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Candidate Expectations you need to know in 2024: A Sneak Peak

September 14, 2023

How committed to their job search is your candidate…really?

As the year 2024 approaches, candidates preparing for the interview process are eager to stay ahead of the curve and understand the candidate expectations for the upcoming year. In this comprehensive guide, we will provide you with a sneak peek into the interview process, highlighting the latest trends and offering expert insights to help you excel. From application requirements to interview expectations, we will cover everything you need to know to navigate the 2024 candidate landscape successfully.

Application Requirements

To start your journey towards a successful interview, it is crucial to familiarize yourself with the application requirements. In 2024, candidates will need to submit the following documents:

cluster1 Archives - Modern Requirements
  1. Online Application: Begin by completing the online application form, ensuring that all sections are accurately filled out.
  2. Transcripts: Include both undergraduate and any graduate transcripts to provide a comprehensive overview of your academic background.
  3. Resume: Prepare a business-formatted resume, focusing on quantifying your accomplishments and keeping the formatting clean and easy to read.
  4. Essays: Craft two thought-provoking essays that showcase your goals, experiences, and alignment with the chosen graduate program.
  5. English Language Proficiency Test (International Applicants Only): If you are an international applicant, you may be required to submit TOEFL, IELTS, or Duolingo English Test scores.
  6. References: Reach out to two individuals who can affirm your professional strengths. The admissions committee may contact your references for additional perspective.
  7. Application Fee: A non-refundable application fee of $90 is required to complete the application process.
  8. Optional: Depending on the program you are applying for, you may have the option to submit GMAT, GRE, or Executive Assessment (EA) scores. Additionally, some programs may require a video essay or an InitialView interview.

It is important to note that waivers may be available for certain application requirements. Check with the admissions team to determine if you qualify for any waivers.

Essays: Your Voice, Your Story

Essays play a significant role in the application process, allowing candidates to showcase their personality, aspirations, and alignment with the chosen graduate program. In 2024, candidates will be required to complete two essays, each with its own unique set of prompts.

Essay One: Mapping Your Future

In the first essay, you will have the opportunity to delve into your short-term and long-term post-graduation goals. Consider the following points while crafting your response:

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Map it like Charlie!
  1. Describe your short-term and long-term post-graduation goals.
  2. Identify a back-up plan in case your short-term goal is not immediately attainable due to economic or industry hiring trends.
  3. Explain how your past education and experience support your career objectives.
  4. Highlight the aspects of your intended Simon Business School program that make it a perfect fit for your graduate study.

Ensure that your response is well-structured, concise, and within the specified word count of 250-500 words. Before submitting, consider seeking feedback from a friend or family member to ensure you have successfully addressed the prompt.

Essay Two: Embracing Diversity and Inclusion

Simon Business School prides itself on fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion within its community. The second essay invites candidates to reflect on their experiences and aspirations in the realm of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. Consider the following prompts while crafting your response:

  1. Describe how you have supported diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in your personal, academic, professional, or volunteer background.
  2. Share your aspirations for growth in the areas of equity, inclusion, and access during your graduate studies at Simon Business School.
Embracing Diversity in the Workplace | DDI

Draw from your experiences, both big and small, to showcase your commitment to diversity and your vision for a more inclusive future. Remember to stay within the specified word count and ensure that your response reflects your genuine beliefs and experiences.

Crafting a Compelling Resume

Your resume is an essential tool that showcases your professional achievements and sets you apart from other candidates. Follow these tips to create a compelling resume with a Job Description:

19 Resume Memes That Only Job Seekers Understand
  1. Business Formatting: Use a business format for your resume, focusing on clarity and readability. Avoid cluttered layouts and opt for a clean design.
  2. Length: Keep your resume concise and limit it to a maximum of two pages. Highlight your most relevant experiences, skills, and achievements.
  3. Quantify Accomplishments: Whenever possible, quantify your achievements to provide a clear understanding of your impact. Use numbers, percentages, or other measurable metrics to demonstrate your contributions.
  4. Formatting: Pay attention to formatting details such as font size, spacing, and bullet points. Ensure that your resume is easy to scan and visually appealing.

Remember, your resume is a snapshot of your professional journey. Make sure it effectively communicates your skills, experiences, and potential to the admissions committee.

Selecting the Right References

Choosing the right references is another crucial aspect of the application process. Here are some guidelines to help you select suitable references:

  1. Professional Strengths: Reach out to individuals who can affirm your professional strengths. Consider former supervisors, colleagues, or mentors who can provide valuable insights into your abilities and character.
  2. Contacting References: Before listing someone as a reference, seek their permission and confirm their availability. Inform them about your application and request that they highlight specific aspects of your candidacy.
  3. Recommendation Letters: While recommendation letters are not accepted, the admissions committee may contact your references for additional perspective during the application review process.

Professional references are preferred, especially if you have limited work experience. If you have interned at a company, consider including your internship supervisor as one of your references.

Additional Resources

To gain a more in-depth understanding of the Simon Business School and its programs, we encourage you to watch the recording of our recent webinar, "Why Simon?" You can access the recording here. This webinar offers valuable insights into the full-time programs and provides an overview of what makes the Simon community so special.

Conclusion

As you embark on your journey towards business school, it is essential to familiarize yourself with the candidate expectations for 2024. By understanding the application requirements, crafting compelling essays, preparing a strong resume, and carefully selecting your references, you can position yourself as a standout candidate.

Remember, the interview process is an opportunity for you to showcase your unique qualities, experiences, and aspirations. Embrace the diversity and inclusion values of Simon Business School and express your commitment to making a positive impact in the business world.

Stay ahead of the curve by staying informed about the latest trends and insights. By following these guidelines and leveraging your personal strengths, you can confidently navigate the 2024 interview process and unlock your full potential. Good luck on your business school journey!

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Just had to put it there.

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.

Recruitment insights you won’t delete. Delivered to your inbox weekly.

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