March 15, 2023
Amidst today’s fast-paced and competitive landscape, you cannot wait for candidates to apply for your open roles. In fact, a majority of the global workforce consists of passive talent - around 70%, hence it is not the right approach to start sourcing only when you have requirements. Recruitment has transformed at full-scale over the last decade. Your organization needs to be prepared to hire candidates in no time, the attrition rates are at an all-time high.
On the other hand, top talent doesn't wait for anyone. It’s a candidate-centric world and recruiters are chasing quality talent harder than ever. Sourcing passive candidates is not a ‘nice-to-have’ strategy anymore, it’s being rigorously worked on and is already a mainstream talent sourcing approach for a large number of enterprises.
While identifying and reaching out to candidates in order to draw them to your recruitment pipeline is a tedious process, most recruiters do not have enough time to start from scratch every time they need to hire someone. Building your talent pipeline can help you solve this, it helps your recruitment team and overall organization to move faster with a lasting impact.
A solid talent pipeline will not only help you accelerate your hiring but also significantly improve the quality of candidates. The talent that you acquire drives your organization’s trajectory and can make or break your growth. So it’s vital to understand how to build a talent pipeline that your organization can rely on. In this blog, we will discuss the exact steps you need to build a strong sourcing pipeline, and how you can leverage automation to up your game. Stick around for some deep actionable insights.
Before we dive into the steps required to build a talent pipeline, let’s first find out what exactly it refers to.
A talent pipeline, at its core, is a collection of pre-screened and qualified candidates who can potentially fill your organization’s open roles. Also, don’t forget – your talent pool should only consist of candidates who are willing to join your organization. The objective here is to hire quickly and easily whenever requirements arise. Having a talent pool full of competent candidates gives recruiters a great variety of choices while hiring for a role. With multiple rounds of screening, hiring teams can also find out if talent is compatible enough with their team culture.
Talent pipelines usually consist of two types of candidates:
A large part of your recruitment team’s efforts and focus should revolve around external candidates, because at the end of the day – your organization is growing. So adding up to the headcount is more important than anything else.
Building a talent pipeline filled with qualified and skilled candidates has multi-dimensional benefits for your organization. Whether it’s the stakeholders, hiring managers or recruiters – an established talent pool gives the comfort and convenience of effortless hiring. Additionally, as you source proactively and not just rely on job applications – getting high-quality talent is assured. This stat just confirms that – 1 in every 72 Sourced candidates is hired compared to every 1 in 152 candidates who apply to open positions.
Let’s find out the most impactful benefits of building a talent pipeline and see how they are transforming the face of recruitment.
Consider the case when you don’t have a talent pool ready and hiring requirements come about. If you don’t have a sourced pool of candidates, it might take you a few days or even weeks to get some candidates to the top of your recruitment funnel. No matter whether you are sourcing actively or passively – creating a talent sourcing strategy, screening sourced candidates and recruiting them is a lengthy journey. However, building a talent pool with passively sourced, qualified and screened candidates saves a plethora of time for recruiters and enables them to hire whenever there’s a need. As building a talent pipeline is a continuous process and it does not stop even when there are no open roles, recruiters don’t need to panic.
Costs related to recruitment are significantly reduced through building a talent pipeline and sourcing candidates passively as a matter of course. You primarily cut down job advertising expenses and utilize your recruitment team optimally for evaluating and engaging candidates, which further impacts the overall costs as well as productivity.
A large number of candidates who you meet, identify on social media or the ones referred to you by someone trustworthy – are usually not seeking a job currently. But what if you have a tempting offer for them in the future? Building a relationship with candidates is the key to successful passive recruiting and having an established talent pipeline helps you in that. Effectively engaging and nurturing candidates in a consistent manner is fruitful in the long run as it builds trust and persuades top talent to work with your company.
Quality candidates do not apply to open positions nowadays, as they are already being reached out to by numerous recruiters. One thing that all candidates seek no matter what is a prolific candidate experience and that is led by building a talent pool. Unlike in cases of application-based hiring, candidates in the sourcing pipeline are constantly engaged, informed and nurtured by recruiters/organizations. Additionally, being informed throughout the application process reduces candidate drop-offs significantly.
Let’s break down the various stages of a talent pipeline:
Building an effective talent pipeline is not a destination, but a journey. As you move forward, learn and grow – your talent pipeline will be easier to optimize along the way. However, chasing perfection, in the beginning, might halt your growth. Here are the steps that you need to follow for establishing an efficient talent pipeline.
Before you start building your talent pipeline, discuss and analyze your organization’s existing skill gaps, current talent needs, upcoming open positions and the major changes in business strategy that might directly impact your recruitment plans.
Connect with talent executives, department heads, company leaders and other stakeholders to collect information and perform a thorough analysis of -
As a recruiter, you must plan for all the possibilities beforehand when creating your talent pipeline. It will further help you tweak the hiring strategy the right way and generate better results in terms of talent acquisition. How? By mapping the current requirements with the kind of talent to be sourced and keeping a check on the anticipated changes in the future.
The next step is to plan your sourcing. Gone are the times when advertising all the different types of job roles on the same platforms was enough. With the competition rising every other moment, having just a couple of sources for acquiring talent won’t work. You need to have a solid plan that covers almost all the possible platforms for sourcing quality talent. Further, each platform has its own different formats and approaches that help in getting optimal results.
Your talent sourcing strategy comprehensively defines the various methods of sourcing you are going to follow, the priority order for each job role, job-specific resources and the ideal approach for each. Some of the most popular methods of sourcing candidates:
Once you identify and screen candidate profiles, you can reach out to them via LinkedIn, emails or other channels they are usually active on. Remember to not follow a straight selling approach, but try to build genuine connections with your target candidates. For accomplishing this, you can engage with their content online, and talk about their career goals. Exchange opinions and discuss things they’re passionate about.
Lead the conversations to understand the candidate’s expectations and check if they are open to new opportunities. Follow a typical community approach rather than pitching them with lengthy job descriptions.
Reaching out to hundreds of candidates can be too overwhelming for you as a recruiter. But as your organization grows and requirements scale up, it’s necessary. How do you cope with it? Using a sourcing automation tool is the optimal way through to scale up your passive sourcing campaigns seamlessly (more on this later).
Once candidates are sourced after pre-screening, it’s time to assess them and filter your talent pool based on various job role requirements. Note that this stage is very critical as you analyze if a candidate is a right fit for your company along with being technically suited. Some of the parameters apart from their role-specific skills are:
Although assessing and filtering candidates is largely driven by the department's expectations and core skillset relevant to the job role, recruiters need to double-check check personality traits and general abilities of the candidates.
One of the most important steps in successfully building a talent pipeline is candidate nurturing. Engaging with your candidates and nurturing them acts as a catalyst for your transition from sourcing to recruiting. How? Filling your talent pipeline with quality candidates is one task, but persuading them through value addition to joining your organization is a different challenge. A majority of individuals in your pipeline are passive candidates, who are pretty comfortable with their existing jobs. You need to strengthen the relationship by sharing relevant engaging content regularly.
No doubt nurturing talent in your pipeline is a long-term process. However, it returns compounding results when done in the right way. All recruiters need to do is to stick to it consistently and keep providing value along with reasons for the candidates to join your team.
Analyzing your organization’s talent needs, preparing a strategy, sourcing candidates, and handling outreach as well as engagement manually, can be too hectic and tedious for recruitment teams. Add up to that the continuous management of the talent pipeline – it ultimately harms the productivity of recruiters and hence organizations who look to hire top talent in the shortest time possible and conveniently.
Nurturebox solves this huge problem by enabling recruiters and talent teams to automate candidate outreach, engagement, pipeline management and performance analysis. That’s not all – the tool integrates with your existing technology stack, so you, as a recruiter, do not need to worry about overwhelming configurations. Just download the Nurturebox Chrome extension, sign up and you’re good to go!
Here’s how you can fill your talent sourcing pipeline using Nurturebox plugin within minutes:
Hence your entire talent pipeline is sorted through a single window – all the more remarkable reason to join Nurturebox now!
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:
