October 27, 2022
Give a great idea to average performers and they won't make anything out of it,
Give an average idea to a team of talented individuals and they will surely get you something worthy.
The talent that you acquire defines your future growth trajectory. No matter which industry you belong to, what you sell and the job roles you’re looking to fill – hiring the right candidates is the core objective, it has always been. However, the recruitment process and methodologies have transformed. Just like consumer expectations have drastically evolved – candidate expectations are growing at an astounding pace too.
The primary reason for the foundational changes in the recruitment space is the immense shortage of talent supply as compared to the continuously augmenting demand. In 2022, 75% of organizations globally report a talent shortage – which is the highest ratio in the last two decades. Finding qualified candidates and hiring them is now trickier than ever, recruiters and organizations need to adapt to these changing times and innovate their talent acquisition strategies.
Fast-growth organizations have high-scale talent requirements at any given point of time. The conventional methods of sourcing, qualifying, and hiring talent don’t quite work effectively. With the talent market becoming more open and dynamic than ever before – recruiters constantly need to experiment with their strategies and evaluate the results to optimize their recruitment funnel. Amidst the severe competition, where hiring has become nothing short of a race among talent hunters – streamlining your recruitment process is the key to boosting your talent acquisition outcomes.
So how do you ensure hiring top-quality talent – while dealing with the scale, time, and external challenges of your recruitment? What strategies do you need to follow for improving your candidate experience and reducing funnel drop-offs? The solution to these is driven by a well-established and smooth recruitment process. In this blog, we will discuss why is it crucial to work on your recruitment process and how you can ace it. Stick around for a comprehensive guide.
The cycle followed by organizations to source and hire candidates for their open positions is defined as the recruitment process. It covers the end-to-end strategy that goes behind finding, screening, shortlisting, interviewing, and onboarding talent. With different stakeholders involved from hiring managers to recruiting teams and department heads, companies accomplish the planning and execution of the talent funnel.
Although the recruitment goals of all organizations resemble – hiring high-quality talent within a short span of time and optimized cost attached, the approach taken by each of them is different. And it should be – every business is different, and so are its requirements. Especially in such a volatile talent market, what works well for you might not lead to the same results for others.
Recruitment being a crucial part of your business’s sustainability and growth, needs to be streamlined for producing optimum results. So we break down the recruitment process into X different stages. Further, each phase is assessed, analyzed, and restructured with the aim to improve hiring results.
It’s a candidate-centric market today. So while planning your recruitment process, the focal area should not just be your organizational goals related to time and cost. You should also cover candidate experience and focus on improving it for a positive shift in conversion rates.
A seamless recruitment process has numerous benefits for your hiring team and organization. Some of the top reasons why you must establish a clear recruitment process and consistently put efforts to optimize it are:
A well-defined recruitment process has multi-dimensional benefits that contribute to the quality of hire. As the recruitment cycle is accelerated while maintaining a positive candidate experience, you retain more candidates in your recruitment funnel and hire people faster than the average competition. Equal focus on sourcing and engaging candidates ensures a high-quality talent pool for your organization. Not only this, a prolific recruitment process also boosts your employer brand and helps you attract the best talent possible.
When you know your recruitment process inside out, you can help candidates, managers, and executives set clear expectations from the recruiting team upfront. In terms of time required to fill current roles or recruiting budget needed to satisfy the quality of the talent pool – everything can be analyzed keeping in mind your recruitment process. Additionally, it keeps your entire hiring team on the same page and enables quality collaboration. Decision-making – which is a crucial part of recruitment becomes much more efficient.
Cost per hire is one of the most critical recruitment metrics for most organizations. No matter how big a business is, optimizing the expenses, especially for recruitment is a constant struggle for stakeholders. With a predefined and tested recruitment process, the cost of hiring is significantly reduced. A strategic recruitment approach begins with talent pool building, and once enough candidates are sourced for creating a talent pool, what remains is assessing them and interviewing the shortlisted candidates before releasing the offer letter. Hence the entire recruitment is streamlined with respect to productivity and cost of resources.
Time taken to hire is undoubtedly the primary factor defining your recruitment efficiency. Fast-growth startups and organizations want to expand, and they do that at an extremely high pace. Clear and end-to-end framing of recruitment plans helps you accelerate each phase of the hiring. Hence, from sourcing candidates to shortlisting them based on pre-decided criteria and templatizing the onboarding – an organized recruitment journey helps recruiters and candidates save a lot of time. On average, top candidates are available for just 10 days in the market before they end up somewhere. More than saving time, you need to boost your recruitment pace for grabbing the ‘creamy-layer’ of talent.
The recruitment process has a direct impact on candidate experience right from the top of the talent acquisition funnel to the bottom. When a candidate is sourced or applies for a role at your company:
All of these questions and more arise when it comes to focusing on your recruitment focus. Working on these not only elevates your candidate experience but also gives your recruitment a word-of-mouth promotion.
If you’re wondering how a fine-tuned recruitment process would help you in retaining employees, here’s the crack. When you communicate clearly about your company culture, role requirements, and candidate expectations during recruitment – the employees that you end up hiring would probably be more likely to stay in your organization for longer. Secondly, as the recruitment process gets streamlined and almost templatized, your HR team gets more bandwidth to actually engage employees in activities, host events, etc.
A positive candidate experience produced by a smooth and talent-friendly recruitment process leaves them immensely satisfied. As a result, it maximizes your talent retention rate.
