If you take a look at recruiting in the past, it was mostly a need-basis process. What we mean by this is—a vacancy leading to the need to fill up the position and recruiters getting into hiring as soon as they could.
Now, we have come a long way from that. Time has changed and so have recruiting methods. Recruiters no longer wait until the urgency to fill up a position. Forward-thinking hiring teams are now ready with a more proactive approach to hiring. Hiring teams are now busy brainstorming as to what they can do to support the future hiring needs of their organization. To this, they find one thing as a crucial aspect of hiring—candidate or talent pipeline.
Candidate pipeline is a smart way of keeping a bank of talents not only adhering to the current job requirements but also for the future. It leads to better productivity, less time and cost to hire, and easier hiring. Hiring teams can better focus on being strategic advisors to the company.
What Is Talent Pipeline?
A talent pipeline is an updated database consisting of talented, filtered, skilled, and tested candidates ready to fill up positions when required. Each organization keeps its talent pipeline prepared in case of sudden vacancies. The idea is to reduce the elaborate task of searching, approaching, & interviewing candidates at the time of immediate hiring.
Having a talent pipeline doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be no need of looking at external candidates at all. Recruiters still may have to search the career site, online job portals, and official emails for potential candidates. However, in most cases, it has been seen that talent pipelines have come of great help when it comes to the immediate filling of positions.
Candidates in the talent pipeline need constant engagement & nurturing. Recruiters must think of various ways to be in touch with such candidates—newsletters, personalized emails, regular updates of the company’s profile on social media, and more. Constant communication with candidates increases the possibility of filling a vacant position.
Knowing how to source talent in itself can be a challenge—recruiters must know a few strategies that work well.
Why Is Candidate Engagement Important?
Candidate engagement simply means maintaining constant communication with the candidates in the talent pipeline. It is an essential part of the candidate experience. Recruiters take special care while building a strategy for candidate engagement.
Now comes the big question—why is candidate engagement important? Recruiters have time and again found out that candidates need to be engaged enough to stay till the end. If they aren’t motivated, they can lose interest before joining the organization. Candidates today look for more than decent pay—what they are more about is how interesting an organization is!
Understand that candidates who are serious about switching their job are sending applications to ten different companies. They’re briefly getting to know about a company. As a recruiter, you can make efforts to show that the candidate is important to the organization, motivate and help them get through the application process.
Many candidates lose interest after getting a negative candidate experience in the early stages of interaction. As a result, you’d see them responding late or not responding at all. Why do we emphasize updating each candidate in the pipeline about 80% of candidates might not consider openings of a company that didn’t notify them previously.
Tips To Have An Engaging Candidate Pipeline
Engaging candidates in the talent pipeline is not that tough, but you need to know the right techniques to make it happen. The first step in having candidates engage with you is to have a meaningful conversation. Begin by asking questions about the future goals, plans, and interests.
- Communication is Key
Communication with candidates in the talent pipeline is crucial. As part of the recruiting team, it’s important that you keep the conversation going with the candidates. When you are in contact with candidates regularly, they feel connected with the organization. Updating them with the latest news, product launches, and accomplishments—makes them more interested in your organization.
From an early stage to the advanced stage of the interview process, interacting with candidates is essential. It makes the candidates feel comfortable & what they can expect from you. Clear & concise conversations during the entire interview process create a positive outlook in the candidate’s mind.
- Create a unique employer brand
While you try to engage with candidates in the candidate pipeline, do not forget to make them oriented with the company as much as possible. Even before you start building the candidate pipeline, you must take a look at your current employer brand. It is a great way to attract the most qualified & suitable candidates to your pipeline. Having a robust employer brand keeps the candidates interested in your company.
To maintain a good employer brand—you need to work on every aspect of your organization—starting from the career site, and social media accounts, to employee feedback.
- Keep an eye on roles that are required
A good candidate pipeline is made by strategically planning the roles you actually want to fill. This comes from the point—of which roles need the pipeline. It’s a good way to not waste your time on candidates who don’t have long-term plans with your organization. Engage with the roles that are more important in the candidate pipeline.
As a result, the candidates will feel more connected with the recruiters. To know which roles need pipelines more, you can look up LinkedIn Talent Insights. Use the insights to measure the trends in your company, get to understand the demanding skills, and assess the talent available. Taking all these into consideration, make a report & share it with your leaders.
- Use data to set realistic goals for your team
To know how engaging a candidate pipeline you’ve created, you need to set goals. When you set targets, it helps to make a more compelling decision for hiring. Having valid data to help you make better decisions is something recruiters are increasingly doing now. It’s important to know what is working out for the recruitment team & what isn’t.
