The Power of Candidate Communication in Employer Crisis Management
August 25, 2023
In today's fast-paced business environment, effective candidate communication is crucial for successful employer crisis management. The way employers communicate with their candidates during times of crisis can significantly impact the overall employer brand, candidate engagement, and ultimately, the company's reputation. In this article, we will explore the importance of candidate communication in employer crisis management and discuss strategies, platforms, and best practices to build candidate engagement and nurture relationships during challenging times. By leveraging technology and implementing effective communication strategies, employers can navigate crises successfully and maintain a positive employer brand.
The Importance of Candidate Communication in Employer Crisis Management
In times of crisis, maintaining open lines of communication with candidates is more crucial than ever. Candidates are not only interested in their own job prospects but also in the overall stability and future of the company they are considering. By proactively communicating with candidates, employers can address any concerns or uncertainties, providing reassurance and maintaining trust. Moreover, effective candidate communication during a crisis demonstrates transparency and empathy, which are highly valued qualities in any organization.
To effectively manage candidate communication during a crisis, employers should prioritize timely and accurate updates. Providing regular updates on the situation, the company's response, and any potential impact on candidates can help alleviate anxiety and ensure candidates feel informed and supported. Employers should also be prepared to answer questions and address concerns promptly, either through direct communication channels or by providing a dedicated FAQ section on their website or candidate portal.
“Knowing your values gives you a beacon, or a lamppost, that can inform how you’re going to prioritize your actions.”- David F. Demarest
Understanding Candidate Communication Strategies
To develop effective candidate communication strategies, employers must first understand their target audience. Candidates have different communication preferences and respond differently to various types of messaging. Some candidates may prefer email updates, while others may prefer phone calls or even instant messaging platforms. Employers should gather data on candidate preferences and tailor their communication strategies accordingly.
It is also essential to consider the tone and content of the messages. During a crisis, candidates may be experiencing heightened stress and anxiety. Employers should strike a balance between providing necessary information and maintaining a supportive and empathetic tone. Personalization is key, as candidates are more likely to engage with messages that feel relevant and tailored to their specific needs and concerns.
Candidate Communication Platforms for Effective Crisis Management
Additionally, instant messaging platforms, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, can provide real-time communication and enable employers to address urgent concerns swiftly. These platforms also offer the opportunity for candidates to engage in group discussions, fostering a sense of community and collaboration. Social media platforms can also play a role in candidate communication during a crisis. Employers can use platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter to share updates, address concerns publicly, and showcase their crisis management efforts.
Building Candidate Engagement Through Communication
Effective candidate communication is not only about providing updates and addressing concerns but also about building and nurturing candidate engagement. Employers should go beyond transactional communication and aim to develop meaningful relationships with candidates. By engaging candidates throughout the crisis, employers can demonstrate their commitment to their workforce, build trust, and create a positive employer brand.
One way to build candidate engagement is by sharing relevant and valuable content. Employers can create blog posts, videos, or webinars that address common concerns or provide insights into the crisis management process. This content should be easily accessible and shareable, allowing candidates to stay informed and share the information with their networks. Employers can also consider hosting virtual events or Q&A sessions where candidates can interact directly with company representatives and gain further clarity on the crisis situation.
Best Practices for Candidate Nurturing in Times of Crisis
During times of crisis, it is essential to prioritize candidate nurturing and maintain positive relationships with candidates. Employers should focus on providing ongoing support and demonstrating empathy towards candidates' concerns. Regular check-ins, either through email or phone calls, can help candidates feel valued and reassured. Employers should also encourage two-way communication, allowing candidates to share their thoughts, concerns, and suggestions.
Moreover, employers should consider the long-term impact of candidate nurturing during a crisis. Candidates who feel supported and valued during challenging times are more likely to develop a strong affinity towards the company. Even if immediate job opportunities are not available, these candidates may become brand advocates or potential future hires. Therefore, employers should view candidate nurturing as an investment in the company's future success.
