While the labor market continues its current trajectory with more than 11 million open jobs and two roles for every unemployed worker, now is the perfect time to reevaluate how you are nurturing candidates through your recruitment marketing campaigns. Could yours use a tune-up?
If you’re honest, then the answer is likely yes. From quitters’ remorse to poor candidate experience, there is an increasing disconnect from the moment candidates are sourced to their first day on the job. A well-built candidate campaign that supports the candidate experience helps ensure that you are successful in engaging candidates from first look to first day and beyond. And it often is the difference between a successful, long-term hire and a quit within the first 90 days. In fact, according to the 2022 Job Seeker Nation Report, 30% of workers have left a job within the first three months.
Successful recruitment marketing campaigns result when talent teams approach candidate engagement holistically, resulting in a flow of top-notch candidates to apply for their vacancies. And it involves personalizing communication, nurturing them through their talent journey, and encouraging candidate conversion each step of the way. But an effective campaign requires a more nuanced approach than simply casting a broad net and hoping for the best.
Here’s how to build your candidate campaigns the right way:
Step 1: Define Your Target Audience
Simply put, Targeted Audience Planning (TAP) is the practice of:
- Identifying which roles your company needs the most
- Learning all about the candidate types who’ll succeed in each role
- Grouping the candidates into specific audiences to more easily build personalized content
- Communicating this content via their preferred mode of communication
The Evolve Talent Acquisition Framework defines three types of audiences, including key audiences, strategic audiences, and relationship audiences. Recruiters for Fortune 500 companies and other large organizations know that attracting an entry-level hourly worker is much different than attracting a senior executive. But we’re talking about taking it to the next level by integrating this TAP concept to really understand who your audiences are and to ask questions like “How are these roles prioritized?” and “What is their importance to our organization’s success?“ to align with your corporate goals. Then, you can develop a campaign strategy for each audience based on this information.
Step 2: Think Beyond the Pipeline
It’s not enough to build a talent pipeline. Rather, it’s about building a talent pool to keep candidates warm and nurtured. Here are a few simple ways to expand your employer presence and build out a wider candidate pool:
- Incentivize current employees to refer their personal network to your company with a rewarding referral program.
- Enable current employees to easily post your company’s job postings via social media, including Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook.
- Provide easy ways for potential candidates to opt into your email list. This will help you gather pertinent details about skills/experience and target future communications appropriately
- Create segmented talent pools for the different roles you are filling to reduce the time required to source for brand new candidates
- Keep these passive candidates warm by continually engaging with them through social and email outreach campaigns
- Keep active candidates warm by following up with personalized messages after a recruiting event
Step 3: Continue Candidate Engagement
Continuous Candidate Engagement is about a philosophy of applying a candidate-centric approach to attract top talent. It’s also about a mindset: embracing a new way to have ongoing conversations with candidates, in real-time and across all channels. And, it’s about supporting these areas with tools that facilitate communication, ensuring all engagement is ongoing, seamless from hiring to onboarding, and 100% mobile so it’s easy for candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers alike to connect with each other from anywhere.
With a candidate-centric approach, you’ll be making a shift that drives immediate and long-term value around operational efficiency and candidate engagement, while steadily impacting your ability to reduce time-to-fill for that precious talent.
Step 4: Execute the Campaign and Monitor the Outcome
Move the campaign forward, but don’t assume that’s where it ends. Take note of the outcomes, monitor your KPIs, and make adjustments as needed. The talent acquisition industry is constantly changing, and so should your efforts to reach candidates.
Identify where your recruiting bottlenecks are: Is it taking the hiring manager a long time to get back to you? Are you not getting enough applicants applying? Have you created a seamless mobile experience? With these identified, you can develop a game plan on how to tackle them.
Step 5: The Right CRM
The right CRM is a true non-negotiable in building the best candidate campaigns. Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) is a recruitment tool that empowers recruiting teams to find and engage their talent networks at scale quickly. A recruitment CRM allows you to meet candidates where they are, turn passive talent into engaged applicants, and ensure you have the right talent identified and engaged before your business needs them.
Engage candidates in the channels they’re most responsive to, whether that’s email, text, or social media. CRM tools help automatically manage communications, send proactive campaigns, and even broadcast your open roles to job boards. By improving efficiency in the sourcing and recruitment process, you can maximize your hiring results while reducing your hiring costs and manual effort.
Effortlessly publish your job postings to 20+ job boards, including boards dedicated to specific audiences and industries. Pull candidate information from multiple resume databases into a single candidate record.
Looking to learn more about using a CRM platform that can grow talent networks and help find the right candidates? Request a live demo of Jobvite CRM or watch an on-demand product tour now. Ready? Get started today.