Set achievable yet ambitious goals that motivate your team. Data makes an assessment much easier. If you’re a recruiting team that isn’t much about the quantity, then having metrics that tell the number of candidates engaged, and offer acceptance rate, maybe your target.
- Fill the candidate pipeline with quality candidates
A candidate pipeline must have a diversified candidate pool—which means you must pay attention while filling the pipeline. The hiring team needs a strategy to get diversified candidates & for that, you can look up the different platforms for candidates.
LinkedIn is the first choice when it comes to looking for professionals. While building a long-term pipeline, use LinkedIn Recruiter’s Advanced search feature that helps you find potential candidates. You can start building connections with these candidates as soon as you find them. Be transparent when you’re trying to reach out to connections on InMail. Talk about why you liked their profiles, and tell them even if you’ve no roles open now, you’d like to stay in touch with them.
Events are a great place to meet new people—especially professionals you want to build relationships with. Encourage the hiring team to attend industry events where they can meet potential candidates to fill the pipeline. Given the resources, you can host your own event & invite professionals for a meaningful event. After meeting professionals at the event, remember to connect with them on LinkedIn later on.
Previous applicants can be a good resource to build out the candidate pipeline. The applicant tracking system (ATS) that you have in place may have multiple candidates. But, not all candidates are going to be the ideal hire for you at the moment. Take a quick look at this database and check the applicants you have there.
Referrals seem to fill the candidate pipeline with talented professionals. We suggest building a referral program as part of your recruitment process. Current employees of the organization can refer skilled candidates they know & in return, they can get referral bonuses as a reward. Though this method is not new, it is significantly changing the way candidates are hired.
- Get candidates from different background
Take a look at your candidate pipeline and see if it reflects the diversity of the talent pool. Every organization is now trying to focus on inclusion—by including candidates from every background. Source from different other schools with historical backgrounds to diversify your candidate pipeline. Build boolean strings with lists of women colleges, and historically black colleges—adding search operator. With the right technique, get to see search results of diverse graduates.
Campus fairs sourcing can get you, candidates, you look to have in your pipeline. Other than that, ERGs or employee resource groups will find you diverse referrals. Having diverse minds in the organization leads to diversified business ideas, better productivity, and multiple ways of solving problems.
- Maintain a balance between internal & external candidates
Are you just thinking of having sourced candidates in the pipeline? Well, don’t. It’s because a candidate pipeline doesn’t necessarily mean having applicants or sourced candidates. The existing employees in your company can be true fits to the position you’re hiring for. You can hire these candidates to fill up difficult positions faster—helping them to climb the corporate ladder.
The thing to remember is how to balance the two—internal & external candidates. If you keep on filling the openings with internal candidates, there can never be enough growth for your organization. You need people from outside the organization to come up with fresh ideas.
- Keep one common source for all information
You may have different platforms where you keep candidate information. It might get a little confusing to keep track of the information & maintain a consistent candidate pipeline. A comprehensive ATS that stores all information you need under one roof is easier for everyone on the recruiting team to view information when needed.
LinkedIn Talent Hub is a great choice as it’s designed to keep teams on the same page. Getting updates is seamless on this platform. Teams can collaborate and share their feedback on candidates. Hiring managers have a better understanding of what’s going on in the pipeline. Visible data is always helpful in making proper decisions.
- Track the progress & strategize accordingly
Using a single platform to track each candidate makes it easy to not lose sight of them. By tracking & analyzing this data you can assess how the pipeline is performing. The recruiting team can then decide how to improve with the right strategies. Many ATS provide pipeline reports—check the reports regularly to determine the status & how the teams are dealing with it.
Motivate the team by establishing a screen-to-hire ratio. Talent Hub on LinkedIn provides an awesome reports feature! Plan realistically to reach the goals of hiring—knowing about each candidate thoroughly.
With time, you will get to know how well each channel is doing. It is possible to even know if candidates are spending too much time in one stage—if recruiters are screening enough candidates or not—or if the hiring time is decreasing with time.
The aim of building & maintaining a candidate pipeline is to save time. We say it does more than saving only time—you save resources & so much more! When you have the right strategy to keep an engaged pipeline, you hit the target. It may take some time until you nail the strategy or boost results. That’s why we got you covered with these tips that can help you build the right strategy. Get your hiring team in line with the right tools and ideas to set forth a well-built candidate pipeline.
A robust candidate pipeline helps your team to source candidates, screen them, and interview handful of candidates—all happening more efficiently than ever. NurtureBox is a great tool that works with LinkedIn in tracking candidates and adding them to your pipeline. You can do so much with this tool that comes with multiple integrations.
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.