Additionally, employers can utilize applicant tracking systems (ATS) to manage candidate communication more efficiently. ATS platforms often offer features such as automated email templates, candidate segmentation, and real-time messaging, allowing employers to communicate with candidates seamlessly and track their engagement. These platforms can also help employers gather valuable data on candidate preferences and behaviors, enabling continuous improvement of communication strategies.
Case Studies: Successful Candidate Communication Strategies in Crisis Management
To gain insights into effective candidate communication strategies during crises, let's explore a few case studies.
Cracker Barrel:
Issue: You never know what the internet is going to find and amplify, but for Cracker Barrel, it was Brad’s wife. In February 2017, Bradley Reid posted on Cracker Barrel’s corporate website asking why his wife Nanette had been fired from the retail-manager job she’d held in an Indiana Cracker Barrel for 11 years.
Solution: The restaurant’s crisis management was, apparently, not to treat this like a crisis. They kept quiet on the issue, never publicly addressing the movement or Brad’s wife. While you’ll still find a few #NotMyCountryStore hashtags littering Cracker Barrel’s social media channels, the firestorm has mostly passed. And the crisis didn’t appear to have any negative effects on the brand’s financial performance.
Pepsi:
Issue: The joys of flying under the radar have probably never seemed so blissful and sweet to Pepsi execs. In April 2017, Pepsi kicked off a new ad campaign with a commercial starring Kendall Jenner. Over the next 48 hours, the “short film” received nearly 1.6 million views on YouTube.
Solution: The brand released an statement in defense of the campaign saying, “This is a global ad that reflects people from different walks of life coming together in a spirit of harmony, and we think that’s an important message to convey.”
However, overnight, Pepsi pulled the ad and paused the campaign entirely. A second statement followed: “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace, and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark, and we apologize.”
The response was heralded for its speed and straight-forward nature, but many predicted it would take a while for the brand to recover from this “worst ad ever.” Now, in 2022, it seems that Kendall Jenner will never escape the backlash surrounding the incident, leaving Pepsi to continue on successfully post-crisis.
Tools and Resources for Implementing Candidate Communication Strategies
Implementing effective candidate communication strategies during a crisis requires the right tools and resources. Employers can leverage various technologies and platforms to streamline communication processes and ensure consistent messaging. Email marketing tools, such as Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor, offer features like automated email sequences and personalized templates, making it easier to communicate with candidates at scale.
Applicant tracking systems, such as Workable or Greenhouse, provide a centralized platform to manage candidate communication and track engagement. These platforms often integrate with other tools like email marketing platforms, enabling seamless communication workflows. Moreover, crisis management resources, such as communication templates, crisis response plans, and best practice guides, can help employers navigate challenging situations and ensure effective candidate communication.
The Role of HR in Candidate Communication During Times of Crisis
Human resources (HR) plays a crucial role in candidate communication during times of crisis. HR professionals are responsible for crafting and delivering effective messages, ensuring timely updates, and addressing candidate concerns. They should collaborate closely with other departments, such as marketing and PR, to ensure consistent messaging across all communication channels.
HR should also act as a liaison between candidates and company leadership, providing insights into candidate concerns and feedback. By actively listening to candidates' needs and relaying them to decision-makers, HR professionals can influence the development of crisis management strategies and improve overall candidate experience. Additionally, HR should continuously evaluate and improve candidate communication processes, leveraging data and analytics to measure the effectiveness of strategies and make necessary adjustments.
Conclusion: The Impact of Effective Candidate Communication on Employer Crisis Management
In conclusion, effective candidate communication is a key factor in successful employer crisis management. By prioritizing timely updates, understanding candidate preferences, and leveraging technology, employers can build trust, maintain candidate engagement, and protect their employer brand during challenging times. Nurturing candidate relationships and providing ongoing support demonstrates empathy and can lead to long-term benefits for the company. HR professionals play a crucial role in crafting and delivering effective messages, ensuring consistent communication, and bridging the gap between candidates and company leadership. By implementing best practices and utilizing the right tools, employers can navigate crises with confidence and emerge stronger, with a positive employer brand intact.
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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