August 18, 2022
The recruitment industry has transformed in a way no one anticipated a few years earlier. Attracting quality talent, sourcing candidates, communicating, engaging and even the hiring processes do not work with traditional strategies anymore. With vigorous competition leading to an unmet demand for qualified candidates, recruiters are facing numerous challenges. Acquiring prolific talent is not a one-person job now, and collaborative hiring helps us solve this. How?
Over 62% of recruiters say their job has become tougher than it was a year ago, and 67% of them claim it’s much more difficult than it was 5 years ago. No doubt it’s a candidate-centric recruitment landscape right now – and organizations need to define their own rules. Amidst the constant pivoting spree, collaborative hiring has proven to be a terrific strategy to tackle hiring requirements faster than ever and at scale.
The idea behind collaboration in recruitment is quite simple - it’s aimed at making the hiring process smarter. And the proposition is justified. Multiple perspectives, varied experiences and domain expertise can together add up to help organizations select the ideal candidate as per their requirements.
Contrary to popular opinion, collaborative hiring is not a practice adopted by unsure and fearful leaders. They understand that hiring the best possible talent needs much more than assessing them based on the required hard and soft skills.
Although all organizations have their own dynamic recruitment practices, the biggest and most successful ones follow collaborative hiring in a majority of their recruitment campaigns.
Let’s now dive in straight for an insightful discussion around collaborative hiring and how it helps in optimizing your recruitment.
It might sound like a silly question at the first glance – every business needs great talent to thrive and grow. However, before we move on to discuss collaborative hiring and its dynamics – a short and quick recall of the need for acquiring the best talent, would set the stage right.
Hiring employees is nothing but shortlisting assets for your company. It begins much before the screening and interviews - at the candidate sourcing stage. Now as you would never invest in unpromising assets that do not appeal to you, similar is the case of recruiting candidates.
Acquiring quality talent is not just important because of the specialized skills and expertise that qualified individuals bring in. It’s critical because of the following reasons:
It’s now time to address the elephant in the room - what collaborative hiring actually is, and why it is significant for organizations.
As the name suggests, collaborative hiring is nothing but a number of people in an organization coming together to form a team with the aim to make better hiring decisions. In other words, the recruitment team collaborates with teams from different departments to take part in the hiring process.
If you’re wondering what’s the biggest differentiator as compared to traditional recruitment strategies – consider collaborative hiring to be a team sport rather than an individual’s play. So just like a Football match, everyone has a dedicated role to play and everyone’s contribution impacts the performance.
In collaborative hiring, the interview stage is the most proactive phase of recruitment. It’s usually a multi-phased process with relevant department leads, hiring managers and the recruiter interacting and evaluating candidates in numerous rounds of hiring. It’s a win-win as your team gets to assess and analyze the candidate’s abilities, interests and potential. On the other hand, the candidate finds an opportunity to know more about the team, work culture, company values and more.
The best thing about this approach is – it’s not just limited to interviews. Collaborative hiring also covers scoring the candidates, evaluating them, and deciding on whether or not a candidate should be hired. Feedback and recommendations are taken from each member of the hiring team before forming the final hiring decision.
As the core productivity of a collaborative hiring team is driven by feedback, it’s essential that you develop a smooth feedback-sharing framework. It should be noted that the final hiring verdict depends on what the team members share in their post-interview feedback discussion.
As the objective is to make better hiring decisions and make them quickly – there’s a need to optimize the feedback-sharing process. Take a look at how you can create a system for managing interview feedback and insights from the collaborative team:
The main difference between collaborative hiring and traditional hiring is that traditional hiring is exceptionally stressful for recruiters and the dependency is huge. Also, the chances of bias are incredibly high in the case of individual recruiters.
Collaborative hiring, on the other hand, is a more holistic approach with distributed teamwork. This approach doesn’t involve any dependency on an individual and hence the chances of bias are cut off too.
Here are some of the drawbacks of traditional hiring that have been addressed by the collaborative hiring approach:
All of these issues are thoroughly solved by a collaborative hiring approach. Are you still sceptical about why should you pivot your primary hiring strategy? Let’s take a deep dive into why you should shift to collaborative mode very soon.
We saw how collaborative hiring works – representatives from various teams join the hiring team to contribute to the hiring process. If you haven’t ever tried the collaborative approach, the first thing that might worry you is the involvement of multiple leads and team members in hiring. As their productivity is primarily measured in terms of domain-specific outcomes, it is fair to think so.
Now the question that arises is – why should you opt for collaborative hiring? Is it really worth the valuable efforts and time invested by your expert teams? Here are the top benefits of collaborative hiring apart from optimal hiring decisions:
Before beginning collaborative hiring, it’s vital that we develop a hiring strategy covering the ins and outs of collaboration and the action plan. Here’s a step-by-step approach for creating a powerful collaborative hiring strategy:
You cannot create a separate hiring plan for each of your job openings. Especially when doing collaborative hiring, where a lot of factors need to be considered – it’s an ideal practice to create a template after identifying all the stakeholders, role requirements and assessment plans for each job category. The framework should include but is not limited to:
The template should be your go-to framework as a hiring manager whenever a new job opening arrives.
Set up clear and concise guidelines for selecting the team each time you decide to collaborate for hiring. State who you want to be in the team for respective job requirements along with executives or hiring managers who are always needed in the hiring team. Apart from the team members, you also need to document the expected roles and responsibilities of each of them.
Don’t forget to add mandatory commitments expected from the team members too. Note that it’s easy to convey casually to senior leads about their roles, but creating a definitive guideline will boost the effectiveness and seriousness of your hiring team.
Now that you have finalized the hiring team and individual roles, it’s time for planning out the flow of interviews along with their respective objectives, stakeholders involved and the way interviews will be conducted. Ensure with each aspect of your plan, you’re keeping candidate experience as the priority. A few best practices that you should follow for optimizing the interview experience for candidates:
Train your hiring teams to drop bias, interact with candidates efficiently and analyze role requirements before every interview. You can also get a better idea of the hiring environment through mock recruiting sessions. Try to conduct a couple of mock interviews by making one of the team members the candidate.
A set of popular and effective questions along with candidate scorecards can be handy in training the interviewers. Ensure that the training material you create can be effectively repeated for all new interviewers. A repeatable training course enables the much-needed awareness for interviewers and sets the right expectations for them.
While collaborative hiring, you will find out that your decisions improve with time as a hiring manager. It’s important to understand that hiring is a never-ending practise and as long as your business exists - you will need to hire.
The tools that you integrate with your collaborative hiring impact the overall efficiency of the hiring campaigns. Hence it is vital to choose a powerful tool - Nurturebox helps you automate the talent sourcing, pipeline and candidate management. It’s the collaborative hiring solution you need right now because it enables your hiring team to collaborate seamlessly.
Unlike the traditional hiring approach, collaborative hiring has dynamic and multi-dimensional requirements. Managing the entire recruitment process - sourcing candidates, pipeline management, interview and continuously maintaining the hiring database can be immensely overwhelming for your hiring team.
It doesn’t matter if you’re working alone as a recruiter or collaborating with your team – Nurturebox streamlines your entire hiring journey starting from the automated sourcing of candidates, the platform enables you to up your hiring game and boost your growth.
Here’s how Nurturebox helps collaborative hiring campaigns:
Looking to source candidates from LinkedIn? Just download Nurturebox’s Chrome extension and get started with automated sourcing in a jiffy. All it takes is a couple of clicks for you to find candidates’ contact details and add them to your campaign. The platform also allows you to integrate your existing ATS with the sourcing campaigns via the extension.
Gone are the days when emailing twice was enough for your target candidates. Now scale your sourcing and recruiting with multi-channel outreach and engagement made easy with Nurturebox. Channels like LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Emails and SMS can be used to interact with your target candidates.
The most important feature with context to collaborative hiring: Nurturebox makes it completely easy for your hiring teams to work together on hiring campaigns. The platform automatically performs sync of candidate profile and activity to your ATS - so that you never get confused regarding the status of hiring, latest feedback and repeated outreach to the same candidate (which might well be possible if done manually).
The way to improve your collaborative hiring and overall recruitment outcomes are to continuously track performance, gather insights and double down on what’s working as per the analytics. Nurturebox provides you with real-time analytics on every touchpoint of the sourcing and hiring 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:
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:
