August 22, 2022
You spend weeks of time and effort in sourcing candidates, screening, shortlisting and conducting multiple recruitment rounds. If this was not enough, add up to that the incessant competition among brands for quality talent. After all the rigorous recruitment processes, candidates dropping off at the very end of the funnel, 20% more than earlier, has made recruiters’ lives tougher. Wondering what’s the way through? Effective candidate engagement - if executed well with the right strategy, can reduce a majority of the hassle for people at both sides of the table.
It’s not a new practice that needs to be adopted but has more to do with improving the entire recruitment. We tried solving this critical problem for you and have come up with the top ways you can minimize the candidate drop-off rate.
As recruitment is getting closer to marketing, the idea is to put your feet in candidates’ shoes and optimize for their experience. From the convenient application process to consistent communication, numerous best practices will help you and your organization in hiring the best talent. Let’s now dive straight in for a comprehensive insight on candidate engagement.
All the touchpoints of an organization’s interaction with candidates sum up to define candidate engagement. To understand it better, let’s try to break down the recruitment process into parts. Take a look at how candidate engagement is connected to each of the stages in the recruitment journey:
Remember that recruiting doesn’t end with your requirements being met or when you hire a candidate. You need to inform others about the closing. Ensuring a positive candidate experience through active engagement in the recruitment journey builds strong relationships with them and enables the trust factor. Let’s take a look at the most critical reasons why you need to focus on candidate engagement:
First things first, you are not the only organization looking for candidates. With less than 27% of people in the workforce looking actively for jobs, it’s only becoming trickier for recruiters. The market is purely candidate-driven right now, and you need to do everything possible to ensure a fascinating recruitment experience for them. In fact, 75% of employed people say that positive candidate experience influenced their decision to accept the job offer. Organizations who stand out among the competition through shorter and well-defined hiring processes, inclusive candidate experience and continuous updates – surely have an upper hand in onboarding the top talent.
Your reputation as an employer is driven by the kind of candidate engagement that you offer. Digitization has made the world smaller where everyone is closely connected and even a minor negative experience might harm your brand. According to a survey, over 60% of job seekers have been mistreated during recruitment. This is another critical area which you cannot afford to miss out on. It’s not just about maintaining an employer's brand - 80% of recruiters claim that attracting top candidates is a function of a positive reputation. You don’t want candidates to publicly talk about their not-so-good recruiting experiences with your organization, which can be solved with consistent and quality engagement.
Top talent is available only for 10 days in the market - you probably already know that. What you might not know is how effective engagement helps cut down the time to hire. And it’s a win-win for both the parties involved. How? Modern businesses want to engage at scale and hire fast. The optimal path towards achieving that is capitalizing on candidate engagement. A good amount of interaction and communication with potential candidates pushes them to start and complete the recruitment process faster.
One of the recruiters’ most painful problems today – is candidates dropping out from the bottom of the funnel. The demand and supply gap in talent acquisition is huge and talented candidates are being approached by multiple organizations at any given time. Passive candidate sourcing has become a norm - and that further makes the talent pool even more volatile. Keeping your candidates deeply involved throughout the recruitment process and assisting them significantly impacts your drop-off rate. How? The more they feel engaged by you, the higher efforts they put into the assessment and to achieve the role.
Productive engagement strategies do a lot more than just grabbing the eyes of top talent. It should be noted that both employer and consumer brands are connected. Hence, candidate engagement involves both short-term and long-term goals for organizations from all sides.
Although being a very straightforward concept, candidate engagement is usually quite testing for recruiters. So don’t feel bad at all when a candidate drops out - over 75% of them do this.
Saying that it’s about keeping candidate-centric throughout recruitment is a very high-level view. We need to dive deep to know how exactly we can reduce candidate drop-off at the end of the recruitment funnel.
Here’s a list of the top ways you can utilize candidate engagement to prevent candidates from dropping off.
As much as 65% of candidates drop off from a job opening due to negative experience in the recruiting process. The need of the hour for recruiters is to make the candidates feel heard and show that you care for them. Moreover, attracting their interest in your primary offerings, brand and mission can be exceptionally beneficial for the overall recruitment results.
No matter what type of engagement it is, communication always holds the key. Over 63% of candidates say that recruiters do not communicate adequately about the hiring process and they are often unaware of essential steps. To ensure maximum candidate retention throughout the recruitment and for optimal recruitment results, it’s vital that you share detailed information covering each step of the hiring journey. From expected skills, experience and the time to complete the whole process – knowing everything would help candidates in preparing for the recruitment optimally.
The top platform for job seekers looking to apply for roles at your organization is the company website - 24.82%, followed by job boards - 24.5%. Hence, it is equally important that the information which is presented on your website and job boards is comprehensive.
It’s one of the severe issues faced by a majority of job applicants. Over 53% of the surveyed candidates did not get any response from employers for 3 months after applying. This practice harms your candidate engagement and needs to be solved. Try staying completely transparent with candidates about the hiring standards, this would help you standardize the shortlisting and for them - it would help in understanding the expectations.
On the other hand, no job seeker applies just for one company. You might also lose out on pulling the talent down the funnel if you wait and don’t act.
The best thing you can ever do for a smooth recruitment process, optimal candidate experience and for quality talent acquisition is to develop a strict yet realistic timeline and constantly move along with it. As per a candidate engagement survey, it was found that over 50% of job seekers declined a job offer due to poor candidate experience.
Having a predefined schedule for various stages of recruitment immensely enhances candidate engagement and experience. Additionally, note that having a timeline doesn’t mean that you need to have fixed dates for recruitment activities. You can move forward with deciding timeframes and informing your candidates about the same while the time of application.
What comes to your mind when you hear - employer branding? For candidates - it’s undoubtedly one of the most impactful factors while applying for a job. 53% of job seekers mentioned poor employer brand and reputation as one of the reasons for leaving a previous job. Additionally, 20% mentioned that it was the main reason they resigned from their jobs. It is evident that building your brand as an employer is more important than ever. How do you do that?
Engaging consistently and sharing timely reminders manually with hundreds of applicants ends up being too overwhelming for recruiters. But you can’t afford to be inconsistent with updating the candidates at the same time. It’s not just about the tedious tasks, but the accuracy could duffer too which can directly impact your employer's brand and candidate experience.
If you’re also sourcing passive candidates, which is a common practice now – automating the outreach, nurturing and engagement would help get rid of the heavy admin work. As a recruiter, your efforts should be focused on analytical assessment tasks. That helps you attain maximum productivity.
You can use automation software and delegate the pipeline management, candidate outreach and engagement.
A common mistake that recruiters unknowingly do is to schedule an interview without discussing the candidate’s availability. It was a preferred practice in traditional face-to-face physical interviews, but with virtual interviews becoming the primary mode of interaction – it’s not the case now. Before scheduling an interview with candidates, you should discuss the date and time well in advance.
It’s one of the direct factors contributing to the drop-off rate too. You need to understand candidates might have more interviews or they might be busy with some other work.
A lot of companies even ask candidates to choose among a number of available interview slots. Such flexibility ensures convenient candidate engagement and a fascinating candidate experience.
The slow repliers and people not responding after a while should be followed up consistently by recruiters. You should always take care of the possibility of candidates missing out on your outreach due to various reasons. Especially, if you feel that a candidate can be a great addition to your organization’s talent pool, follow up multiple times and try a getting response.
Following up in recruitment is similar to that in sales. So, if a candidate doesn't respond at all, you should drop the idea and focus on other candidates.
A successful candidate engagement strategy cannot be complete without feedback. Similarly, the recruitment process is hard to optimize without input from candidates about their experience. At every stage of the hiring journey, candidates should be provided with constructive feedback. Not only does this improve the candidate experience, but being transparent and active also helps in developing a positive relationship with them. They take away actionable pointers and often appreciate your efforts in improving them professionally.
On the other hand, asking for feedback from all of your candidates - regardless of their results would help immensely help you in the long run. You get to see your recruitment process through numerous perspectives and hence extract insights from your recruitment that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Ask for feedback proactively to learn and grow as an employer.
Candidate engagement covers all the stages of the recruitment journey. When you scale your recruitment, which you need to do for the organization’s growth - handling various tasks and executing them to perfection cannot be done manually. You need an automated solution that assists you in optimizing your candidate engagement and experience - Nurturebox enables you and your recruitment teams to
Along with delegating the mundane tasks and ensuring a better life for your recruitment teams, automation also helps you serve a prolific candidate experience along with productive engagement.
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:
