Adobe Journey Optimizer

DeepaliGarg · 6/26/25

“The High-Stakes Silence Between Offer and Join”

In many organizations, notice periods can stretch from 30 to 90 days—a time when candidates are emotionally distant from their future employer but still on the radar of competitors. For HR teams, this period has traditionally been marked by chaos: countless manual follow-ups, missed nudges, inconsistent buddy assignments, and a big question mark around engagement.

We knew this had to change.

What started as a manual engagement flow has the potential to evolve into a fully automated, orchestrated experience using Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO). The result? A scalable system that can keep everyone informed and every candidate engaged—without needing to lift a finger after setup.

The Problem: Engagement Drops, Offer Declines, and HR Burnout

Before automation, every part of the candidate engagement journey was HR-driven and manual:

HR teams sent each welcome and follow-up email manually.
Buddies weren’t assigned on time—or at all—without someone checking manually.
Hiring Managers often remained out of sync until the candidate’s Day 1.

This created drop-offs, reduced candidate excitement, and—most painfully—offer declines.

We need systems that don’t just send emails. We need ones that understand workflows.

Enter: AJO.

The Shift: From Emails to Engagement Journeys

With AJO, organizations can reimagine the entire onboarding journey. Every action—whether it's a welcome email to the candidate, a reminder to assign a buddy, or a checklist to the manager—can be triggered automatically, based on the data available. It’s more than automation. It’s awareness.

Now:

No more chasing down updates manually.
No more missed touchpoints.
No more wondering if someone received what they were supposed to.

This kind of flow ensures the right people are nudged at the right time, and the candidate stays connected every step of the way.

From Offer Accepted to Day One—What It Looks Like Now

Let’s say a candidate accepts an offer. Here’s how an ideal journey might unfold:

The candidate instantly receives a welcome message.
If buddy assignment is missing, HR is reminded automatically.
When the buddy is assigned, they get a prompt with onboarding tips.
Week by week, the candidate receives curated content: company culture, tools, benefits, employee communities, and more.

The experience feels personal and human—but behind the scenes, it’s seamless, scheduled, and smart.

Pro Tips for Building Effective Journeys

✔️ Design for human moments, not just automation

Every journey step should reflect how a human would act if they were manually doing it. Make the emails conversational, timely, and role-relevant.

✔️ Plan for “what ifs”

What if the buddy isn’t assigned? What if the hiring manager forgets something? AJO allows you to create alternate paths and reminders so nothing gets stuck.

✔️ Test like it's real

We treated staging like production, running full journey walkthroughs with sample data. This helped us catch gaps in logic, timing, and messaging tone—before anything went live.

✔️ Start small, scale fast

We didn’t try to solve everything at once. The initial journey focused only on accepted candidates and basic reminders. Once stable, we layered in more content, roles, and timing logic.

✔️ Build trust with visibility

When HR can see who’s being messaged, who’s pending, and what’s next—they stop chasing updates and start trusting the system.

Results to Aspire Toward

HR workload drastically reduced
Candidates stay consistently engaged across the notice period
️ Every reminder is sent at the right time, to the right person
No one is left out of the onboarding loop

One stakeholder summed it up best: “I didn’t realize how many things we were doing manually until we stopped doing them.”

Final Thought: Great Journeys Aren’t Just for Customers

With AJO, it’s possible to prove that powerful engagement flows don’t just belong in marketing. HR teams deserve automation too.

When engagement becomes effortless and consistent, candidates feel more connected. Hiring teams stay better informed. And the entire onboarding experience becomes more human—because the system takes care of the operational stuff.

This use case can inspire teams across regions and industries to transform how candidate engagement is done.