How does Employer Branding help in Outbound Recruitment?

August 17, 2023

If you work in the recruitment space - you’ve probably heard ‘employer brand’ a thousand times, especially in the past few years. With outbound recruitment topping the priority list for organizations, you obviously want to leave no stone unturned in this volatile talent market.

The most vital force of attraction for candidates today is an appealing employer brand. But the bigger question is - how do you practice employer branding effectively?

As per a survey by LinkedIn, 75% of job seekers research a company's reputation and employer brand before applying for a job. While employer branding primarily empowers your recruitment efforts, helping you attract and retain top talent, it should be looked at as a holistic approach.

It’s high time we start considering employer branding as something a lot more than random posts on company culture, values, and employee experiences. Wondering how will it help you ace your outbound recruitment? This guide will help you with an in-depth strategy for employer branding. So stick around for some valuable insights and actionable steps on boosting your outbound recruitment with employer branding.

What is Employer Branding?

Employer branding refers to the reputation and image a company creates as an employer, and how it is perceived by current and potential employees. It encompasses everything from company culture, values, benefits, and employee experiences to how the company communicates its brand message.

Establishing a superior employer brand has become increasingly important in recent years as the job market has become more competitive, and job seekers have become more selective in their job search.

So organizations now need to differentiate themselves from their competitors and create a positive image that resonates with potential employees.

A great example of effective employer branding is Google. Known for its innovative and employee-centric culture, Google has consistently ranked among the top companies on various "Best Places to Work" lists. Google's employer brand emphasizes a fun, collaborative, and diverse work environment that fosters creativity and personal growth. This has helped Google attract and retain top talent in a highly competitive job market.

Elements of Employer Branding

Before we move on to the impact of employer branding on recruitment, let’s first break down the different elements. Together they help you attract and retain quality talent, which is the key to any business’s growth.

Culture: The values, beliefs, and behaviors that define a company's work environment.
Values: The principles and ethics that guide a company's decision-making.
Benefits: The perks, rewards, and incentives that a company offers its employees.
Employee Experience: The interactions and experiences employees have with the company during their employment journey.
Communication: The way a company communicates its brand message to potential and current employees.
Reputation: The perception of the company in the eyes of the public and its employees.
Leadership: The effectiveness and vision of the company's leaders in creating a positive work culture.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: The company's commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive work environment.

Why is Employer Branding Vital for Your Organization?

Employer branding has become a crucial aspect of all types of recruitment, whether it's inbound or outbound. According to LinkedIn, companies with a strong employer brand receive 50% more qualified applicants, which can significantly increase the chances of hiring the best candidates.

Additionally, according to a survey by Glassdoor, 84% of job seekers say that the reputation of a company as an employer is important when deciding where to apply for a job.

These statistics emphasize the critical role of employer branding in today's job market, where candidates have a wealth of options and are increasingly prioritizing company culture and values in their job search.

Now, let’s take a look at the top 5 benefits of a strong employer brand:

Attracts Top Talent: A strong employer brand can attract and convert top talent for your organization. When job seekers are looking for a new job, they want to work for companies that align with their values and offer a positive work environment. A strong employer brand can help establish your organization as an ideal employer, which can attract the best candidates.

Employee Retention: Employees who are proud of their company and feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves are more likely to stay with the organization. A strong employer brand can help establish a positive work culture, which can lead to higher retention rates.

Recruitment Cost Savings: When your organization has a strong employer brand, you are more likely to attract high-quality candidates, which can reduce recruitment costs. Additionally, a positive work environment reduces turnover rates, which can also significantly save the recruitment spend.

Competitive Advantage: With an established employer brand in the industry, you are more likely to attract the best candidates and retain top talent, which can lead to increased productivity and innovation.

Reputation Management: A strong employer brand also plays a vital role in reputation management. When your organization has a positive employer brand, it can help mitigate negative publicity and promote a positive image of the organization.

It’s clear that by investing in employer branding, organizations reap a multitude of benefits.

But how does it impact outbound recruitment? And what are the steps you need to take to build a remarkable employer brand? It’s high time we dive in deep.

How Employer Branding Empowers Outbound Recruitment?

Outbound recruitment, also known as external or proactive recruitment, refers to the process of identifying and approaching potential candidates who are not actively looking for a job. Unlike inbound recruitment, which involves attracting candidates through job postings and other public-facing efforts, this practice requires a more targeted approach and a strong employer brand to be effective.

Even from a high-level view, one of the key ways in which employer branding impacts outbound recruitment is by creating a positive perception of the organization among potential candidates.

Establish an appealing reputation in the workforce

A strong employer brand helps you position your organization as an attractive place to work, with a positive reputation and a strong sense of purpose. This can be particularly important for outbound recruitment, where candidates may not be actively seeking new opportunities and may need to be convinced of the benefits of working for the organization.

Easily convert and retain talent

Another way in which employer branding impacts outbound recruitment is by helping to attract and retain top talent. Candidates are often drawn to organizations with a strong employer brand, as they perceive these organizations as being more likely to offer fulfilling and rewarding work experiences. This can help organizations to build a pipeline of high-quality candidates who are interested in working for the organization, making outbound recruitment efforts more effective.

