How Every Business Department Can Get Value Out of Talent CRM

August 16, 2023

Recruiters' job entails more than hiring people via interviews, reviewing applications, scrounging job boards, managing current employees and potential candidates, etc. Modern-day hiring requires a proactive approach to attracting, hiring, and retaining professionals for the business. Recruiters deploy many tools to make their job easier. However, they need to extract the maximum value out of each investment.

Talent CRM is believed to be restricted for the HR team and used for communication and nurturing relations with potential candidates. But what if other departments could get valuable insights and leverage them?

Often talent acquisition teams get a talent CRM without any due diligence. They need to map the project requirements and get their hands on tools to complete their tech stack. This investment without research and understanding of the tool leads to poor implementation. This disturbs the existing tech stack and takes away the opportunity for other departments to use talent CRM. But can other departments actually use the talent CRM?

This blog will address what a talent CRM is and how it can be a valuable addition to the talent acquisition process. Additionally, we will look at its multiple use cases, not restricted to the HR department!

What is Talent CRM?

Talent CRM is a recruiter-specific tool that assists talent acquisition teams in nurturing relationships with employees and active and passive candidates. Like any ‘Customer Relation Management’ (CRM), talent CRM (candidate relation management) software aims to strengthen the relations with job candidates.

Recruiters use talent CRM to track and engage with job candidates and nurture relations with top talent. Talent CRM is like a swipe file, where a recruiter gets an overview of all the relevant information and interaction of every candidate. Talent CRM combined with ATS (application tracking system) enables recruiters to effectively source, engage, and hire professionals. Instead of waiting for a vacancy, recruiters proactively work to build a quality talent pipeline.

However, TRM (Talent Relation Management) software and ATS (Application Tracking Systems) are different. Often, companies confuse the two because they provide comprehensive information about the job candidates. However, both of them have distinct purposes.

ATS is a tool/ software that provides a single source of truth for all the information about job applicants. It stores all the relevant information about the candidates in a single place to easily manage hundreds of applications.

TRM, on the contrary, is a tool to communicate and nurture relations with applicants. It also includes all the information about an applicant but stores the data regarding interactions with each person. It shows all the conversations with the potential candidate and helps to automate and build relationships.

Why Must Every Company Invest In A Talent CRM?

Is the investment in talent CRM worth it? Can not ATS alone do the job? How can talent CRM software add value to the hiring process?

Talent CRM does more than help you communicate with job candidates and build better relationships. It is not just about automating the messages to nurture applicants and passive job seekers. Here are 7 benefits that make talent CRM a must-have!

Healthy Talent Pipeline

Unlike ATS, talent CRM includes the candidate profiles on which the recruiters have spent time communicating and strengthening a relationship. Hence, talent CRM becomes the source of a healthy talent pipeline.

Recruiters build relationships with many professionals over some time till a vacancy opens. They use talent CRM to communicate and automate this process with email sequences and templates. Hence, recruiters can refer to their talent CRM for a qualified pool of talented people when required.

Enhanced Candidate Engagement

Often recruiters encounter low job acceptance rates and applicants to interview rates, which could be because of inappropriate job titles, incomplete information, not following up, etc. Recruiters must ensure to communicate and engage the candidates in the company and job role.

Recruiters shall create custom campaigns based on business needs and skill requirements to personalize the approach. Moreover, they should give visibility into the project types and clientele to give a better understanding and get the candidates invested in the business from day 1.

Moving from a Reactive to a Proactive Approach

Gone are the days when recruiters post a job vacancy and hired talented people. The requirements and expectations have evolved. The hiring market is very competitive, and recruiters need to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive approach.

Recruiters must get into passive hiring and actively look for skilled people to fill open job roles when required. Talent CRM makes passive hiring easy by keeping track of all the conversations and providing an option of automation.

Save Resources

Talent CRM helps save the resources of the firm in many ways. Firstly, recruiters can easily fill the open role with less time and money. Secondly, since these leads are pre-qualified, there is a reduced turnover ratio. In essence, talent CRM saves resources by making the hiring process faster and more effective.

Recruiters can easily streamline the hiring process with talent CRM by integrating various tools and using them to store all the job candidate information. It may seem like an expense, but, in reality, it is an investment that improves workforce quality.

Automation

The hiring market has evolved, and to sustain the competition, recruiters must use automation to manage all the hiring elements effectively. Automation enables recruiters to use message sequences, create and use templates, and store all the data in one place.

Recruiters can use specific message sequences to make messages personalized and relevant. CRM templates help to save time in crafting the perfect message to send to hundreds of candidates.

Integration

Talent CRM helps to streamline the process and provides various integration opportunities, often missing in other HR tools. Recruiters can easily integrate the ATS and other tools for scrapping and reaching out to the talent CRM.

Recruiters get a panoramic view of all information regarding the candidates and can perform a variety of tasks right from the talent CRM tool. This includes creating a list of potential candidates, reaching out to them, nurturing relationships, engaging candidates, hiring, and much more.

Candidates and employees feel cared for and nurtured as recruiters remember them. This helps to create a stronger connection and closer relationship with your team and potential candidates. A talent CRM tool helps recruiters streamline the hiring process, build a talent pipeline with quality professionals, and automate admin tasks while being a single source of all the information. This increases the productivity and ROI of each team member potentially. But can we go any further?

How Can Your Company’s Each Department Leverage the Talent CRM?

Talent CRM, when chosen after due research, will help to achieve higher productivity and string all the departments in one thread. It acts as an enabler in building a lean organization by optimizing the recruitment process and being beneficial to other departments. Let us look at how talent CRM help department other than HR.

Dept. 1: Sales and Customer Service Team

Talent CRM helps the sales and customer service teams enhance customer relations. How?

64% of consumers avoid purchases from companies with a poor employee work culture.

Talent CRM helps attract and retain top talent and strengthen internal communications with the employees. Talent CRM helps portray a positive employer brand as recruiters nurture relationships with potential candidates.

Dept. 2: Commercial Team

The commercial department deals with company finances. Talent CRM helps commercial teams by cutting costs on hiring, predicting hiring costs, and detecting financial leakages.

The finance team can detect the wastage of resources by looking into employee turnover and job acceptance rate. Moreover, talent CRM cuts the cost of a multi-channel hiring approach.
The finance team can forecast the budget allotment for hiring by referring to the active conversations and open job roles. Moreover, they can understand the needs of candidates to predict the compensation packages and set aside respective funds.
The finance team saves a lot of money by deploying talent CRM. This includes marketing costs of open job roles, assessments, background checks, and other hiring-related expenses.

Dept. 3: IT Team

The IT team can use the reporting feature of talent CRM to drill down the talent data associated with your processes, workflows, and hiring. This data can help to improve core metrics such as time to hire and turnover ratio.

Moreover, they can understand the candidate's requirements to assist in training planning regarding the technical tools and software. Also, they can cut costs on unnecessary hiring tools by integrating and streamlining the hiring process with a suitable talent CRM.

Dept. 4: Marketing Team

86% of HR professionals believe employer branding adds to the marketing effort. Talent CRM helps nurture relationships with candidates and build a positive employer brand. This helps the marketing team to cut costs as the recruiters do a part of marketing for the business. Also, talent CRM reduces the costs of marketing job postings.

Marketing teams can use talent CRM to create custom marketing messages to promote businesses. They can curate templates for CRM to save marketing costs by a hefty margin.

Dept. 5: Administration Team

Talent CRM stores all the data of candidates in terms of each interaction. This helps the admin team by saving their cost and time on maintaining candidate databases. They need not curate lists of active applications or candidates in the hiring process.

The administration department also gets a comprehensive view of all the candidates, employees, and other team members without analyzing a chunk of data. Moreover, since talent CRM streamlines the hiring process, the admin team saves resources in providing technical support to the HR teams.

See how talent CRM impacts all business operations and can be of use to every department out there. It directly influences the organization as it is the primary portal for hiring and building teams. But how can recruiters find a suitable talent CRM?

Find The Right Talent CRM For Your Team- Nurturebox

Choosing the right talent CRM requires due research, mapping out needs, and analyzing the effectiveness of each available option. Here is a list of seven factors to consider while picking the right CRM for your business.

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Candidate Profile- The talent CRM must include the option to maintain and see candidate profiles. A CRM with profile options is effective and will lead to duplication, which implies repetition while reaching out.
Email Outreach- The selected CRM should have the option of email outreach. If it doesn't have the email outreach option, recruiters will have to add additional tools to send emails and another tool to record and track them. This will only increase the hassle and defeat the purpose of talent CRM.
Email Templates- The talent CRM must have email templates cause recruiters to need more time to write messages to each candidate or create the perfect message to persuade candidates. The CRM should come with multiple templates for different situations and give options to customize and add templates.
Campaign Analytics- Talent CRM should provide campaign analytics to measure the effectiveness of the effort. Recruiters must have access to data such as turnover rate and applicant-to-interview rate.
Integration- Talent CRM software is a waste if it lacks integration options. It should enable integration with scraping tools, email campaign tools, social media, etc.
Automation- Talent CRM software must provide automation to ease the recruiters' jobs. What's the use of getting a tool if recruiters have to manually reach out to 100s of candidates? Then it would not add any value at all.
Manage Contacts & Interactions- Talent CRM tool must manage all the profiles and contacts and store all the interactions to avoid duplication. Reaching out to the same candidate more than once on the same platform can shed a negative light on the employer brand.

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Want a solution that does it all?

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Nurturebox is the ultimate talent CRM that does all this and much more for recruiters to make recruiters' tasks easier and more effective. Nurturebox takes over the admin tasks related to the top-of-the-funnel hiring process. It helps recruiters to build relationships with candidates while it performs all the mundane jobs.

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Start by downloading the plugin, integrating the ATS system, and finding suitable candidates to reach out to. No more recording candidate profiles, storing conversations, maintaining application databases, dealing with multiple tools, and spending hours personalizing the experience for candidates. Just streamline the process and hire effortlessly!

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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.