How to Boost Your Recruiting Efficiency: Top 8 Tips to Level Up

August 16, 2023

Almost all recruiting teams around the world are facing multi-dimensional challenges with sourcing and hiring quality talent. Especially, when the requirements are scaled up – recruiters struggle with the extensive competition and fast hiring expectations. A majority of hiring managers look for different strategies to pivot their recruitment approach - but is it always the solution? Well, changing the direction of your talent acquisition won’t assure you a smoother or faster drive. But when you deconstruct your hiring process to elevate recruitment efficiency – the chances of success significantly increase.

The process followed by recruiting teams alongside the candidate experience contributes heavily to your hiring outcomes. If you have been in management meetings before, you would probably relate to stakeholders asking hiring managers to scale up the volume with limited resources. It can either be the budget or the recruitment team, but the requirements are rarely the same in volume or stagnant.

Contrary to popular opinion, measuring recruiting efficiency is not possible without diving into hiring metrics. While some might argue that efficiency is a qualitative analysis performed by experience – it cannot be enhanced unless accurately measured. You need to combine numerous metrics together to figure out the areas that need improvement. Consequently, these measurements also tell you if the recruitment team requires expansion.

It’s evident recruiting efficiency has to be consistently taken care of in order to optimize your talent acquisition. But how do you take the necessary steps to level up your recruiting efficiency? What are the data-driven actions that must follow for successfully recruiting top candidates? Let’s dive deep into answers to these along with the 8 most impactful strategies that you can implement right away for boosting recruiting efficiency.

What is Recruiting Efficiency?

Before we move on to the top tips for elevating recruitment efficiency, let’s quickly revisit what it refers to. You need to know what you’re dealing with inside out in order to solve something.

Recruiting efficiency is the measure of how optimal your entire recruitment process is – right from the application stage to the onboarding of talent. The candidate experience, cost of recruitment, and return on invested resources is largely driven by the efficiency of recruiting. How? Let's first take a couple of statistics:

60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity
52% of candidates don’t receive any communication in the two to three (or more) months after applying.

Not only the quality of candidates you hire but the time and cost required to hire those candidates also depend on your recruiting efficiency. And you should know that a vacant position costs $500 a day to organizations on average. Surprised already? Well, take it as another huge reason why your hiring process needs revamping.

The reason why recruitment efficiency is a vital metric today is straightforward - it impacts all the stages and participants in the journey.

While in the application phase, you aim for getting CVs relevant to the position and company requirements. The more quality profiles you receive, the better candidates you would be interviewing and hiring.

Next comes the interview stage in which you want to check if enough candidates out of the interviewed ones are getting the offer letter or not. If the ratio is too low, it’s a clear sign you’re unable to attract quality candidates.

Not to forget - the candidate experience which drives the success rate of your recruitment funnel’s bottom stage - onboarding. The ratio of people accepting your job offer defines how well the candidates have been engaged and tells you about their satisfaction level.

Top 8 Tips To Increase Recruiting Efficiency

Make Your Job Descriptions Precise

First things first, the job description is your prior interaction with the candidates and it sets the tone for your entire recruitment cycle. To optimize the hiring outcomes, your job posts need to be short, clear, and concise. You need to be very specific about the requirements and candidate responsibilities you state in the document.

Adding too many non-primary candidate responsibilities and expectations might confuse your visitors and harm your application rate. Additionally, the more optimized your job description is for the required job role, the higher the relevancy of received applications and hence more profiles can be shortlisted in a shorter period of time. Here are the prior constituents you should have in job descriptions explained in a succinct way:

Job overview
Responsibilities
Qualifications - skills and experience
Company mission statement
Relevant web page links - About us, culture pages, and recent Press Releases
Links to company social media

Any non-essential requirements and information should be avoided and the focus should be on persuading the candidates for applying for the open roles.

Utilize an ATS

Most of the recruiting teams spend hours each day on maintaining the candidate applications database manually as a result – the efficiency of the recruitment process is not dedicatedly focused upon. Tracking, updating, and managing candidate databases is a hefty task and a large chunk of human resources in every company are invested in these operations. Utilizing an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) tool solves this at scale.

The capabilities of ATS tools are not limited to application tracking, some tools even help in automating the first round of screening. So whether you’re scaling up your recruiting or have just a few people in your recruitment team, ATS can be a very handy tool. Not only do you save enough time by automating repeated lengthy maintenance tasks, but it also boosts your recruitment team’s productivity by enabling collaborative hiring. The high-level view of your recruitment pipeline is particularly useful in continuously analyzing and improving your recruitment journey.

Amplify Your Referral Campaigns

If there’s one source of recruiting candidates you can always rely on no matter the scale of your company or the position you’re hiring for – is candidate referrals. Despite being one of the most effective ways of recruiting, numerous organizations put limited focus on referral campaigns. Amidst today’s intensely competitive landscape, leveraging your employees’ networks is a fantastic way to boost recruiting efficiency.

In terms of all the primitive recruitment metrics - time, cost, and retention of hired candidates, referrals top the charts with the best metrics. Although on average only 7% of the total candidates are referred by employees, around 40% of them convert! Employers now need to amplify their referral campaigns through aggressive promotions and reward systems. A strategic combination of both internal and external referrals ensures you hire fast and at fast fewer costs as compared to other approaches.

