Talent sourcing and acquisition are only becoming more intense and competitive with each passing day. The demand for skilled candidates is eminently high and recruiters are aggressively reaching out to top talent to fulfil it.
Amidst the current landscape – attracting, engaging and hiring great talent is largely driven by your employer brand. With the workforce having more choices than ever, serving positive candidate experience holds the key to successful recruitment. You never want to lose out on top talent; the only way to ensure that is to provide multi-dimensional support to your hiring efforts.
If you’re wondering why candidate experience is so important today – 78% of candidates say their overall candidate experience is an indicator of how a company values its people, and hence helps them decide whether or not they should consider working there. Moreover, a large chunk of candidates who are interviewed share their experiences publicly - especially if not so good.
Recruitment has become more of marketing and word of mouth undoubtedly plays a crucial role. If you have been in the talent acquisition space for a while now, you probably know how impactful social recruiting is for employers now. That adds up to the reason why optimizing your hiring processes for serving engaging and effective experiences.
The bigger question is - how can recruiters and organizations ensure quality recruitment experience for their candidates? How the numerous aspects involved in talent sourcing and hiring can be transformed for catering to their expectations? In this blog, we answer all of these and more. Let’s dive straight in for an insightful discussion about candidate experience and top tips to improve it.
What is Candidate Experience?
Before analyzing why quality candidate experience is vital for employers and going into tips to build it, you should first clearly know what defines candidate experience. At a ground level, the impression of an employer on candidates across sourcing, engaging, recruitment, onboarding and post-hiring stages covers candidate experience. It might sound really simple but is a dynamic and constructive process.
Why? A lot of factors influence candidates’ experience during the recruitment journey. In both the cases of inbound and outbound talent sourcing, these factors drive candidate decisions when it comes to joining a company.
It starts even before a candidate is assessed or applies for your open positions – from your website career section, job ads and outreach followed by the application process and further recruitment steps. The objective is to make the hiring process better, faster, easy and overall seamless for your candidates.
It’s evident that impactful candidate experience boosts your employer brand, spreads great word of mouth for your recruitment campaigns and helps you attract and engage quality talent. Now in order to achieve such powerful objectives, recruiters need to work on each touchpoint of the candidate's journey. Remember that all the people who apply to your open roles are part of the candidate experience we’re talking about. So you need to consider all the engagement and experience-building activities.
Why Improving Candidate Experience will Help You Hire Better Talent?
Going a level deeper, let’s now figure out why enhancing your candidate experience is the key to attracting quality talent. Here are the top 3 reasons:
#1 It helps build relationships
Modern recruitment is all about following the community approach where recruiters establish relationships with candidates. A great recruitment experience enables you to leave a positive impression on candidates. Hence, regardless of the results – all the candidates you engage end up being satisfied with the process. Over 60% of job seekers have had a poor candidate experience once in their careers. But what’s truly surprising is – 72% have shared their experience on online employer review sites such as Glassdoor.
Building relationships with candidates further encourages the unsuccessful candidates to apply again to your open positions, which is what you often want. On the other hand, candidates who didn’t have a good experience while recruiting with you would not only avoid your brand themselves but also share the experience with their networks.
#2 Fuels up your employer brand
Boost in employer brand is both a consequence and cause of improvement in candidate experience. When your organization values its candidates in the same way it does for employees – the credibility significantly increases and people are more likely to apply for open roles. Additionally, an optimized hiring journey with consistent communication and engagement allows candidates to know your culture well. Feedback from candidates is useful in promoting your employer brand as an employer of choice for the workforce.
#3 Significantly increases the offer acceptance rate
Candidate ghosting – especially at the offer acceptance stage has become a humongous challenge for recruiters today. Although the reasons for not doing so vary for different candidates, serving a prolific candidate experience will make sure you reduce the drop-off rate and maximize your offer acceptance ratio. The recruitment process when streamlined, keeps candidates positively engaged and helps you stay on track with your hiring requirements. The overall candidate experience has a larger impact than you think and it might well make or break their decision of joining your company.
Top 8 Tips to Enhance Your Candidate Experience
Much like you filter out candidates and choose the one who fits the best to your requirements, company culture and team – candidates also choose the employer who suits them the best. And they have every right to do so. Given the current recruitment market scenario, it’s totally expected of qualified talent to make decisions and choose among a variety of top-notch employers. As a recruiter, you cannot do much with intense talent sourcing efforts as much as you can by optimizing the candidate experience.
Only 46% of employers report regularly upgrading their recruitment processes that affect the candidate experience. If you’re a recruiter willing to work on your candidate experience but clueless about the implementation – here are the top 8 tips you cannot miss out on.
- Optimize Your Application Process
First things first, your application form doesn’t need four to five pages of rigorous data collection. Infact long and complex application process is the primary reason why you aren't receiving many good candidates at the top of your recruitment funnel. Analyze what you absolutely need in your application form and keep it minimal - the shorter the better.
