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Data-Driven Recruitment: Scale Up Hiring Process

October 27, 2022

Recruiters today leave no stone unturned to ensure the best recruitment experience. Hiring managers think of new & unique ways to include in their recruitment best practices. Diversity at the workplace, hiring candidates with disabilities, and bringing back women to work after long gaps—are some of the highlights of a new style of hiring now. However, a few years back the recruitment scenario wasn’t like this. 

The traditional hiring process would mostly depend on intuition or luck—more than data or facts. There was no guaranteed way of knowing whether the hiring methods were working or not—HRs would only proceed on the basis of ‘assumption’. Coming back to the present times, when everything is based on data, with analytics tools available in the market—data-driven recruitment is a reality. 

What is Data-Driven Recruitment? 

While ‘data-driven’ has been a buzzword for many aspects for quite a long time, data-driven recruitment is the use of quantifiable data that creates, tracks and optimizes the hiring strategy of every organization. The whole point of using data in the recruitment process is to ensure that recruiters or hiring managers don’t make hiring decisions based on assumptions. 

Data-driven recruitment has proven to be an efficient method in attracting top talent, keeping note of recruitment metrics, and building great teams. By making only a few changes in the recruitment methods—you can reap the maximum benefits of data-driven recruitment. You need not be tech giants in order to use data-driven recruiting—you just need to have a team that knows about it.

How Data-Driven Recruitment is Helping Hiring Teams

Using data in the hiring process improves the quality of hire. With data, it becomes easier to fast forward the hiring process and approach the most suitable candidates. Want to know in detail about how data-driven recruitment helps in hiring? Here’s how—

  • Set aside your budget. It’s important to keep track of your budget allotted for the recruitment process. Tracking sources helps in taking note of the recruitment channels that bring in the most talented or qualified candidates. 
  • Improve efficiency. With the right tools, you can check the number of emails exchanged between your hiring teams and the candidates. By looking at the time taken at each step, you may want to bring on some changes—speed up wherever necessary.
  • Modify hiring issues. Try modifying the set of questions prepared for interviewing candidates. Redesign the page or tweak questions as per the need. Again, look at what you might be missing out on. For instance, maintaining diversity—if you feel a few groups of candidates aren’t represented well.
  • Forecast the needs. You need to assess the number of applications you want to flow in. it makes sense to keep a number in mind regarding the applicants you want to interview. In case, there are too few candidates, you may need to source again. 
  • Structured interviews. To ensure an effective interview method, prepare a structured interview that makes the hiring process seamless. Secure the best results from the interviews you hold. 
  • Make improvements. Include programs that can bring positive change to the recruitment process. For example, including employee referral programs may bring effective changes. Show your team supportive data on to how such a program can help.

How To Incorporate Data In Hiring?

We see organizations taking a different approach to hire these days. Most of it is data-centric, for which organizations are drawing huge advantages. For teams that are most likely to shift to data-driven hiring, we would suggest you few ideas to incorporate into your process—

Selecting the proper metrics

Select a few hiring metrics that track your activities. Like many companies, it’s essential to know the quality of hire. The metrics you employ would let you know the overall effectiveness of your recruitment process. What you can possibly measure otherwise are— the budget for each hire, time is taken to hire one candidate, source from where a candidate is hired, candidate feedback, and rate of job offer acceptance. 

The importance given to each kind of data varies with each organization. It’s up to the senior leaders and hiring managers to decide which data they want to emphasize. To know which data hiring managers are more interested in, here are a few things to ask:

  • What data is usually important to help in your hiring process?
  • What challenges do you face while hiring?
  • Which recruiting sources aren’t able to provide effective results?
  • What would make a hiring successful according to you?

Efficiently collecting data

As we know data collection is time taking, we appreciate efforts that would help us collect the best data in a short period of time. The aim is to make the process as quick as possible. Here’s how you can pace up the process of collecting data—

  • Make the best use of ATS

Every recruiter is acquainted with ATS as part of their routine recruiting activities. The applicant tracking system has some amazing features that include reporting capabilities. With this, you’ll be able to analyze interviews better. 

  • Find ways to collect data

Take help from Google Analytics—where you can get to know about the career page conversion rates easily. Else, it’s easy to gather data from surveys taken among candidates. 

Utilize data in the right way

After collecting data, you need to decide what to do with the data. Determine how to include the data in your hiring process. There are certain recruiting issues commonly faced by recruiters—address those issues with data.

Long hiring time

There’s a standard industry time taken by organizations to hire. If you find out that you take more time than that, you might have to rework. Find out which step is consuming more time than required.  

  • Sourcing. Try changing your sourcing methods—possibly the current method is taking up more time. Using a sourcing tool can help tackle the situation—leading to faster talent hire. Build a talent pipeline more efficiently than you’ve imagined.
  • Shortlisting. Keep aside a set of questions to be included in the job application form. Prepare questions even for the phone screening stage. While speaking to candidates over the phone, you may well make the first step of screening. 
  • Interviews. Make use of software that will schedule interviews with candidates and hiring managers. It becomes much easier to keep track of the interviews that are up in line.   
  • Offer letters. Write exceptionally well-structured offer letters that perfectly cover details about the role. The letter should have the information that appeals to the candidates. It must entice the candidate to move forward with the offer. 

Decreased job acceptance rates

When the best candidates turn down the offer, it leads to more expenses and uncertainty about the role. It’s almost a nightmare for every recruiter when they finally cannot get a candidate onboard. However, such a scenario can take place often as candidates always have more than one choice in their hands. But when this happens almost every time you’re hiring, you must make a few changes—

  • Create lucrative job opportunities. Like every other organization that wants to stay ahead in the hiring game, delve into the various platforms such as Glassdoor to find out what’s trending. 
  • Get to know the interest of candidates. In the initial conversations with the candidates, try to understand their views on the role they’re interviewed for. It’s easy to assess an understanding of the role from phone interviews.
  • Create a great candidate experience. Every team member that comes to talk with the candidate must have a positive attitude. The aim should be to treat the candidate properly. When a candidate feels comfortable during the interview, it creates a great overall experience. 
  • Job letters should reflect the truth. Maintaining uniformity in the information shared with the candidate during and after the interview is considered optimal. Stick to what you’ve told during the interview, even in the offer letter.

 

Increased new hire leave rate

Most organizations witness the scenario of new hire turnover where candidates leave soon after they’re hired. There’s almost nothing one can do to put an end to this. But, there are remedies to possibly reduce such a number. 

  • Informing candidates about the role. Candidates must know every single detail about the role—duties, responsibilities, and expectations. And, this should be informed before the candidate receives the offer letter. Everything a hiring manager says during the interview must reflect on the offer letter. If a candidate finds out anything different in the offer letter, they might outright reject the offer.
  • Build a planned onboarding process. Make every step count while onboarding a candidate. Ensure that the candidate feels important and comfortable from the beginning. Start with a welcome email when the candidate is onboarding. Aim to make the candidate feel at ease with the steps. Candidates should receive the right training from the first day of their role. 

Be aware of the restrictions on data

-Data is not useful to know why something happens. You may numerically get some results but you still need to interpret the data.

-Data cannot always solve your issues. It’s good to have data on how hiring teams are doing in terms of their performance. However, you would have to find solutions to some problems on your own.

-Rely on tools that grade interviews. For example, consider using NurtureBox which allows users to track applications & stages of interviews. 

 Plan for the next step using data

Data-driven recruitment can be entirely based on data, depending on what you want to do with it. Hiring teams can make better decisions when they have strong data in hand. Data shows the way to what worked for the hiring team earlier & what didn’t. Improve future hiring decisions with reliable data. Utilize data in the best way possible. 

How To Choose The Right Data Points

There are a variety of recruitment data to choose from. Such data typically includes time-based metrics, costs, and recruitment channels. The best is to know which performance indicators are key to your recruitment process. With this knowledge, you can go ahead and create the perfect plan for data-driven recruiting.

If you’re wondering what could possibly be the key performance indicators, here are some of them— It could be cost-based techniques. Much like the cost per hire, talent pool growth, and applications on each channel. Source of hire, retention rates, candidates in each hire, and submission to acceptance rate are some of the quality-based recruitment techniques. Of course, the time is taken or the speed with which each step time to hire, job acceptance, and approval time—all are taken into account. 

You’re bound to have an overwhelming influx of data. Sit down with your team to discuss the relevant goals & decide on the KPIs required. Focus on the data that suit your requirements the most. For instance, if your goal is to reduce costs on recruitment, optimize hiring strategy, and improve the quality of hires, then take a look at the metrics. 

How To Improve The Recruitment Process—Collect & Analyze

The goal behind every recruitment strategy is to have a successful hiring process. Recruitment process must be efficient & effective for both the candidates as well as hiring teams. Additionally, there are few other things that can be done to improve the recruitment process—

  1. Craft attractive job ads

Job advertisements must be clear and have all the information necessary for the candidates. Hiring managers should work with other teams to think about what they want to include in their job ads. Remember to include specific details about the job. Choose job titles that are easy to understand. Provide description about the company culture for candidates to get idea about work ethics. Use clear language & avoid any kind of jargon. 

  1. Work on your candidate sourcing

Candidate sourcing is a hot topic among recruiters now because professionals want to discover new opportunities. You can approach passive candidates with sourcing techniques & increasing the chances of hire. Sourcing can be done through various ways like by using social media, attending events, using boolean search, and investing in sourcing tools. For sourcing tools, try NurtureBox that comes with sourcing automation features to make hiring easier. 

  1. Building resourceful talent pipelines

Keep your pipelines ready for near future hiring. Fill the pipeline with skilled & talented professionals. Sourcing candidates before any vacancy, gives you enough time to engage with the candidate. When a suitable role opens up, you know whom to hire. Candidates that have interacted with you are also on a better position to opt for the role. Decide on the roles that would fill the pipeline, look for ex-employees, source passive candidates, and engage with candidates.

  1. Improve at every stage of recruitment

Having checklists handy makes your recruitment process more organized. Use the checklists to prepare interview questions. All that is done to have candidate information before you speak to them. Personalizing emails are crucial to instigate interest among candidates. Recruiting email templates must be updated regularly. For that you can try personalized JD feature of NurtureBox that has built-in templates & the option to create more templates. 

Benefits of Having Data-Driven Recruitment 

As Clive Humby nicely points out that data is the new oil—it’s valuable than ever & has to be refined to be put to use. The truth is data has to be analyzed to know its worth. 

We have discussed in detail about how data regulates the recruitment space and what it brings for a seamless hiring process. Recruiters are grateful for the immense benefits that data contributes to their daily recruiting tasks. The idea is to build a strong data-driven recruitment strategy to experience efficient recruitment process. Data-driven recruitment embraces the advantages of emerging technologies—such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

With a perfect AI-powered data driven recruitment strategy, you should be able to achieve these for your organization—

  • Hire without human errors
  • Increasingly reduce cost per hiring
  • Improve hiring results
  • Much better candidate experience
  • Lesser candidate drop-offs
  • Hiring happens faster
  • Quality of hire increases

For organizations that haven’t yet thought of focusing on data-driven recruitment—now is your time! Data has brought huge changes in the different industries and recruitment is no exception. The ideal way forward is to think about the best possibilities that data brings. Make things a reality with the right data in hand. Data driven recruitment has proven to be the game changer in shaping the future of talent acquisition. 

Deciding on whether you want to see the change in your recruitment strategy—include the valuable data insights. Know what your organization is missing out on the growth possibilities. 

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

  • Build positive brand awareness
  • Make your audience stick around for longer
  • Get better traction on social media
  • Gain more trust of your audience than ever
  • Generate qualified leads
  • Improve conversion rates
  • Boost business visibility with SEO
  • Position your brand as an authority
  • Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

  • Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly.
  • Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
  • Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
  • Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
  • Types of content to be created
  • Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
  • Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.
  • Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

  • Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide    
  • Continous publishing and distributing content
  • Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

Top Must-Have Skills in a Content Marketer

Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.

  1. Excellent Writing Skills

A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.

  1. Audience Research

Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.

  1. Keyword Research

Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.

  1. Data-oriented Content

Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..

  1. Project Management, Planning, and Publishing –

A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.

Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.

  1. Content Promotion

Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.

  1. Performance Analysis

Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.

Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.

Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

  • What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
  • How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
  • What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
  • Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
  • Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
  • What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
  • Where do they look for a new job?
  • What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

  • Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.
  • Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.  
  • Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.
  • Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.
  • About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

  • Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
  • Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
  • Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
  • Include and optimize all content for SEO
  • Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
  • Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

  • Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
  • Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
  • A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
  • Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
  • Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
  • Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills
  • Excellent writing and editing skills
  • The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
  • The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
  • Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

  • Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
  • Why should candidates apply for the position?
  • Highlight the growth opportunities
  • State the company vision and mission
  • Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

  • LinkedIn
  • Indeed
  • Instahyre
  • ZipRecruiter
  • Monster
  • GlassDoor
  • CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

  • Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
  • Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
  • Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
  • Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
  • Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

  • Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
  • On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
  • Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
  • Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.

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