Employer brand leaders from Ford and Organon share what’s working in candidate messaging right now, from personalized outreach and talent rediscovery to knowing when automation hurts more than it helps.
Most candidates will interact with your brand more through automated emails than through any recruiter conversation. Think about that for a second. The “thank you for applying” message, the routine status update, the rejection note, these messages are the experience. So if they’re clunky and off-brand, your candidate experience is too.
We sat down with Kerry Noone, Director of Employer Branding at Ford Motor Company, and Geoff Webb, who leads Talent Discovery & Engagement at Organon, for a candid talk about candidate messaging. The conversation covered everything from rejection emails and WhatsApp rollouts to the surprising power of a well-timed flyer.
Here are the lessons that emerged. Watch the full roundtable replay here.
Be Selective About Who You Message, and More Honest About How
As a young company, Organon often reaches out to people who have little or no sense of the brand. Outreach has to carry the weight of introducing the organization and the role at the same time, which means the team is far more deliberate about who they contact. As Geoff Webb says, “It’s better to message your people and have it be impactful than to spam hundreds of people and have absolutely no one reply to you.”
Perhaps that’s obvious; most people accept that tailored outreach is better than spray and pray. The problem comes when “personalization” means cramming in information from a candidate’s profile – pets or hobbies or whatever – in the hopes of sounding relevant. Candidates read these messages as performative and are less likely to trust your intent.
As part of an EVP refresh, Ford pulled every automated message to check whether they had the balance right, and whether the wording still matched the promise the brand was trying to make to candidates. Gaps emerged quickly, including a “you started your application but didn’t finish it” email went out with no branding at all, not even a logo. Bottom line? Be careful about who ends up on the other end of your outreach, and keep personalization grounded in what might actually matter to that person. And be just as deliberate about the automated messages they receive as the human ones.
Don’t Let Automation Carry Messages It Can’t Handle
On the subject of automation, it’s impossible to communicate with every candidate one‑to‑one, especially in high‑volume or global hiring. Some communication has to run through automated emails; it’s only as people move closer to interview and offer that the templates fall away and a human takes over. This makes the wording of those messages part of the work.
Organon inherited most of its automated messages from MSD (known in the USA as Merck) through Workday. Those emails “weren’t branded very nicely” and Workday made it hard to send well‑designed, branded emails with attachments or video. So the team quickly removed most of its down-funnel automations and spent the next four years designing “white glove” one‑to‑one interactions instead of messages at scale.
For the bulk, early-funnel messaging, automation is essential to handle volume and basic updates so candidates aren’t ghosted. But even here, it’s important to give candidates a baseline of respect for their time and interest. Organon’s previous application acknowledgment was little more than a “thank you” and “we’ll be in touch within 24 to 48 hours.” It’s since been rewritten to thank candidates for considering the company, and to commit to doing their best to respect the candidate’s time. That small change tells candidates you see their effort and take them seriously.
Respect the Candidate Even When You Say No
Rejection emails are the only touchpoint many applicants ever see, so they end up carrying a disproportionate share of the candidate experience. At Organon, the automated rejection only goes to candidates who never spoke with a recruiter. If they had a conversation, a recruiter calls and gives constructive feedback and examples of how the candidate might do better next time. The company also changed the rejection email into what Webb calls “a candidate’s bill of rights.” “Generic is very off putting,” Webb says. Thematically, the new message focuses as much on respect for the candidate as on delivering the rejection itself.
For consumer-facing brands, candidates are also the customer base. Candidates do not separate how you reject them from how they see you as a customer, and the impact of cold, careless rejections is felt in cancelled subscriptions and fewer sales.
Adding coupons and discount codes to rejection emails is a proven way to keep goodwill and a steady stream of shoppers, even as you’re rejecting a candidate. But offering anything useful in return for a candidate’s time and energy can turn a “no” into a much softer landing. While at CVS, Noone’s team gave rejected candidates access to an online “candidate care” tool containing interview and job search resources. Initially restricted to CVS roles, it was later opened more widely once the team looked at the ratio of applicants to hires and realized how many people could benefit.
Treat Your CRM Like a Living Talent Community
Most organizations are sitting on a large group of candidates who already know them, yet sourcing budgets still lean heavily on bringing new people in at the top of the funnel. At CVS, Noone’s team flipped the script by emailing people already in the database and asking them to update their information, a simple step which led to around 24,000 people uploading a resume the company did not previously have on file. That allowed them to create more targeted campaigns, for example, contacting healthcare professionals in specific locations. The database became a set of living talent pools.
Noone also asked this talent community what information they wanted to receive. The answer, overwhelmingly, was jobs. They also responded well when job alerts sat alongside useful “insider” stories about their profession or industry, and prompts to update their details based on new experience they’d gained since their last application to the company. That insight now shapes Ford’s plans for CRM and sourcing, with an emphasis on better segmentation and clearer tracking of how these messages convert.
Webb calls this kind of ongoing contact the “next frontier” for branding and sourcing. These operations have a lot to gain from working together and nurturing the existing database with consistent storytelling so that, when the right job appears, candidates already understand the organization well enough to act.
Give Silver Medalists a Different Journey
Neither runners up in the hiring process nor referrals should not be treated like a stranger in the queue. Both Ford and Organon are building a dedicated talent community for these high-quality candidates to receive a more white-glove, personalized experience.
Organon also created a new disposition code, “qualified but not considered,” to capture candidates who met the qualifications but did not progress because of timing or changes in the role itself. It feeds directly into their talent pool for future roles and avoids lumping genuinely strong candidates in with those who were disqualified.
Meet Candidates Where They Are (Literally)
Channel strategy was a recurring theme. Ford uses SMS for high-volume plant hiring but sticks to email and phone calls for professional roles. When Noone was at CVS, the company used Paradox’s SMS capabilities to cut time-to-fill from 22 days to just two or three.
Organon, which hires extensively outside North America, spent three years fighting to implement WhatsApp globally, since a large amount of their candidate base uses the messaging platform. They auto-send candidates an initial WhatsApp message after they apply, asking if they’d like to continue the conversation there.
And then there’s the old-school approach. Organon hired someone specifically to do offline, disruptive outreach at a key manufacturing location, including flyering local neighborhoods. “Everybody’s used to someone connecting with them on LinkedIn or Indeed,” Webb says. “Then they get a flyer in their hand and they’re like, ‘Oh, what’s this?’”
No salesperson closes a deal by assuming every buyer wants to be sold to in one way. Better messaging means using the channels your candidates already trust, not forcing them into the same path just because your tech stack can send email at scale.
Your Career Site Might Not Be Working How You Think
Many candidates will begin and end their journey on your career site, but do you know where the traffic goes? Organon found that almost all visitors were landing in just two places: the homepage and job search results. The EVP-rich landing pages the team had invested in, filled with stories and branding experiences, were attracting very little attention. The team is now exploring how to push that content down to the job page level where candidates are actually spending their time.
At Ford, the application status page was one of the highest-traffic pages. They repurposed it to a multi-use space that highlights hot jobs and other relevant content without getting in the way of the primary task. That includes clearer explanations of what candidates can expect, as well as more deliberate responses to reviews on platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed. As Noone put it, the goal is to show candidates “what they will experience” and be intentional about who gets to frame that story.
AI Has a Role, Just Not a Starring One
Of course, we couldn’t conclude the roundtable without asking about AI. Neither team is handling candidate conversations over it. Ford is experimenting with AI‑assisted writing behind the scenes, but also adding explicit language to explain how AI is and isn’t being used. That’s in response to feedback from the CandE awards around the need to communicate AI usage more transparently to candidates.
Organon uses AI to optimize job descriptions and titles and strip out gendered language, especially in markets and languages where the team does not have native fluency. But on the topic of AI interviewing and decision-making, Geoff was direct: “An AI cannot reach out and say, ‘Hey Geoff, what’s bugging you today?’ and map that to an intrinsic motivator. I really don’t think it’s qualified to interview people.”
For teams watching this space, the emerging best practice is to keep AI focused on drafting, editing and analysis. Humans stay front and center for high-touch communications, and whenever a candidate is being assessed or rejected.
The Shared Threads
Across Organon, Ford and CVS, and across both consumer and B2B environments, the same patterns kept surfacing:
- Candidates deserve clear, respectful messages that match where they are in the process.
- They want to feel that their time and energy is valued, even when the answer is “not this role.”
- They respond when you use the channels they actually live in, whether that is WhatsApp, SMS, email or a piece of paper through the door.
- And they stay in your orbit when you treat your database like a community and offer them value in return.
As Webb put it, employers can stand out simply by paying closer attention to how respectful they are in their messaging. The ones that do this are seeing 40 to 60% response rates while everyone else wonders why candidates are ghosting them.
About The Author