60% of job seekers report they have quit an application due to its length or complexity. The most common mistake companies do is that they recollect all the information which is already there on resumes even after asking candidates to upload them. One of the primary deciding factors for talent, the application process needs to be quick, engaging, short and meaningful enough for candidates too.
- Frame Job Descriptions Effectively
The job descriptions that you share with candidates via email or through job boards should consist of comprehensive information surrounding the role requirements and company culture. When we say thorough information – it doesn’t need to be necessarily long. At the end of the day, no one really likes to read the long stuff and this is another factor contributing to the drop-off rate.
Provide candidates with what they usually look for – the highlights section for job descriptions.
Don’t miss out on the necessary fields including job title, location, responsibilities, experience required, work environment and basic details about what candidates can expect from the role and company.
- Communicate Consistently
65% of job seekers say they never or rarely receive notice of their application status. Isn't that a huge number? It’s a basic expectation of candidates to be informed about their application status when they apply to open roles. As a recruiter, you have a lot on your plate at any given time but you still need to inform even the rejected candidates about the results of your screening/ interviewing.
Effective communication holds the foundation for all positive candidate experiences and organizations can set up automated emails to keep candidates updated about the recruitment status after each stage gets over. Timely updates not only help you deliver quality candidate experience but also accelerate your overall hiring process.
- Provide Adequate Support
Chatbots on career pages are more helpful than you think of them to be. Additionally, applicants often seek support from recruiters and hiring managers. Whether it is an assessment-related query or concerns specific to different roles – your talent team needs to be accessible throughout the recruitment process. Emails should be responded to within 2 working days of receiving them. Providing options to connect over multiple channels like WhatsApp, LinkedIn and more would add up to the candidate experience as job seekers are assured of reliable support. The drop-off rate would also decrease with constant support.
- Be Flexible
As a recruiter, you cannot ask candidates to appear for meetings and interviews at a specific time slot on a given day. Although they might not deny it in most cases, you should still give them options to choose from via scheduling tools for flexible candidate experience and to avoid back and forth. This must be practised for remote assessments like technical or aptitude tests as well. Additionally, after each stage of the recruitment is successfully completed – the scheduling option can be added at the end for a faster hiring cycle and seamless candidate experience.
- Assign a Dedicated Point of Contact
Different recruiters from a team contacting the same employees creates a lot of confusion that can be avoided for a better candidate experience. Assessment and interviews can be conducted by department heads, leads, hiring managers or anyone else as per requirement. However, the point of contact (POC) has to be one assigned person who will handle all the communication with candidates.
This should be cleared when screening the candidates as it helps them stay up-to-date with the recruitment stages. Having 1:1 conversations would reduce the drop-off rate among candidates and recruiters can also extract insights to find out what’s working and what isn’t.
- Nurture Candidates in Your Talent Pool
Passive sourcing is topping the charts all around in terms of meeting talent requirements and the quality of hire. Unlike active talent sourcing, you need to create and nurture your organization’s talent pool. Once you have sourced enough candidates, it’s time to launch nurture campaigns which are aimed at adding value and empowering candidates.
To build meaningful relationships with candidates and maximize your chances of hiring them, encouraging them consistently would help. How do we accomplish that? By educating them about the specifics of the role and by sharing the ins and outs of the company – you truly nurture your candidates. Keep in mind that the campaign is primarily about nudging them to apply and prepare for your job roles.
- Predefine Entire Recruitment Timelines
One of the most underrated recruitment tactics, predefining the talent assessment and onboarding timelines helps candidates prepare better. Irregular flow of processes is common in recruitment and often leads to candidate drop-offs or ghosting. Before the first round of assessment begins, recruiters must inform candidates about each stage of the interview and the estimated time period to be expected.
It immensely helps candidates in avoid any last-minute panic too. The objective here is to keep complete transparency in the recruitment process and accelerate your hiring activities as per requirement – both of which contribute heavily to the candidate experience.
Ace Your Candidate Experience With Recruitment Automation
After analyzing what candidate experience means, the challenges involved and ways to improve it – we came to know the need of the hour is candidate engagement and experience optimization at scale with seamless execution. It’s exactly what Nurturebox enables you and your talent teams to accomplish with automation. With end-to-end sourcing, outreach and engagement automation – Nurturebox empowers talent teams to scale up their talent acquisition efforts while optimizing the recruitment processes.
From LinkedIn outreach at scale to personalized nurture email sequences and adding candidates directly to your ATS, Nurturebox’s Chrome extension makes recruitment simpler and ensures a superior candidate experience. The best part? It integrates with your existing tech stack effortlessly so that you don’t need to do the heavy work of migrating candidate data. If you’re a recruiter looking to fill multiple positions and struggling with consistent candidate engagement and hence, experience – Nurturebox is the go-to solution for all your needs. Get started with sourcing and engaging candidates through LinkedIn 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.