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Top Outbound Recruiting Metrics Defining the Impact of Employer Branding

What can’t be measured, is highly unlikely to improve. To find out the effectiveness of a strong employer brand on outbound recruitment, we must not miss out on the following metrics:

Candidate engagement: Employer branding helps organizations attract and engage potential candidates who may not have been actively looking for new opportunities. By creating a positive perception of the organization and its values, a strong employer brand can increase the likelihood that candidates will respond to outreach efforts and be more willing to engage in the recruitment process.

Time to hire: The time it takes to hire new employees is a significant metric for recruitment success. When organizations have a positive reputation and are viewed as an attractive place to work, they may receive a higher volume of qualified applications, reducing the time and resources required to find and vet potential candidates.

Employee retention: A strong employer brand also contributes in promoting employee satisfaction and retention by creating a positive work environment and a sense of purpose. This further also reduces the need for constant recruitment efforts, saving time and money for the organization.

‍For example, consider a software development services company that is looking to hire a senior developer to lead a new project.

Through outbound recruitment efforts, the company identifies a candidate who is currently employed but has expressed interest in working for the organization. The candidate is hesitant to leave their current job, however, as they are satisfied with their current work environment and the opportunities available to them.

If the software development company has a strong employer brand, they can use this to their advantage in convincing the candidate to make the switch.

By highlighting the organization's positive reputation, values, and sense of purpose, the company can create a more compelling case for the candidate to consider the opportunity.

This can help to reduce the time and resources required to hire the candidate and promote long-term retention if they accept the offer.

How to Create a Strong Employer Brand to Ace Your Outbound Recruitment?

Creating a strong employer brand for outbound recruitment requires you to follow a dedicated strategy involving a number of steps. But you don’t need to worry, here’s a detailed approach that will help you ace your outbound recruiting efforts.

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Define your brand

Start by defining your employer brand. This involves identifying what makes your company unique, what values you stand for, and what kind of culture you want to create. Once you have a clear understanding of your brand, you can start building a brand identity that reflects these values and resonates with your target audience.

Craft your messaging

Develop a compelling message that clearly communicates your employer brand to potential candidates. This message should highlight your company's values, culture, and mission, and should be consistent across all channels, including your website, social media, and job listings.

Optimize your online presence

Your online presence is crucial for building a strong employer brand. Make sure your company website is up-to-date and visually appealing, with a clear focus on your employer brand. Use social media platforms to showcase your company culture and values, and actively engage with potential candidates.

Provide an exceptional candidate experience

Creating a positive candidate experience is critical to building a strong employer brand. This involves everything from the application process to the interview experience and follow-up communication. Provide timely and personalized communication to candidates, and be sure to keep them informed throughout the hiring process.

Leverage employee advocacy

Encourage your employees to become brand ambassadors and promote your employer brand on social media and other channels. This can help build credibility and trust with potential candidates.

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Why Do You Need to Automate Your Outbound Recruitment?

At a ground level, outbound hiring is a lengthier process which can also be tricky to scale, especially when done manually. Sourcing candidates one at a time and continuously engaging with them are all mundane tasks that recruiters often struggle with.

Amidst all the hassle and potential chaos, automating your outbound recruitment can be the ideal option for your organization.

Here are the top reasons why you must use a tool for automating your outbound recruitment:

Scalability: Automating your recruitment process can make it easier to scale your hiring efforts. Such tools can handle a large volume of applications and can easily scale as your hiring needs grow.

Time and Cost Savings: By automating repetitive tasks like sourcing, screening, and scheduling, recruiters can focus on high-value activities that require human skills like engagement and relationship building.

Enhanced Candidate Experience: Automated systems can keep candidates informed about the status of their applications and provide them with feedback in a timely manner. This can lead to a positive impression of your company, even if they are not selected for the role.

Improved Hiring Quality: Automating your recruitment process can lead to improved hiring quality. Automated systems can screen and rank candidates based on qualifications and fit, helping you to identify the most suitable candidates for your open roles.

Data-Driven Insights: Automating your recruitment process can provide you with valuable data-driven insights into your hiring process. By analyzing recruitment data, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize your recruitment process.

How does Nurturebox help you scale Your Outbound Hiring?

Do you often get overwhelmed by the scaled-up requirements when it comes to outbound recruiting?

What stops you from dedicatedly focusing on your employer branding even after knowing its importance?

Recruiters already have more than enough on their plates and handling it all manually directly harms their productivity. The road to redemption?

Automate the repeated mundane tasks of recruiting and focus just on the human-centric ones. Nurturebox empowers your recruitment process with comprehensive candidate sourcing and engagement automation.

That’s not all – the Chrome extension also:

Seamlessly integrates with your existing recruitment stack like ATS
Enables you to source hundreds of candidates from LinkedIn within seconds
Connects you with them over multiple channels
Maintains the entire talent pipeline on auto-pilot

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Strategic talent sourcing, engagement, and recruitment pipeline management just became a lot easier with Nurturebox. Try it now!

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.

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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.

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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.