job Alert emails (another question asked at Registration), these preferences are also used to dictate when these automated emails are sent.

Whenever a job is published publicly, Eploy will compare the requirements of the role with the preferences of those candidates who have opted in to receiving job alerts and it will email all those candidates who have matching preferences.

What do I need to think about when planning?

In general, there are three aspects to your Job Alerts settings that you'll need to give some thought to and potentially configure during phase 3 of your Implementation.

Job Alert Settings and Candidate Preferences

When thinking about your Job Alert settings, first and foremost you'll need to think about how many versions you want.  

Job alert settings are linked to your website - if you only have one website, you'll only need one set of Job Alert settings.  If you have multiple websites (e.g. a different Candidate Portal for each of your brands), then you can have multiple sets of Job Alerts if you want - one for each website.  It may be that you want to use the same set of preferences for each website, but you'd like the emails sent to have the same branding as the website in question - this can only be done by having multiple sets of job alert settings.

Once you've decided how many versions of your Job Alerts settings you're going to have, you'll now want to think about the settings themselves.  We have three sections to look at:

Details - this section allows you to specify:

• Which website these settings apply to
• When the job alert settings should be effective from
• Whether you'd like your job alert emails to send hourly or daily
• The maximum number of emails to send.  This setting works in combination with the email frequency and is based on the number of jobs published which match to a candidate's preferences.  For example, if you set the frequency to Hourly and the maximum emails to 2, every hour Eploy will check to see how many matching jobs have been published within that hour.  If there are 2 or less matching jobs, Eploy will send one job alert email for each job.  If more than 2 jobs have been published, Eploy will send a single Summary email (which contains the details for all matching jobs).  Every hour, Eploy will repeat the same check.  If you set the email frequency to daily, Eploy will carry out this check once a day, with the corresponding emails being sent once per day.
• The email template used to notify about a single job and the summary email, which is used when the maximum emails to send threshold is reached

When to send - this allows you to control when Eploy will send Job Alert emails, specifically in terms of which day of the week emails will be sent and between which hours of the day.

Preferences - this is where you indicate which of the various preference options available should be matched.  You'll need to decide which of the preferences should be used: Department, Location, Radius, Function, Salary, Contact Preference.  Whichever of these preferences you choose to use, the Vacancy must match with all of the selected preferences of the Candidate to result in an email being sent.  You'll need to decide whether to tick all the options, really restricting the likelihood of Candidates matching, or whether you want to use the less is more approach - selecting fewer preferences, which would therefore increase the likelihood of a job alert email being sent.

Drop Down Lists

Whichever of the preferences you choose to use, you'll need to ensure that the relevant drop down list has been filled in with the appropriate options.

Most of these will be populated by your Implementation Manager, but it's always a good idea to make sure that the right options have been added to the system.

One key thing to remember where these drop down lists are concerned is that they're visible to Candidates.  It can be really easy to fill a drop down with your internal language and short-hand, which may work brilliantly for your Recruitment and Hiring Manager population, but may not mean much to your Candidates.  We always recommend that, wherever possible, the language you use within these drop down lists should be candidate focussed.  By reducing (or, ideally, eliminating) internal jargon and short-hand, you'll be making these lists fully accessible to your Candidates which will result in a better experience for them.

Email Templates

There are only two types of email templates you'll need - Details and Summary email templates.  

The Details template is used when the system sends an email to the Candidate to let them know about a single job.

The Summary template is used by Eploy when it needs to let the candidate know about several vacancies at once.

For each template type, you'll need to consider:

• The general design of the template
• For the detail template, how much information about each Vacancy you'd like to include within the email
• Also for the detail template, whether you want to use links to the Vacancy page on your website or the Apply link (you can use both if you wish).  The summary template includes a dedicated link that takes the candidates to the list of matched vacancies on the website
• If you have multiple websites, and therefore multiple sets of Job Alert Settings, do you need a different pair of templates for each website?  For example, if you have 2 websites which have different branding on them, would you like your job alert email templates to match the branding of the website?

I'm still not sure what I need to do - are there any examples I can see?

Yes, there are.

Log in to your Eploy core system and navigate to Admin > Job Alerts.

From here, you can look at the Details tab.  Clicking on the website name will display the Job Alert settings for that website.

Opening the Emails tab will display the Job Alert email templates.