Strategize Your Passive Talent Sourcing

Around 73% of all the candidates today are passive job seekers. While inbound recruiting and active sourcing of talent worked quite well earlier, the passive talent pool is a different challenge to track. When it comes to impact generation, passively sourced candidates are 120% more likely to establish a positive impact on organizations. That’s not all - passively sourced candidates are 17% less likely than active candidates to need further skill development efforts.

Passive talent sourcing also allows you to tailor your recruitment efforts to assess only qualified and skilled candidates. Building your talent pool has a huge role to play in your organization’s growth and hiring success, and the key to accomplishing that successfully is through passive sourcing.

Recruiting teams and hiring managers need to go big on passive outbound recruitment to acquire quality skilled talent in the least amount of time. Continuously building your talent pool, engaging with candidates, and recruiting them is a lengthy process but the generated results are usually multifold of the same efforts spent in cracking inbound recruitment.

Optimize Candidate Communication

If you have been in the recruitment space for quite some time, you would probably know why communication skills are prioritized for recruiters and are often trained around the same. While it’s a huge factor in defining the quality of recruitment followed at your organization, effective communication also leaves your candidates with a positive initial impression.

Recruiting efficiency depends on streamlined and timely communication with candidates and employees. From sourcing candidates to recruiting and keeping them effectively engaged throughout the funnel – the way you and the team communicate with talent defines their future decisions.

Contrary to popular opinion, communication isn’t just about when you talk to them on the phone or via video call interviews, it’s much more beyond that. Even before a candidate applies to your role, it begins with your job promotion posts and sourcing emails. At each stage of the recruiting journey, quality communication aimed at solving candidates’ problems in the easiest way possible – helps you recruit better candidates quickly and efficiently.

Simplify Your Interview Conduction

This is one of the most common challenges faced by organizations today. What’s even more surprising is – a number of employers don’t even consider this a problem. Not having a standardized approach towards interviewing candidates and allowing recruiting team members to conduct interviews based on experiences and experiments – severely affects your recruitment efforts. How? You not only lose out on top talent but also end up spending a lot of time and resources without positive results.

Following a templatized interview structure along with regular training sessions for the recruiting teams help them conduct fair and streamlined interviews. Along with generic recruitment training, the hiring manager should also ensure sync between departmental heads and recruiting team members for role-specific requirements. This immensely helps in simplifying the interview process for recruiters and promises a consistent candidate experience. Better interviews directly mean more effective candidates being identified and recruiters getting to know candidates deeply.

Consistently Focus on Employer Branding

Working on recruiting efficiency doesn’t just mean setting up short-term goals and chasing them. In order to ensure you don’t always put extensive efforts in sourcing top-notch talent and establishing your organization as an employer of choice. Work consistently on your employer brand by prioritizing the superior candidate experience, aggressively running recruitment marketing campaigns, and promoting your company culture.

Another great approach to boosting your employer brand is by leveraging your employees’ network. When you represent your brand subtly through personal social profiles, the awareness and thought leadership aspects elevate significantly. You make your company culture and experience clearly stand out among the huge crowd. As a result, your brand attracts and hires much better talent both via inbound and outbound efforts. Candidates have more than a few choices when it comes to choosing their employer today, what makes the difference is your employer brand.

Automate Your Sourcing and Engagement

Let’s cut to the chase – recruiters already have a lot on their plate at any given point in time. Identifying, outreaching, engaging, sourcing, recruiting, promoting jobs, managing candidates and the list is truly endless. While a large chunk of companies has relatively small recruitment teams of 3-6 people, it becomes too hectic for recruiters to handle both analytical and mundane admin tasks of maintaining the recruitment pipeline. With scaled-up requirements, manual recruitment operations are nothing short of a nightmare and the effects are actually seen in the quality of talent acquired due to lack of time. Here’s where recruitment automation comes into the picture.

Modern recruitment is about racing against time and facing continuous competition for hiring top talent. In such a scenario, automating the most time-consuming repeated tasks of your recruitment – candidate sourcing and continuous engagement is the need of the hour. Using automated candidate sourcing, you can reach out to as many candidates, add them to your talent pipeline and nurture them continuously. As a result, you never run out of quality candidates and your hiring becomes 5x faster with an internal pool of engaged talent.

Elevate Your Recruiting Efficiency – Recruitment Automation with Nurturebox

No matter how big or small your recruitment team is, mundane admin tasks like maintaining the candidate pipeline and engaging with the masses harm your team’s productivity. And when you’re hiring for multiple roles and when the requirements scale up, escalation with manual efforts produces hectic recruiters, not sudden results. But now that you're here, you already have your solution at hand.

Nurturebox enables talent teams to scale up their outbound recruitment efforts with a comprehensive sourcing and engagement solution. The tool also combines with your existing ATS to serve you a birds-eye view of your entire recruitment scenario. The Chrome extension plugs in with your LinkedIn and integrates with your tech stack to help you source candidates and engage them within seconds – all through a single dashboard.

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.