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Why is Outbound Recruiting Important to Fuel Your Company's Growth?

August 16, 2023

If the already panicked recruitment market wasn’t enough – the pandemic, mass layoffs, great resignation and the great recession further shook the industry apart. There exists a huge gap between demand and supply of hireable talent now. Fulfilling industry needs and expectations is a continuous struggle for recruiters. Given the exponentially rising requirements and growth in the number of passive candidates, outbound recruiting is the most reliable hiring solution.

More jobs are available as compared to the number of candidates today. A majority of the total workforce – around 73% of them are passive candidates, which means they are not looking for jobs at all. Hence recruiters clearly cannot wait for inbound leads i.e. applications through job boards from active job seekers. Why? Because hiring quality talent is the top priority for most of us.

If you’re worried about not being able to get quality candidates for your hiring campaigns, maybe you are not doing much outbound recruiting. Is something stopping you? Whatever it is – we'll help you solve it with this blog. Let’s dive in straight for an insightful discussion on outbound recruiting and why is it crucial for your growth.

What is Outbound Recruiting?

Organizations didn’t need to look beyond traditional approaches to finding and recruiting candidates for a long time. Talented and experienced people applying for roles posted on job boards, newspaper ads and online listings were more than normal. Recruiters had the power of picking candidates in an overcrowded market. People were looking for work without caring much about external factors like work culture, mode of working and the offered flexibility.

Things, however, have drastically transformed. It’s a candidate-driven market now. Recruiters are constantly facing challenges in hiring quality talent. Here’s where the outbound recruitment approach comes into the picture.

Outbound recruiting involves hiring actively by identifying and reaching out to candidates personally. Unlike the traditional inbound recruiting method, the outbound approach gives you entire control of your recruitment journey. So instead of waiting and spending hours on unproductive filtering of candidates – you are proactively offering the right people to join your organization. 

The outbound recruitment approach is similar to a cold pitch or a cold call. However, the recruiters do their research before targeting any candidate. This approach to hiring is far more beneficial (both in terms of resources and time) as compared to traditional inbound recruiting.

How do we claim that? Well in the case of outbound recruitment –  you are already connecting with qualified candidates as per your requirements. And you never rely on quality applications to grow your team and strengthen your business.

Why Outbound Recruitment is the Need of The Hour?

Enterprises now want to grow and scale up fast. The successful functioning and sustainability of any organization are largely driven by the talent and resources it possesses. So as recruiters, you are not running just a single race, but multiple ones against the competition, time and expectations. It’s more than enough to get overwhelmed, but the earlier you adapt to the shifting trends, the better you would be placed in the near future. 

Here are the top reasons why the outbound recruiting approach is crucial for recruiters and enterprises today:

  1. You want to hire quality talent 

The primary reason why recruiters are striving is their need to find and hire quality talent. But how does sourcing candidates guarantee high-quality hire? Look at these statistics:

  1. Time is more precious than we think

Outbound recruiting immensely helps in saving time and resources as you don’t wait for weeks to get a few good applications, filtering out CVs and screening those candidates. The hiring cycle gets much longer in the case of inbound recruitment.
On the other hand, outbound sourcing and recruiting involve identifying the right candidates and directly screening them. This cuts off a lot of time consumed in hiring talent and helps in saving capital too. Using the outbound approach, you can scale up your recruitment processes as per required.

  1. Predictable outcomes are luxury

You can have different approaches while executing outbound recruitment campaigns, but positive outcomes are ensured. Passive sourcing, which is a part of outbound recruitment helps recruiters unravel diverse talent pools and quality candidates in a much simpler way as compared to creating job posts and pushing on job boards. Additionally, outbound recruiting makes recruiters’ lives much easier and helps them strengthen their core skills to overcome any future challenges in hiring.

How to Execute Outbound Recruitment?

Only 25% of the overall candidates in the workforce are searching for jobs actively. A large chunk of talent is passive talent. So, in order to boost your recruitment – your hiring team will need to focus on passive sourcing.

Source: LinkedIn Business

We came across what outbound recruiting is and why is it crucially important for modern-day recruiters to sustain and grow their organizations successfully. Let’s now take a look at how to execute outbound recruiting for quality hiring campaigns. 

An ideal outbound recruiting strategy should focus on the candidates who are talented and are open to better and more impactful opportunities. That forms about 60% of the total workforce. So the outbound recruitment strategy is divided into two parts:

  • Building a talent pool
  • Connecting with the aim of conversion

Step 1: Building a Talent Pool

An important aspect of efficient hiring in modern times is having a talent pipeline full. The idea is to keep sourcing candidates and add the top-qualified ones to your talent pipeline. Hence, whenever candidates are required for an open role, you know where to go for a quick solution.

