Staffing is a business first and foremost about people — connecting them with meaningful opportunities. It’s what most of us have fallen in love with about this industry. Yet the very candidates who are so critical to our livelihood often become an afterthought amid the race to land a client and submit résumés.

The stakes are high should we fail the candidate: They will go to the staffing firm up the road that treats them a little bit better. But if we keep our candidates engaged with us, fostering a deep relationship, we retain them within our talent pools while also gaining enthusiastic fans who will recommend us to their loved ones and peers.

If there’s one specific phrase that comes to mind when discussing how staffing firms can keep their candidates engaged, it’s be real. Staffing professionals need to be honest and forthcoming with talent about what’s going on out there in the market.

If hiring managers’ expectations are unreasonable, you need to be straight with them. The same is true for your candidates.

The perfect job will never exist. The talent will never get everything they want. There will be pros and cons to accepting any assignment — always. Something’s got to give — always. And that’s the reality.

Your candidates need to hear the truth, whether you are clarifying what the market will bear in terms of pay range or whether their expectation for full-time remote work is realistic. If I were a candidate in today’s job market, I’d certainly want the facts and not the fluff. Fluff wastes time — theirs and yours — and timing in any job search is of the essence.

Customer service. Being real with candidates essentially boils down to providing exceptional customer service — yes, they are our customers. And customer service is the one act you can control. It’s what staffing professionals need to continue to improve upon to maintain our reputation and ensure talent knows that we are there for them, that we set the right expectations, that we provide expertise in the field and that we look out for their best interest. No bad placement helps anyone. They know we’re here to help them find an opportunity and guide them in the proper direction. In essence, we’re their career advisors.

Connections. But it should be deeper than that. While we certainly should advise their careers, we have to treat our talent like our friends and family. Trust and relationship building is everything throughout the recruitment process. That requires making connections. Our goal at Clinity Talent is to truly connect with the talent and remain in contact with them on a long-term basis. To effectively guide them, we need to know about their lives, goals and every little detail in between to really understand what that close-to-perfect opportunity is for them.

And that is something only people can do. While artificial intelligence continues to flourish, we must remember that humans are human, and we have emotions. The job market can be brutal. While AI is effective in match-making and other various recruitment strategies, there’s nothing like the human connection to provide the understanding of the job seeker’s experience — the highs and the lows of not only the job market but life itself.

This industry should never be about having a five-minute conversation with a candidate, plopping them in a job and never talking to them again. We should be seeking more than that, providing more than that and setting our standards higher because we are in the people business, and people are complex. It’s times like this, when the world can be so on edge, that we need to not only give our everything to talent on a one-sided basis but to each other as well — and talent should reciprocate, because going through any sort of experience in life can be rough. We can’t lose faith in one another, so why not partner together as one?