13 hours – the average time taken by recruiters to source candidates for one role. Imagine how hectic sourcing can be while hiring for multiple roles. Tight deadlines could also force you to move forward with hiring without being assured about the quality of the sourced candidates. And the last thing you would ever want as a recruiter is a failed hire. In order to scale quality talent sourcing and hire better candidates, a sourcing automation tool can be a game-changing solution.
Amidst today’s competitive landscape, finding talent pools consisting of skilled, experienced and interested candidates is a mammoth task. Automating the sourcing helps you target diverse talent clusters and keep your pipeline ever-ready. So that you don’t need to panic whenever requirements arise.
Finding quality talent is the first and key step to successful hiring. However, the dynamics of the recruitment industry have changed. You now need to source passively to add valuable talent to your teams. Let’s find out why you need a sourcing automation tool for streamlining your hiring journey.
All You Need to Know about Candidate Sourcing Automation
To hire quality talent, you need to optimize your recruitment journey bottom-up. Effective hiring can be convenient too – only if you have set up systems in place.
Automating candidate sourcing cuts off the heavy manual work of recruiters. From finding the right candidates, managing talent pipeline and candidate outreach to engagement – a candidate sourcing automation tool handles everything for you. With the core aim of scaling quality talent sourcing, automation can immensely help you hire fast and efficiently. So that you not only hire better, but you fill your talent pipeline for your organization’s future long-term objectives as well!
Wondering why you should source proactively? Fair question.
LinkedIn reports that over 90% of the workforce is interested in learning about new opportunities but only 36% of candidates actively search for a job. That further suggests you are missing out on two-thirds of the potential candidates while just relying on job posts.
Answering your question – sourcing passive candidates is the way forward to sustain a business. Candidate sourcing automation helps you execute your hiring strategy effectively and save a lot of time by automating the mundane recruitment tasks like managing, monitoring and continuously updating the talent pipeline, and candidate engagement.
What are the Differences between Manual and Automated Sourcing?
A number of strategies exist when it comes to recruitment. You can post your job openings on numerous job boards and wait for candidates to apply for your job. The success rate, in this case, depends on various factors – your employer brand, job posting platform, attractive job description and more.
On the other hand, you can directly find talented candidates and reach out to them to find out if they’re interested in switching jobs.
Now here’s an interesting stat - the average number of unemployed people per job opening ratio was 0.6 in December 2021 against 1.6 a year earlier. This clearly conveys that there’s exceptional demand for talent, however, the supply is limited. Let’s now find out how automated candidate sourcing differs from manual sourcing.
Manual Sourcing
Distribution of job postings needs to be done manually
All applications are not assessed in most cases
You need to find candidates one by one and add them to your pipeline
Interacting and engaging with candidates takes a lot of time and effort as emails need to be sent to each candidates
Sourcing candidates is evidently the biggest task in terms of time consumption for recruiters. If you think automation is here to replace you and hiring teams – it’s not the case. Sourcing automation tools assist you to streamline your hiring process and help you hire the best talent faster.
Here are the top benefits of an automated sourcing tool:
Smooth Hiring Process
Automation helps you streamline the hiring process by continuously managing your candidate pipeline. Additionally, while leveraging automation, all the applications are examined and hence the opportunity is equal and fair for all the candidates. You no more need to intervene manually and update the recruitment status for various candidates. From sourcing, outreach and engagement to onboarding the candidates – everything is seamless.
Especially in this era of virtual recruitment, consistent candidate engagement and an unparalleled hiring experience matter a lot for candidates.
Unbiased Recruitment
One thing humans can’t avoid is bias. Even with a little contribution, recruiters do make biased decisions when sourcing and hiring candidates. With automation, there’s no conscious or subconscious bias based on irrelevant parameters. This ensures a diverse workforce within your organization.
Quality Talent Sourcing
Automation addresses the elephant in the room – quality talent sourcing too! Algorithmic mappings from job descriptions to candidate skillset are fast and efficient, even more than humans. Discovering quality talent is easy and convenient with sourcing automation.
TIme-Saving
Time is probably the most precious resource for recruiters. Especially when sourcing talented passive candidates, who already have recruiters with great offers chasing them – making the hiring process quick becomes even more important. Sourcing automation’s biggest advantage is that it helps save a lot of time by taking care of the repetitive tasks so that you can zero in on interactions and evaluation.
What to look for in Automated Sourcing Tools?
An automated candidate sourcing tool would support you at each stage of your hiring journey. However, the availability of a number of solutions can make you a little confused as to which one should you choose.
Analyze your requirements first and figure out what you expect from your candidate sourcing tool. Here are the features you should look out for in a comprehensive sourcing tool:
Candidate pipeline and ATS management: You should be able to automate the pipeline management and add candidates in a hassle-free way.
Automated outreach: Once candidates have been added to the pipeline, the tool should allow you to perform outreach at scale. Personalization and multiple channels apart from Email and LinkedIn are always a plus.
Email engagement campaign: From the moment a candidate applies for a job role at your organization or when passive candidates are interested in the position – consistent engagement via email should follow up.
Find contact details: Before you start reaching out to people in bulk, you will need their contact details. Ideally, you should be able to extract contact details from the target candidate's profile on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Data scraping: Must have for bulk-hiring, data scraping refers to finding a certain category of potential candidates and extracting their data(contact details, current role, skillsets etc.) using filters and boolean search on LinkedIn.
Intelligent pre-screening: In the case of sourcing actively, AI-driven pre-screening of candidates is vital and immensely effective in candidate sourcing.
Data-driven performance analysis: Analyzing the outcomes of your sourcing campaigns through insights helps you know what’s working and what’s not.
Nurturebox and How it helps in Automated Sourcing?
We saw why you need a sourcing automation tool, how important it is to choose the right candidate and what should you look for in an automated sourcing tool.
NurtureBox enables recruitment to scale their talent outreach through automation and powerful plugins. Take a look at how our solution makes hiring hassle-free for you and provides a seamless recruitment experience for your prospective candidates.
Find Prospects and add to Campaigns
Identify relevant prospects on LinkedIn and use NurtureBox’s Chrome extension to find their contact details. Our platform allows you to add your prospects to your sourcing campaigns with a single click. So that you can start connecting with prospects straightaway.
Personalized Multi-Channel Outreach
Recruitment of the top talent is just like marketing your offerings to the best prospects. Reaching out to every candidate with the same message won’t help. NurtureBox allows you to create personalized templates and perform outreach at scale without compromising on personalization. As a result, your response rate increases and more prospects are interested in the job opening.
ATS Integration and Continuous Pipeline Management
Monitoring and updating your ATS manually is such a task. Imagine updating the status of recruitment for hundreds of candidates on a daily basis, it’s more than hectic. Our automated sourcing solution allows you to simply integrate your existing ATS and each time you add a candidate to the pipeline, and perform consecutive engagement steps – the status is updated without manual intervention. NurtureBox also reminds you to follow up and engage with the rest of the candidates
Email Engagement Sequences
The platform allows you to integrate your sourcing automation with email nurturing campaigns through plugins like Lemlist. The further email engagement is automated as per your configurations. NurtureBox brings everything to one place so that you can take care of your sourcing through a single window.
Track and Analyze What Works
Now comes the best part – data-driven insights are served hot by NurtureBox to help you analyze what works the best for you. The objective is to improve with each iteration and capitalize on the approach that brings the best results.
Conclusion
Sourcing is one of the lengthiest tasks for recruiters and does not allow them to mainly focus on the more productive tasks. Manual sourcing is usually inefficient in today’s competitive recruitment space. Sourcing automation tools solve this by automating most of the repeated tasks and enabling recruiters to scale quality talent sourcing seamlessly.
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?
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:
On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.
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