August 10, 2022
You want to hire better talent and hire them fast. To ensure you don’t leave any stones unturned, you spend considerable time understanding ideal candidate personas, preparing strategies for sourcing relevant candidates, adding them to your pipeline and engaging with them. After weeks of continuous sourcing and connecting with candidates, you hardly recruit a few and are now exhausted. Talent sourcing is not the same as it used to be five years ago. It’s time-taking and quality candidates are hard to hire due to competition – the way to optimize it is by taking assistance from talent sourcing tools and streamlining the process to generate maximum ROI.
Sourcing candidates is the top priority for over 68% of organizations today. Why? It’s inevitable in today’s talent-centric market where over 90% of employed people are interested in new opportunities but only 36% of them are active job seekers.
The road to redemption is clear. If you want to hire the best people, you need not do hours of hands-on work but shift your focus on the analytical part which is identifying and evaluating people. And numerous recruiters are successfully hiring better talent than ever through this strategy!
A talent sourcing tool helps recruiters and hiring managers to find, connect and engage with talent with the help of automation. It’s a great addition for teams looking to scale up their sourcing capabilities. So, regardless of your company size or industry, talent sourcing tools could immensely help you to reach new talent pools and hire relevant candidates efficiently.
More than 90% of recruiters reported at the time of survey that they’re hiring for new roles. Hence, sourcing and hiring never really stop for recruitment teams.
Let’s now find out what are the benefits of a talent sourcing tool and why you really need it.
The foremost priority of any organization is to acquire great talent. A talent sourcing tool helps you expand your reach as you can discover and connect with 10x more candidates within the same timeframe.
Talent sourcing tools need no manual intervention when it comes to managing the candidate pipeline. As a result, recruitment teams can find more diverse talent pools and ensure quality hires.
It takes 36 business days for companies to hire a new employee. Sounds too much, right? Automating the candidate sourcing and talent management with a sourcing tool will ensure you cut down the time to hire and hence, the cost to hire too.
The average per hire in the U.S. is $4425. Add up to that the human capital cost in case of latency and inability to find relevant candidates. Talent sourcing tools majorly solve this problem by taking care of all the mundane tasks, so recruiters just need to evaluate and hire.
One of the vital things for hiring efficiently and fast is to have pre-filled talent pipelines with quality candidates. It becomes a lot easier if you maintain a sourced candidates database. Whenever requirements arise for any role, having qualified candidates in the pipeline would ensure you don’t rush and choose the best possible candidate.
Talent sourcing tools help you fill the talent pipeline a lot faster and you can always keep looking for candidates and add them to your pipeline with a single click
Apart from hiring the best talent, passive sourcing also gives a chance to improve your workforce diversity. How? As you are in control of outreaching talent pools at scale – the complete flexibility allows you to make decisions based on diversity.
A talent sourcing tool is specially made for maximising passive candidate sourcing. A large chunk of available talent comprises passive opportunity seekers and hence recruiters can make the best out of it.
We discussed how crucial talent sourcing tools are for efficient and proactive sourcing of candidates. But how do these tools work? What are the features that make them powerful and reliable? Let’s find out.
The first step of sourcing is to get your target prospect’s contact details. So a talent sourcing tool should be able to extract contact details of your prospects from multiple platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and job sites with established candidate profiles.
Users must be allowed to add the contact details to their database and engagement campaigns directly with a single click.
The next core feature is the availability of integrating your ATS with the talent sourcing tool. An Application Tracking System (ATS) is basically a top-level view of your recruitment pipeline. Each time you find a qualified candidate who is also interested in the opportunity, you can add them to your ATS.
This feature helps you keep track of all candidates and access the status of hiring for each of them.
As a recruiter, reaching out to hundreds of candidates individually can be a hefty task. And then engaging and nurturing them continuously – it’s just not possible manually. A talent sourcing tool should solve this through automated outreach and engagement features.
As the aim of reaching out to talented candidates is to get a response, you should not compromise personalization. An ideal talent sourcing tool will enable personalized outreach at scale through multiple channels like LinkedIn, emails, WhatsApp and others.
To make sure you get better with time in your sourcing campaigns, it’s important to monitor and analyze your performance insights. It can be questions like – how much time did it take to hire for different roles, which candidates didn’t respond, which ones did instantly and all the other performance indicators that help you improve your sourcing process.
Given the dynamics of talent sourcing, tracking the KPIs would also help you identify the most productive channels, methods and outreach practices.
Hiring the right talent is only getting trickier with time. But as with every other industry, adaptivity is the key to sustainability in the recruitment space too. Talent sourcing is one of the primary strategies when it comes to recruitment. However, recruiters and organizations have very limited time and talent sourcing tools help are solving this by automating mundane hands-on tasks of recruiters.
NurtureBox is a comprehensive talent sourcing tool that helps you identify, connect and engage candidates at scale. The tool allows you to add prospects to your ATS, create and launch email campaigns, engage with candidates on WhatsApp and track your sourcing performance conveniently. Our sourcing automation solution ensures a seamless experience for recruiters as well as ensures candidates are in continuous touch with the organization.
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:
