August 10, 2022
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
