The transformation of the recruitment space is not unknown to recruiters and organizations today. However, with all the awareness around recruitment becoming more candidate-centric than ever before– not a lot of enterprises are actually acting on it. Talent hunters are constantly struggling to find and hire quality talent.
Amidst the intense noise in the recruitment space today, recruiters are racing against competitors and time. In order to boost hiring results, organizations regularly need to measure and improve their recruiting efficiency. But what does it mean at a deeper level? Recruiting efficiency directly relates to the various recruiting strategies and methods employed at your organization to source, recruit, and onboard candidates.
Whether it is about hiring top-notch talent, simplifying the recruiting process, or optimizing the usage of available resources – efficient recruitment can empower your company’s growth and expansion plans. If you’re wondering how the process impacts the quality of talent hired – the answer is candidate experience. How candidates in the workforce perceive your recruitment and employer brand largely drives your talent acquisition.
In this blog, we will discuss how recruitment efficiency impacts your hiring outcomes, how to measure the impact, and what areas you need to work on for amplifying the results. Stick around for a deep discussion about all you need to know about recruiting efficiency and a step-by-step approach to improve it.
What is Data-Driven Recruitment?
Before we hop into different metrics that define recruiting efficiency, let’s try to understand data-driven recruitment briefly. Data-driven recruitment is leveraging statistics to inform your hiring decisions and choose the right methodologies. Talent teams utilizing data to move their recruitment are more likely to hire better candidates while optimizing the cost, time, and other crucial hiring metrics.
Here are the top reasons why data-driven recruitment is vital today:
- Helps boost recruitment efficiency and productivity
- Enables recruiters to save more time while recruiting
- Pulls out the errors and shortcomings of the current hiring process
- Makes it possible for you to forecast your hiring
- Helps improve overall hiring effectiveness
What are the Different Recruiting Metrics?
The standards used to measure hiring success and enhance the overall recruiting process in an organization are referred to as recruiting metrics. These measurements help in figuring out if you’re hiring the right talent if your recruitment methodology is optimal and what are the different aspects you need to work on in your talent acquisition process.
Data-driven recruitment works on the basis of numerous recruitment metrics and enables you to make decisions that lead to better hiring outcomes. Here are the most crucial recruitment metrics you cannot miss out on to curate your recruitment as and when required.
- Time to fill: The number of days required to find and hire a new candidate is the time to fill. It is usually measured in terms of the time between the release of the role requirement and the day when a candidate accepts the offer letter.
- First-year attrition rate: Out of all the candidates hired, the percentage of candidates retained for at least a year – form the first-year attrition rate. This is a critical metric as it conveys if the candidates’ expectations were met and if the recruiters communicated effectively or not.
- Cost per hire: This is measured by calculating the total cost of hiring divided by the number of candidates hired. Numerous costs are included in the total hiring costs including job board fees, external recruiting consultant charges, recruiting team payroll, tools purchased, etc.
- Quality of hire: Although different organizations have varied meanings attached to this metric, it is mostly defined by the performance rating of a candidate during the first year of employment. Additionally, recruiters also measure the success ratio as a part of the quality of hire by dividing the total number of candidates satisfying the performance threshold by the total number of candidates hired.
- Applicants per opening: The total number of applications received for each open role is another vital metric that recruiters need to track. It tells you about the complexity of the application process and if the job description is easy enough to decipher.
Also Read: Top 10 Recruiting Metrics to track in 2022
What is Recruiting Efficiency?
Recruiting efficiency is a combined term used for various metrics covering your recruitment cycle end-to-end, primarily the speed and cost of hiring. Every company’s objective of growing fast and effectively is driven by hiring more in less time and that is where recruiting efficiency comes into the picture. In each stage of the recruitment funnel, different metrics are utilized to measure the efficiency, the most relevant of them are:
- Number of applications received
- Number of resumes reviewed/screened in a certain time period
- Average time between Receival and screening/review
- Percentage of resumes qualified
- Number of candidates screened via phone in a certain time period
- Average time between resume screening and phone screening round
- Percentage of candidates qualifying for interviews
- Average time between phone screening and interview
- Percentage of successful candidates in interview
- Average time between interview and final decision
- Number of offer letters generated
- Average time between final decision and release of offer letter
- Percentage of candidates accepting offer letter
- Average time between offer letter release and acceptance
- Time between offer acceptance & starting date
It is evident that recruiting efficiency covers each stage of recruitment funnel – right from the application to offer letter acceptance and joining stage. While the above-mentioned metrics define the quantitative measure of recruiting efficiency, each has a deeper qualitative meaning attached. Let’s now find out how each of these impacts your hiring and its outcomes.
How to Measure Your Recruiting Efficiency?
Similar to measuring the success rate in other aspects of your business, recruitment needs continuous analysis and data-driven optimization too. However, there lies a big difference – hiring is not an internal operation. Whatever you do has a direct impact on your employer brand and how the external workforce views you - so the candidates’ recruitment experience matters inherently.
Keeping all the dimensions of recruitment in mind, we figured out the ideal way to distribute recruiting efficiency, and it is in line with the sequence of the candidate’s journey down the recruitment funnel.
- Application Efficiency
The productivity of your application to interview stages forms the first major part of recruiting efficiency. This is measured to analyze how closely the sourced candidates match the job description. It can be measured with a simple calculation:
Application Efficiency = (Number of candidates selected for an interview/ Total number of Resumes shortlisted for the role) x 100
If the outcome is too low, it means either your recruitment team is being too specific with shortlisting or the posted job description doesn’t quite align with the requirements. And hence these factors need to be worked upon.
On the other hand, if the rate is too high, the shortlisting isn’t intense enough to satisfy the role requirements.
An ideal rate is around 60- 75% of application efficiency. If the rate is significantly lower than 50% – it directly means your strategy needs restructuring, as you’re losing out a lot of time in getting enough candidates to the first interview stage.
- Interview Efficiency
Moving a step forward – interview efficiency reflects your hiring team’s shortlisting procedures. The way to measure it is,
Interview efficiency = (Number of candidates who are given the offer letter/ Total number of interviewed applicants) x 100
Although this metric varies for different positions, an interview efficiency rate that is too low signifies the cost and time of hire are high. How? As your hiring managers take more time and too many shortlisted candidates to fill in fewer positions, you know something’s missing in the recruitment process that can be corrected to boost interview efficiency.
In ideal scenarios, the interview efficiency should at least be around 25-30% in order to sustain the hiring costs effectively and acquire quality talent fast.
- Onboarding Efficiency
The ultimate recruiting efficiency is the final results, i.e., how many of the total candidates offered a role actually accept the job. Onboarding efficiency can be measured by a simple calculation of -
(number of candidates accepting the offer letter/ Total offer letters released) x100
If your onboarding efficiency is lower than 60%, it means that the recruitment process needs to be optimized for candidate experience. It might also mean that the hiring manager is unable to negotiate the salary effectively and communicate the perks of joining the company.
No matter how well-established your organization is, the onboarding efficiency rate is something you might still struggle with if the recruiting process isn’t convenient and satisfying enough.
And if a company manages to get to a 100% offer acceptance level, it definitely means that their compensation for the corresponding role is higher than others in the same space.
Why Measuring Recruiting Efficiency is Crucial Today?
The success of your business directly depends on the talent you acquire. And so far we have seen how recruiting efficiency drives the outcomes of the hiring journey. Here are the top reasons why measuring recruiting efficiency is critical for your organization today.
#1 You Want to Hire Top Talent
Bad hires cost you as much as 30% of the candidate’s yearly wage, it’s pretty clear that as a recruiter you need to be very specific about the talent that you want to hire. And that begins with knowing your business requirements, framing your recruiting processes correspondingly, and executing those strategies efficiently.
Continuously analyzing your recruiting efficiency not only helps in enhancing the process for recruiters and the cost of hiring for companies but also boosts candidate experience. That further means that brands can extensively retain quality talent in their funnel, reduce drop-offs and attract more qualified candidates with their employer brand.
#2 Optimize Time and Cost of Hiring
The primary outcome of working on your recruiting efficiency is reducing the time and cost of hiring. The better your hiring process is – the more you understand your requirements and the closer you would be to your target candidate. Along with the shortened time between sourcing and onboarding, it will also impact the cost of hiring as fewer resources are spent on hiring more candidates.
Winning the confidence of candidates with amplified recruiting efficiency also ensures you retain more employees once they are hired – which is a major factor in saving up human resources costs.
#3 Boost Company Productivity
When your candidates have a seamless recruiting journey with your organization that they enjoyed – the momentum with which they begin work would be phenomenal. So efficient recruiting ensures satisfied candidates, and motivated employees and you retain them for longer too.
Not to forget – happy employees bring in 20% more productivity as compared to others.
Recruiting Efficiency vs Recruiting Effectiveness: What’s the Difference?
The efficiency of recruiting covers the optimization of the process for improving metrics like time, cost, and candidate experience. These metrics have a direct impact on the success rate of an organization’s hiring. Hence, working on recruiting efficiency is much needed for talent teams and hiring managers today.
Recruiting effectiveness, on the other hand, involves the ultimate outcome of recruiting which is the quality of talent hired. Although it’s a very subjective metric and organizations often have varied approaches to measuring it – candidates’ performance rating is one of the top metrics used to analyze that. The ROI generated after investing resources in recruiting is the recruiting effectiveness at a ground level. Additionally, the volume of hiring, sourcing channels, outsourced hiring agency’s performance, and referrals also contribute to this metric.
Boost Your Recruiting Efficiency with Recruitment Automation
The talent market today is more challenging than ever. With outbound recruitment being the primary gateway to acquiring quality talent, recruiters have a lot on their plates all the time. From finding qualified candidates to reaching out, engaging, and recruiting them – hiring teams are stuck in the same never-ending loop of recruitment. The best opportunity to improve recruiting efficiency and hence hire better talent by optimizing the lengthy mundane hiring journeys is now brought by recruitment automation.
Nurturebox enables recruiters and talent teams to automate mundane top-of-the-funnel tasks of recruiting that take most of the recruiters’ time. By delegating admin tasks and focusing on the human side of recruiting, talent teams can now work with dedication towards improving their recruiting efficiency. The platform allows you to automate outbound sourcing, outreach, and engagement and pulls your entire recruitment funnel on a single platform – eliminating all the hassle for you. Scaling up your recruitment is incredibly easy with Nurturebox’s Chrome extension. It integrates with your existing recruitment tech stack for a truly seamless experience, try it out now!
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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..
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