Prior to reaching out to candidates, developing a talent pool is a great investment of time and effort. It might feel a bit intimidating at the beginning, but here’s how you can optimize this step:

  • Use LinkedIn as your primary sourcing platform but use role-specific platforms too. Example: Stackoverflow, Github for tech talent, ProductHunt for Product Managers, Behance for designers etc.
  • Find contact details of your target candidates and store them in one place

Step 2: Reaching Out to Prospective Candidates 

Once you have your talent pool established, it’s time to connect with the candidates and pitch to them about the open roles at your organization. Here are some best practices you should follow to optimize this step of outbound recruiting:

  • Personalize your emails: No one likes to open and read generic emails that are not personalized and are clearly sent out as carbon copies. Research about your target candidates and leverage it to give your email a personal touch so as to maximize your chances of getting a response.
  • Avoid spamming them: Having your target prospects’ contact details like email, mobile number and WhatsApp number does not mean that you will reach out to them repeatedly. It’s a big red flag. 
  • Follow up consistently: Following up with your target prospects in case you haven’t received a response in 2-3 days, helps you boost your response rate if you personalize your email well.

Use a Talent Sourcing Tool

As a recruiter, you want to focus on the core tasks of the hiring journey. However, with so many tasks starting from sourcing to managing the talent pipeline – doing everything manually can be daunting for you and can harm your productivity. To boost your outbound recruiting, it is recommended that you use an automated candidate sourcing tool like NurtureBox. As the future will be driven by passive talent, you need to consistently engage and reach out to candidates at scale. Our candidate sourcing tool enables automated outreach, candidate engagement and nurturing while managing your ATS and talent pipeline at the same time.
But how does NurtureBox work? We will find out more about this in the next section.

Top Strategies to Ensure You Hire Right via Outbound Recruiting

Think of outbound recruiting as your sales campaign or email marketing campaign. The only difference is - here you are trying to sell your job to candidates instead of products to target customers. Let’s uncover the top 5 strategies you need to follow for hiring better and more efficiently. 

#1 Source the Right Candidates and Add them to Your Campaign

The first and foremost parameter that will define the outcomes of outbound recruiting is the quality of candidates you source. The best way to go about it is to use LinkedIn to identify and handpick relevant target candidates.

What after you find out your prospective candidates? Use NurtureBox’s Chrome extension so that you can effectively manage your sourced candidates.

Use SIgnalHire plugin available with NurtureBox to find the contact details of your prospect through their LinkedIn profile.

Once you find their contact details, you can directly add the candidate to your campaign in order to engage further.

#2 Personalize Your Entire Email 

It’s 2022 and sending the same email to every candidate doesn’t work at all. To boost your email open rate and response rate, personalizing your subject line as well as email content is crucial.

Please note that candidates are more likely to open your email if your name is written instead of the organization’s name.
The recruiting efforts are not just about delivering successful hires, but also about the candidate experience.
NurtureBox provides you with the option of creating templates so that you can instantly execute personalization at scale. 

#3 Engage with Them on Their Preferred Channels

Once you have sourced numerous candidates and prepared personalized emails, it’s time to begin engaging with the candidates. To further strengthen your relationship with your potential hire, engage with them on their preferred channels.
NurtureBox allows you to engage with added candidates through Whatsapp, Email and LinkedIn. Each update regarding their status of recruitment, expected timeline and upcoming events - interviews & scheduled meetings should be informed.

#4 Analyze Your Performance Metrics and Refine the Processes

Data plays a huge role in refining your outbound recruitment with each iteration. Similar to data-driven marketing, you need to analyze what’s working the best and what’s not for you. For example - metrics defining the response to your outreach campaigns.

If you have got the NurtureBox Chrome extension installed already, performance insights and various other metrics can be accessed with a single click.
Once done, you can work on improving the corresponding parameters for the outbound recruiting campaign.

#5 Get the Right Tools

Getting the right set of recruitment support tools will exponentially boost your productivity. As you beat the manual hassle and focus on critical human-centric tasks, the quality of hire will surely improve. 

From contact finding tools like SignalHire to ATS integration using Recruitee and email engagement campaigns using Lemlist, NurtureBox has everything you will need for outbound sourcing and recruiting accessible through a single window. 

Summary

Traditional inbound recruiting methods are no more as effective as they used to be. While the demand for quality candidates is huge, outbound recruitment is impeccably growing. And there is no reason why it should not. Improved ROI, faster hires and most importantly - high-quality recruitment has been made possible through outbound recruiting. To cut down your manual efforts in managing talent pool and sourcing by around half, NurtureBox is a comprehensive solution that you’ll need. With integrated ATS management, email engagement sequences and automated outreach – our sourcing automation tool helps you hire top talent at scale.

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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..

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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?
  • 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.

  • 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.

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