August 15, 2022
Hiring quality talent in today’s competitive space is only getting trickier with time. About 72% of recruiters are struggling to find relevant candidates. Amidst the intense war for top-quality talent, there's hardly any room for experimentation. You just can’t afford to lose your precious time and recruitment efforts to sub-optimal candidate sourcing and hiring processes. The road to redemption? You need to focus on the most critical recruitment tasks and automate the rest. Choosing the right candidate sourcing software is the ideal first step toward streamlining your hiring journey.
The global workforce right now consists of 70% of passive candidates and just 30% of active candidates. Sourcing the right people who fit in the boots of your employee persona has clearly become the key to successful hiring. To source better, you need sourcing software that complements your recruitment capabilities.
In this blog, we will discuss how vital a candidate sourcing tool is in your recruitment process, and the top five features to look out for in it.
Candidate sourcing software acts as your sourcing companion and helps you with outreach, ATS management, and candidate engagement, and keeps track of your progress through analytics.
The aim of utilizing a tool for sourcing candidates is to build, manage and optimize your talent pipeline. With the mundane tasks being taken care of, you can find better talent in less time and primarily focus on evaluating them.
As a result, you get ready for the hiring challenges by scaling your candidate sourcing and maximizing your chances of onboarding the best talent.
Recruiters and hiring managers often confuse a candidate sourcing tool with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) – but they’re entirely different. ATS is used by everyone in the recruitment team whereas sourcing tools are used by sourcing recruiters.
An applicant tracking system is used for managing candidates who are already there in the talent pipeline. They have either been contacted by your recruitment team or they have applied to your open roles. An ATS is more of a workflow solution used to manage the hiring process and maintain a candidate database. Recruiters utilize ATS to track various candidates and end-to-end recruitment.
On the other hand, a candidate sourcing tool is aimed at sourcing candidates and adding them to the talent pipeline. It is to be noted that only reaching out and engaging with these candidates is managed with a sourcing tool. Having a sourcing solution with an integrated ATS will give you the ultimate automation experience. Recruiters usually use sourcing tools to find and engage with passive candidates.
If you have been in recruitment for quite some time, you know finding the best talent is not a cakewalk. However, there’s no way your organization can grow without recruiting great talent.
76% of the recruiters agree that attracting quality candidates is the biggest challenge for them. The battle for incredible talent has been intense, especially over the last decade. And when it comes to tech hiring - the heat further multiplies.
Relying on expensive third-party recruiters is no more a sustainable solution. With the global markets facing record-breaking downfalls, startups and SMBs are looking to cut costs in each aspect of the business. The final solution? Organizations are taking it all on themselves.
Further on, recruitment teams have a huge influx of demand which can be extremely challenging to meet. That’s where you need a candidate sourcing tool.
At its core, candidate sourcing software enables your talent acquisition team to uncover new talent pools, engage with relevant individuals, fill your talent pipeline and ultimately source the best possible candidates.
Let’s dive deep to understand why you need it.
Let’s be honest – we all have our go-to channels or platforms that we trust the most when it comes to finding talented candidates. And it’s quite justified, using a variety of platforms for outreaching and maintaining the data manually can be overwhelming at times.
However, you should also consider the probability of countless other recruiters approaching the same talent pool.
Scaling your outreach with a candidate sourcing automation tool allows you to find out a variety of fresh talent. Hence, the chances of you hiring good quality talent and adding up to the diversity magnify.
Top talent is available for just 10 days in the market. But what if you are already connected to them? Sourcing passive candidates can be a game-changer even if they aren’t available at the moment.
In cases when you don’t have a talent pipeline, finding suitable candidates for open positions can take much more time and effort. It also increases the chances of you compromising on quality talent because you need to hire soon.
A candidate sourcing software helps you fill your talent pipelines rapidly and with all the different talent pools so that you don’t need to rush to source candidates manually when required.
36 days is the average time taken by organizations to hire talent. What do you think might be the reason behind this long hiring cycle?
Brownie points for guessing it right - mundane tasks that recruiters like you need to perform on a day-to-day basis. Finding candidates on various platforms, getting their contact details, outreaching, engaging across various communication platforms and maintaining and updating a database continuously take up a lot of time.
When supported by a candidate sourcing software, a majority of the repeated tasks are taken care of and hence the time to source and hire candidates considerably decreases.
With the same recruitment team sourcing and hiring more talent periodically (without compromising on the quality), the cost to hire is reduced.
When hiring for multiple roles, sourcing talent from numerous channels and constantly shortlisting candidates – managing your talent pipeline can be too clumsy. Chances are high that you might even miss out on connecting with talented individuals as the data gets lost in your crowded ATS.
When using candidate sourcing software, you get a birds-eye view of your talent pipeline. More importantly, automation helps you stay organized and not miss out on engaging with any of the candidates. So that you stay organized with your recruitment campaigns, automate the top-of-the-funnel tasks and accelerate your sourcing process.
Here is the list of key features you should look out for in a candidate sourcing tool:
You cannot spend hours transferring data from one platform to another. And not maintaining all the candidates’ details at a single place can lead to mismanagement, so your sourcing management software should be able to sync with your ATS (applicant tracking system) in order to keep your talent pipeline organized and accessible.
NurtureBox allows you to automatically sync candidate profiles to your existing ATS so that you have a live overview of your talent pipeline and the recruitment status of candidates.
Our platform also makes sure your pipeline does not contain duplicate entries. So that you never reach out to a prospect twice.
An ideal candidate sourcing solution should facilitate adding prospects to your sourcing campaigns. Hiring managers should find it easy to source top talent and fill their talent pipeline. Automated or semi-automated sourcing allows you to add candidates from any platform to your specific role pipelines with a single click. This will allow you to source a large number of candidates from various talent pools, more than you could do manually.
For adding them to your campaigns, you should be able to import candidate details like their personal email id and phone number. NurtureBox’s Chrome extension allows you to source prospects from LinkedIn and adds them to your campaigns within seconds. You can also install various plugins like Recruitee, Rocketreach and SIgnalhire to find your target prospect’s contact information.
The key to scaling your recruitment campaigns lies in automated outreach. It’s a candidate-driven era and you should be able to reach out to target prospects on their preferred channels of communication. A comprehensive candidate sourcing tool allows you to perform automated outreach campaigns through multiple platforms: LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Email and more.
Just automated outreach isn’t enough. As with marketing, you need to engage continuously with your prospects. Doing that with hundreds of candidates manually can be hefty. Your sourcing tool must offer the functionality of doing that in a jiffy.
NurtureBox helps you scale your outreach and engagement with a multichannel approach. SO that you can execute your candidate engagement campaigns via channels like Whatsapp, Email and LinkedIn based on what the candidate prefers.
Scaling your outreach doesn’t mean sending the same messages to everyone in your prospects list. Personalization is a vital factor that you need to take care of while outreach and candidate engagement.
The communication happening through your candidate sourcing tool needs to be personalized as per the target candidate’s age, current role, demographics and preferences.
Through personalization, you win your candidates’ trust and multiply your chances of hiring the top talent.
NurtureBox offers personalized outreach and candidate engagement that feel human.
Sourcing campaigns need to be optimized based on data. It’s vital because you need to know what works and how the prospects are reacting to your outreach and engagement.
A candidate sourcing software should have the functionality to track metrics like subject lines, templates, candidates showing interest, time of sending the messages, response rate and more.
NurtureBox allows you to track engagement metrics and analyze what’s working the best for your sourcing campaigns. Every touchpoint in your candidate pipeline execution is used to give you deep data-backed insights.
A candidate sourcing software can play a pivotal role in your recruitment cycle. Building, managing and continuously optimizing a talent pipeline will be vital to your hiring goals. The competition for top talent is undoubtedly huge, but it is possible to attract the best talent if outreach and personalized engagement are done at scale.
NurtureBox is a comprehensive solution that takes care of your candidate outreach at scale so that you can focus on the more crucial part - evaluating and interviewing them.
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:
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.
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:
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
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.
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following 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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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
Requirements
Soft Skills
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
