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Captivating Gen Z: The Art of Customer-Centric Recruiting

August 16, 2023

Born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s, requires a unique approach. These guys can be a handful, but it’s not them we blame!

As the first true digital natives, Gen Z brings a fresh approach and perspective. They bring valuable skills to the table. To attract and engage these talented individuals, recruiters must adopt a customer-centric mindset. By understanding their desires, aspirations, and values, recruiters can build meaningful connections and forge lasting relationships. Here, we explore the strategies and tactics to tackle and captivate the Gen Z mind and successfully recruit the next generation of talent.

EMBRACING AUTHENTICITY

Gen Z craves for authenticity in all aspects of life. This includes their professional endeavors. 

  • Recruiters must emphasize transparency and sincerity in their interactions. 
  • Share real stories and experiences to showcase your company's culture, values, and impact. Utilize social media to highlight the human side of your organization.
  • Give potential candidates a glimpse into what makes your workplace unique and welcomed. 

With authentic brand image, recruiters can establish trust and foster genuine connections with Gen Z.

For instance, Imagine you’re a recruiter for a technology company. You’re looking to attract talented Gen Z candidates for software engineering roles. Instead of relying on traditional recruitment methods, you decide to leverage social media platforms to showcase the authentic and human side of your organization. You start by sharing real stories and experiences from current employees on Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

For example, you interview one of your software engineers, and create a short video where she talks about her journey at the company, her passion for solving complex problems and how the supportive culture helped her grow professionally and personally. To further showcase the authenticity, you encourage employees to take over your social media accounts occasionally. This will allow candidates to get an unfiltered glimpse into a typical day at the organization. These takeovers can include stories, posts, live Q&A sessions where candidates can engage with employees and ask questions about the work culture.

LEVERAGE TECHNOLOGY 

As digital natives, Gen Z expects a seamless and tech-savvy recruitment process. 

  1. Embrace technology to streamline the application and interview experience. 
  2. Utilize video interviews, virtual career fairs, and interactive assessments to showcase your company's innovative approach. 
  3. Optimize your website for mobile devices, as Gen Z predominantly uses smartphones for browsing. 

By leveraging technology, recruiters demonstrate their commitment to staying ahead of the curve, capturing Gen Z's attention, and enhancing their overall experience. Here’s a good example of how a company can leverage technology to enhance the recruitment process for Gen Z!

“A global technology company recognizes the importance of attracting and engaging Gen Z talent. To showcase their innovative approach, they have implemented several tech-driven initiatives in their recruitment process.”

  1. Video Interviews: Instead of relying solely on traditional phone calls or in-person meetings, the company conducts video interviews. They use video conferencing tools to remotely connect with the candidates. This aligns with Gen Z’s preference for digital communication.
  1. Virtual Career Fairs: The Corporation hosts virtual career fairs using an online platform that enables candidates to explore job opportunities and interact with recruiters without leaving their homes. This virtual environment allows for real-time chats, video presentations, and Q&A sessions, providing an immersive experience for Gen Z candidates. It also eliminates the geographical barriers and expands the reach of recruitment efforts.
  1. Interactive Assessments: The Corporation has developed interactive online assessments that test candidates' technical skills, problem-solving abilities, and cultural fit. These assessments are designed to simulate real work scenarios, allowing candidates to showcase their abilities in a practical and engaging manner. The use of interactive assessments not only helps to identify top talent but also appeals to Gen Z's desire for hands-on experiences.
  1. Mobile-Optimized Website: This is a no-brainer, IMO! Recognizing that Gen Z predominantly uses smartphones for browsing, The Corporation has optimized its career website for mobile devices. The website is responsive and provides a seamless user experience across different screen sizes. Gen Z candidates can easily explore job listings, submit applications, and access additional resources on their smartphones, ensuring a frictionless application process.

With these advancements, the Corporation demonstrates its commitment to embrace the innovation and cater to the preferences of Gen Z candidates. This approach not only captures the attention but also enhances the overall recruitment experience.

PRIORITIZE PURPOSE AND IMPACT

Gen Z is driven by a sense of purpose and desires to make a positive impact on society. As recruiters, highlight the meaningful work opportunities within their organizations. Showcase your company's commitment to social responsibility, environmental sustainability, or philanthropy. Gen Z seeks to align their personal values with those of their employers. By showcasing your organization's purpose-driven initiatives, recruiters can attract Gen Z candidates who are passionate about making a difference.

IGNITING GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT 

Gen Z craves continuous learning and personal growth. Recruiters should emphasize professional development opportunities and career advancement prospects. Highlight mentoring programs, skill-building workshops, and training initiatives within your organization. Gen Z seeks employers who invest in their growth and provide them with a clear path for advancement. 

In today’s fast-paced world, Gen Z craves more than just a job–they hunger for continuous learning and personal growth. As recruiters, it’s essential to tap into this so-called innate desire and emphasize the professional development opportunities and career advancement prospects within the organization. 

Picture This! 

  • A mentoring program where seasoned professionals guide and inspire the next generation.
  • Imagine skill-building workshops where Gen Zers can acquire new competencies and unleash their full potential.
  • Envision a training initiative that equips them with tools they need to excel.

By fostering a culture that prioritizes learning and development, recruiters can captivate the attention of ambitious Gen Z talent, offering a chance to thrive and soar!

Welcome to a world where growth knows no bounds!

EMBRACE DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

Gen Z is the most diverse generation in history and values inclusivity. Recruiters should emphasize your organization's commitment to diversity and inclusiveness. Showcase employee resource groups, diversity initiatives, and inclusive policies. Emphasize that your company fosters an environment where all voices are heard and respected. With embraced diversity, recruiters can attract Gen Z candidates who value and celebrate individual differences.

CRACK IT NOW

As the workforce faces a global talent shortage, recruiters must think outside the box to attract Gen Z who have specific demands and preferences. Here are some unique strategies that recruiters can adapt.

Enhance your Career Site: Recognize that your career page is the foundation of your marketing strategy, especially for the Gen-Zers. Implement best practices to highlight essential information, modernize the design, create an appealing platform to attract more candidates.

Personalize Communication: Prioritize personalization by inviting students to join the talent community before they apply. Share relevant content based on interests to establish a connection. During the interview process, provide frequent updates to keep candidates informed about the hiring status.

Go the Extra Mile: Send a small care package tailored to your new hire’s preferences, demonstrating your genuine interest and creating a positive impression.

Craft your Job Description: Recognize that Generation Z has distinct priorities when considering potential job opportunities. Tailor your job descriptions with CRAFTMYJD . Get aligned with the preferences, making open roles more appealing to this newest wave of job seekers.

Cultivate Employee Influencer Network: Leverage the power of referrals, as Gen Z relies heavily on recommendations when searching for employers. Encourage your current employees to share their work experiences on social media platforms, highlighting the positive aspects of your company culture. Allow candidates to gain a genuine view of your organization.

GO ALL IN!

Recruiting Gen Z requires a customer-centric approach that focuses on authenticity, technology, purpose, growth, and inclusivity. By understanding their desires and values, recruiters can establish connections that resonate with this dynamic generation. Adopting these strategies will enable recruiters to captivate and engage Gen Z candidates, paving the way for a brighter and more diverse future workforce.

In this ever-changing landscape of recruitment, embracing the customer-centric mindset is key to attracting and retaining top Gen Z talent. 

You ready to embark on this exciting journey?

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.

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