Two of the biggest challenges for recruiters today are – finding quality talent to hire and reducing the candidate drop-off in the recruitment funnel. While hiring teams strive hard to ace every stage of recruitment for different roles at scale, they often have more than enough on the plate to handle. Introducing automation for repeated admin tasks and streamlining the recruitment process by preparing standardized workflows would grow your team’s productivity multifold.
Further, if the admin side of recruiting like managing applications and candidate databases is mostly automated – recruiters get more time to interact directly with candidates leading to much more efficient engagement and hiring.
Let’s now reverse engineer what goes into a strong and effective recruitment process. From multi-layered planning to leveraging technology at its finest, this breakdown covers everything. Without any further ado, let’s dive in straight.
Before all recruitment strategies comes the basic principle of keeping candidates first. This mindset and approach are extremely important, especially with recruitment in modern times. It’s often underrated how deeply recruitment impacts candidates’ lives. And hiring journey is not simple for a majority of people, even if they are well-versed technically. It’s natural for candidates to seek guidance anytime as they feel nervous and confused about the different recruitment processes for every company.
Successful recruiters have this trait but it’s least talked about – they make candidates feel so comfortable and important that recruitment becomes a positive journey filled with learning.
To make your recruitment process more effective, you can’t just keep experimenting randomly and expect good results. Analyzing data to inform your hiring strategies and decisions is the need of the hour. Renowned global employers have been following this for a long, but that’s not the reason you should practice data-driven hiring. Companies lose USD 14,900 for each bad hire and leveraging data to drive your recruitment decisions will ensure you’re hiring better candidates and not losing out on your precious resources - especially time.
Recruitment strategies that work amazingly well for companies might not work for you at all. The road to redemption? Analyze your company culture, growth objectives, and past recruitment performances to figure out your recruitment process. From your organization’s mission, vision, and diversity-building plans to interview strategy – personalize each step of your requirement for producing desired results.
94% of recruiters and hiring managers say that using recruitment software has positively impacted their hiring. As you look forward to scaling your hiring and hiring a number of candidates in a short span of time, using recruitment automation and other technological solutions is the way to reach your goals. In fact, using solutions like Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is necessary for recruiters for collaborating with their teams effectively and maintaining the candidate database easily.
Platforms like Nurturebox enable recruiters to automate their outbound sourcing, engagement, and candidate pipeline management. With a comprehensive solution for scaling up your candidate sourcing via LinkedIn, Nurturebox also allows you to create nurture sequences for engagement and track your recruitment funnel – all from a single window.
We have talked about how candidate experience is driven by your recruitment process throughout the blog. But why does candidate experience matter? First look at this figure - 63% of job seekers will probably reject a job in case of bad candidate experience. The difference between the supply and demand of talent is huge and is constantly growing – this leaves the workforce with more opportunities than ever. Additionally, candidates now expect much more than nice payroll and perks from companies. Company culture, employer brand, and recruitment experience have become intrinsic drivers of decisions for them.
So far we had a high-level view of the strategy required to build a reliable recruitment process. But how do you apply those plans and strategies to establish your recruitment cycle? Let’s find out with a brief analysis of 7 core phases in the recruitment process.
Once a position is opened at your organization, you cannot directly go online for posting the job ad or reach out to candidates for sourcing.
After you know the role specifications and internal expectations in terms of skills, experience, and qualifications – it’s time for you to create a detailed and inviting job description. It’s a vital phase as the number of applications and the ratio of qualified ones would be determined by your job description.
Candidates use the JD to figure out if they match the skill and experience requirements, and if the job is worth applying to (or switching for). The objective of this stage is to get applications from ideal candidates. Here are some tips to ace your job descriptions:
Talent sourcing refers to drawing candidates to the top of your recruitment funnel. Numerous channels exist for sourcing candidates including a website careers page, social media platforms, job listing sites, advertisements, referrals, and more. Additionally, recruiters also reach out to candidates or network with them at events, job fairs, and online. Here’s where the differentiation in outbound and inbound sourcing approaches happens:
At this stage, you probably have a number of applications and sourced talent profiles and now you need to shortlist them for beginning your recruitment interview or assessment rounds. This is where you push candidates from the top of your recruitment funnel.
Now this stage is vital as you perform an in-depth analysis of candidate profiles and make a decision about whether or not they are qualified enough for interviewing with you. On the other hand, a majority of recruitment teams find this stage the most challenging. Although making decisions about recruitment is not a piece of cake, breaking down the strategy into small steps can surely help. Here’s how you can screen candidates and shortlist effectively:
The shortlisted profiles are sent for interviews. This stage can be divided into two or more interview rounds depending on an organization’s requirements, respective roles, and general practices. Some organizations also conduct a single round of interview in their recruitment process.
For example – If you’re hiring developers, you can prepare separate interview rounds for technical assessment and non-technical (or culture-fit) evaluation. Ideally at this stage, the recruitment teams collaborate with department heads for assessing candidates.
Here are some tips you must not miss out on for optimizing your interview process:
Now that you have finished the interview and evaluated the candidates deeply – it’s time to share the offer letter with the shortlisted candidates. Do it enthusiastically – convey that you have confidence in their abilities.
Effective communication and candidate experience are the keys to successful conversion here. You can never be assured of a candidate accepting your job just because the offer is tempting or the candidate has surpassed all the evaluation rounds.
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:
