Organizations spend a fortune in posting job openings to expensive sites, campaigning with paid ads, activating their employer brands and whatnot for inbound recruiting. Hiring teams invest a majority of their time filtering and screening candidates. All of this to find out that only a few candidates qualify their requirements and hiring for each role is going to take them weeks - if not months of time.
The traditional strategy of waiting for good applications isn’t just costing you time - it’s keeping you away from top talent and halting your growth. Hiring cannot stop, you need to have a way through and it’s outbound recruiting. You might be wondering, “Isn’t reaching out to candidates even slower than getting applications?”. Well, outbound recruiting software helps you here as a recruiter. Want to know how? Stick around for a detailed discussion.
On average, each vacancy costs $500 a day to organizations. 73% of the overall candidates are passive job seekers and hence do not apply for jobs. These two statistics show the tough reality modern recruiters are dealing with amidst the competitive landscape. Gone are the days when sourcing candidates was simple and recruitment was mainly focused on screening and interviewing.
In this blog, we will find out why reaching out to candidates has become the new normal and how outbound recruiting software enable you to scale your hiring campaigns.
Why is Outbound Recruiting Now More Crucial than Ever?
Growing companies have numerous roles to fill at any given time. When you need to hire as soon as possible, which is usually the case – you cannot wait for people to get attracted to your job posts. So you will need to proactively identify, reach out and engage with talented candidates to fill your positions.
Especially for early-stage organizations or while hiring for non-core roles, outbound recruiting is the optimal approach for recruiters. Moreover, this strategy solves numerous challenges faced by recruiters like unqualified candidates, screening of hundreds of CVs and candidates dropping off during the hiring process.
So it’s the era of outbound recruiting where recruiters possess the opportunity to take over the hiring cycle completely. Hunting top talent is a continuous battle among organizations now. The incredible control over recruitment strategy and execution is not a ‘nice to have’ anymore, it has become a necessity.
Top Benefits of Outbound Recruitment
We had a top-level view of why outbound recruitment is the need of the hour. It’s now time to analyze the most effective benefits of this strategy.
Saves Time
The most critical resource for recruiters is the time they majorly spend filtering, screening and interviewing candidates. With the inbound approach, it takes about 100 person-hours to hire someone. Keeping aside the recruitment teams' productivity, even the organizations can’t afford to spend much time filling their positions. Outbound recruiting cuts the length of the hiring cycle by half as you don’t need to filter from hundreds of candidates.
Streamlines Hiring Journey
Outbound recruiting ensures you skip the first half of the talent acquisition funnel - awareness, consideration and interest. You qualify candidates before reaching out to them so that they directly land up to the application phase which is followed by hiring. Hence, the recruitment cycle is streamlined, recruiters don’t have to face much hassle and have more control over the hiring process. Outbound recruiting enables you to generate expected results rather than riding on a number of secondary factors.
Helps You Hire Better Talent
A LinkedIn report revealed that 1 in 72 sourced candidates are hired against 1 in 152 applicants (inbound). It is evident that candidates who are actively sourced by an outbound approach are twice as better as candidates who apply for a job posting. Outbound recruiting gives you immense flexibility to choose who you want to interview and hire. You can also try passive candidate sourcing as they are 120% more likely to make a substantial impact on your organization.
Cuts Down Hiring Costs
The average cost per hire in the U.S. is over $4000. Isn’t it much more than what you had expected? Well, hiring journeys are immensely long and we often don’t realise the costs including the invested human capital. Outbound sourcing gives you a powerful advantage by identifying qualified candidates and then reaching out. The recruitment costs are cut down due to less time taken to hire candidates and by avoiding expensive job posting sites.
Outbound Recruiting Tools: Why Do You Need One and How to Choose?
While outbound recruiting has numerous positives, the efforts required are directly proportional to the scale of hiring. That further makes the outbound approach a bit tricky - what if you were hiring for tens of roles at once? Manual outbound recruiting is tedious and you don’t need to do it all by yourself anyway.
Outbound recruiting software enables you to scale your hiring seamlessly with automation. The core idea of having an assistive tool for recruitment is simple – delegate the repeated chores to automation and focus heavily on assessing quality candidates.
An ideal outbound recruitment software also takes care of the quality and cost of hiring. How to find out if a tool is a great fit for you?
Let’s discuss the functionalities you should priorly look out for in an outbound recruitment software.
Top Features of Outbound Recruiting Software
#1 Integration With Your Existing Technology Stack
Most recruitment teams use multiple systems and solutions for their hiring process like an applicant tracking system (ATS) for database handling. An outbound recruiting software should first enable simple integration of existing ATS so that you don’t keep jumping from one platform to another.
Nurturebox offers you a hassle-free approach to automating candidate database management through ATS integration. With all top-of-the-funnel chores being taken care of, you don’t need to manually update and maintain the recruitment pipeline. Just focus on getting the best candidates and optimize your recruitment.
#2 Effortless Recruiting Campaign Execution
Recruitment is like sales. You need to plan and progress step by step for yielding quality results. The outbound recruiting software that you opt for must allow the planning and execution of targeted campaigns with a single-window dashboard for the status of your pipeline.
Nurturebox enables recruitment teams to create campaigns, add prospects from platforms like LinkedIn and control the further hiring process through a single window. From extracting contact details to executing engagement sequences
#3 Automated Outreach and Candidate Engagement
When it comes to searching, identifying, reaching out and consistently engaging with candidates – it adds up a pile of admin work that harms your productivity as a recruiter. In order to scale your hiring, an outbound recruiting software needs to automate candidate outreach and engagement. Not only does it help in reaching out to hundreds of prospects and building relationships, but also ensures organized hiring without much manual intervention.
If you’re already worried about personalizing your messaging for prospects, as outbound recruitment is like sales Afterall – fret not. Nurturebox makes sure you scale your outreach and engagement without compromising on the personal touch.
#4 Multichannel Approach
Reaching out to candidates and engaging them via a single channel is an uncertain approach to outbound recruiting. Your tool should allow executing multi-channel outreach.
NurtureBox offers LinkedIn, Email and Whatsapp integrations to maximize your outreach and engagement results. It adds up to the convenience for your candidates as they can use their preferred channel of communication.
#5 Performance Insights and Analysis
An ideal outbound recruiting software gives you data-backed insights so that you can make strong decisions and further optimize your hiring campaigns.
NurtureBox offers engagement metrics to target the interested candidates who respond to your outreach. To know which candidates are actively engaging back and what type of outreach is working the best for you – performance insights play a crucial role.
Summary
Outbound recruiting is the need of the hour given the intense competition for acquiring top talent. Modern enterprises can’t afford too much patience as they need to scale fast. The comprehensive control over recruitment outcomes that the outbound approach offers evidently stands out. Outbound recruiting software further makes it seamless for recruiters to scale recruitment campaigns so that they can hire quality talent quickly and efficiently.
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.
Top Must-Have Skills in a Content Marketer
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
Excellent Writing 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.
Audience Research
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.
Keyword Research
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.
Data-oriented Content
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..
Project Management, Planning, and Publishing –
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.
Content Promotion
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.
Performance Analysis
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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