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The Role of CRM in Building a Strong Employer Brand Reputation

August 25, 2023

Employer branding - co rozumieć pod tym pojęciem? - Master HR

Employer branding refers to the perception and reputation that a company holds as an employer. It encompasses the company's values, culture, work environment, and opportunities for professional growth. A well-defined employer brand not only attracts top talent but also retains and motivates existing employees.

Understanding CRM and its role in employer branding

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a system that companies use to manage their interactions with current and potential customers. It helps businesses streamline their sales, marketing, and customer service processes. However, CRM is not limited to customer interactions alone. It can also play a vital role in employer branding.

By utilizing CRM in the context of employer branding, companies can effectively manage their relationships with employees and candidates. CRM provides a centralized database where companies can store information about potential candidates, current employees, and alumni. This enables the company to have a holistic view of its talent pool and tailor its employer branding efforts accordingly.

The benefits of a strong employer brand reputation

A strong employer brand reputation offers numerous benefits to companies. Firstly, it helps attract top talent. In today's job market, candidates have the luxury of choice, and they prefer to work for companies that have a positive employer brand image. A strong presence in the market as an employer of choice increases the likelihood of attracting high-caliber candidates.

How to build a strong employer brand?

Secondly, a strong employer brand reputation enhances employee retention. When employees are proud to be associated with a company, they are more likely to stay loyal and committed. This reduces turnover rates and saves the company from the costs associated with recruitment and onboarding.

Lastly, a strong employer brand reputation improves the company's overall image and brand perception. Customers and clients are more likely to trust and engage with a company that has a positive employer brand reputation. This can lead to increased business opportunities and partnerships.

Leveraging CRM in succession planning for employer branding

Succession planning refers to the process of identifying and developing potential future leaders within a company. It is essential for companies to have a strong pipeline of talent to ensure business continuity. By leveraging CRM in succession planning, companies can identify high-potential employees and provide them with the necessary training and development opportunities.

CRM allows companies to track the performance, skills, and aspirations of employees. This information can be used to identify individuals who have the potential to take on leadership roles in the future. By investing in their development, companies can create a strong employer brand reputation as a place where employees can grow and advance their careers.

Utilizing CRM in employer reputation management

Managing employer reputation is crucial for attracting and retaining top talent. CRM can be a valuable tool in this regard. By using CRM, companies can actively engage with employees and candidates, ensuring that their experiences are positive and aligned with the company's values and culture.

CRM enables companies to personalize their interactions with employees and candidates. It allows for targeted communication, ensuring that individuals receive the right messages at the right time. This personalized approach helps build trust and fosters a positive employer brand reputation.

Furthermore, CRM can help companies collect feedback from employees and candidates. This feedback can be used to identify areas for improvement and address any issues before they become detrimental to the employer brand reputation.

The impact of CRM on employer brand perception

CRM plays a significant role in shaping employer brand perception. By effectively utilizing CRM, companies can create a positive and consistent employer brand image. CRM provides companies with the tools to communicate their values, culture, and opportunities for growth effectively.

Consistency is key in employer branding. CRM enables companies to ensure that their employer brand messaging is consistent across different channels and touchpoints. This consistency helps build trust and reinforces the company's employer brand reputation.

Moreover, CRM allows companies to track and analyze the impact of their employer branding efforts. It provides valuable insights into what is working and what needs improvement. This data-driven approach enables companies to make informed decisions and continuously enhance their employer brand perception.

Strategies for building a stellar employer brand reputation using CRM

To build a stellar employer brand reputation using CRM, companies can employ several strategies. Firstly, companies need to define their employer brand values and messaging. CRM can help companies articulate and communicate these values effectively.

Secondly, companies should leverage CRM to personalize their interactions with employees and candidates. Personalization helps create a sense of belonging and demonstrates that the company values its people.

Additionally, companies can use CRM to actively engage with employees and candidates. Regular communication, feedback collection, and recognition programs can go a long way in enhancing the employer brand reputation.

Lastly, companies should leverage the power of storytelling. CRM can help companies collect and share success stories of employees who have benefited from the company's growth opportunities. These stories serve as powerful testimonials and further enhance the employer brand reputation.

Case studies: Successful implementation of CRM in employer branding

Several companies have successfully implemented CRM in their employer branding efforts. One such example is Netflix, a streaming giant. Netflix leveraged CRM to streamline its recruitment process and provide a personalized candidate experience. By utilizing CRM, they were able to track candidate interactions, preferences, and feedback, leading to an improved employer brand perception and increased candidate satisfaction.

Netflix Logo and symbol, meaning, history, PNG, brand

The team’s success can be attributed to the following key factors:

  • They prioritize cultural fit, seeking individuals who align with Netflix’s unique and forward-thinking work environment.
  • They leverage data-driven approaches to identify candidates with exceptional skills and potential.
  • The team maintains strong relationships with external networks, fostering connections and sourcing talent globally.
  • They employ a rigorous and thorough evaluation process to ensure the right fit.

Tools and technologies for CRM in employer branding

There are several tools and technologies available to support the implementation of CRM in employer branding. Customer Relationship Management software, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM, provide comprehensive solutions for managing employee and candidate relationships.

Additionally, social media platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor can be integrated with CRM systems to track and analyze employer brand perception. These platforms provide valuable insights into how employees and candidates perceive the company and can help guide employer branding strategies.

Conclusion: The future of CRM in employer branding

As the competition for top talent intensifies, companies need to invest in building a strong employer brand reputation. CRM plays a pivotal role in this endeavor. By utilizing CRM effectively, companies can attract, retain, and engage top talent, while also enhancing their overall brand perception.

The future of CRM in employer branding is promising. Advancements in technology will continue to provide companies with more sophisticated tools for managing employee and candidate relationships. From artificial intelligence-powered chatbots to predictive analytics, CRM will enable companies to create personalized and impactful employer branding experiences.

In conclusion, building a stellar employer brand reputation requires a strategic approach and the right tools. CRM is a powerful tool that can help companies establish and maintain a positive employer brand reputation in today's competitive market.

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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