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Top 5 Sourcing Automation Tools You Need To Find Candidates Effectively

October 27, 2022

Are you tired of sifting through low-quality candidates or struggling to keep up with the constant resumes? 

If you said yes, it might be time to adopt a new technology that can take over these tasks. Utilizing one of the best candidate sourcing tools will save you time and stress! Now is the time to free up your schedule and hire more people with less effort.

But not all candidate sourcing tools are a good fit for your business. As there are so many options in the market, some fall short on features and have poor candidate engagement or leave a bad taste in your mouth with their sourcing processes.

That's why we have put together this list of the best candidate sourcing tools to help you find great candidates. With these on your side, you can find better candidates quickly!

Let's analyze! 

Why should you opt for a sourcing automation tool?

The number of applications a company receives for countable openings is increasing daily, placing added pressure on talent acquisition decision-makers to make quick hires. In fact, about 250 people apply for a single job on average. 

In this scenario, scanning every application, you receive on your table is impossible. This is where the role of an automation tool comes in. A sourcing automation tool takes clumsy work off your plate by streamlining the candidate search process by sifting through profiles and matching them with job listings.

Even though candidates and human resources professionals desire more personal interaction during interviews, recruiting automation can improve those interactions by allowing recruiters to find better talent and hone their candidate engagement skills.

This boosts the quality of the talent pool and helps companies find the right fit more quickly. With the right tools, they can focus on higher-level tasks such as managing a large candidate pool and improving the overall candidate experience.

Best ideas to leverage the automation power for candidate sourcing 

As recruiters are juggling multiple applications for multiple job openings, getting sufficient talents in a short span is not feasible while maintaining candidate engagement. But when you have the support of AI automation for sourcing candidates, the scenario is entirely different. 

Through AI-powered sourcing, talent teams can build broader and more diverse talent pools in less time by identifying candidates with the right skills for each role.

The following approaches help you streamline your sourcing efforts by leveraging automation and artificial intelligence. It lets you keep track of candidates by storing resumes, references, and performance ratings with each profile

1. Automated talent search 

When it comes to candidate searching, you have to babysit and select candidates based on their skills and experience. Then, be it on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, you have to use advanced search filters to narrow the audience and collect their information manually. 

But, automated sourcing makes it easy to find qualified candidates with specific skills and experience because you can search for them at scale. The data from candidate profiles are ingested into your CRM so that when hiring needs to arise—you’ve already got a pool of talent ready to go!

2. Streamline everything without hassles 

Automation helps you export all the sourced candidates to your integrated ATS with verified contact details and complete information about their professional backgrounds. Moreover, it enables you to filter the best talent by matching the skills of the selected candidates with the job descriptions. 

Automation enables you to save a lot of time by eliminating the need to enter candidate information into your ATS manually. You can also minimize the chances of human error by automating the data collection, verification, and validation process.

3. Boost candidate engagement

Keeping your candidate engaged through multiple touch points during the hiring process will help you attract the best talent for your openings. In fact, about 80–90% of candidates say a positive or negative candidate experience can change their minds about a job or company. With automation, you can automate the workflows and send auto-personalized emails/messages on multiple platforms. 

You can use automated text campaigns to nurture passive candidates and keep their interest in the job alive. Automated communications can engage passive candidates and move them towards conversion with minimal effort on your part.

4. Analyze and refine the process with the analytics 

If you are unsure how your efforts are measuring up, then use analytics to find out what works and doesn't. This will help you make necessary changes to your process and measure the impact of those changes on your results.

5. Collaborate in a hassle-free way 

Tools are essential in a collaborative hiring strategy to allow your teams to work together.

With tools like Nurturebox, automation can help you keep track of candidate profiles and activity within your ATS—so you never get confused about the hiring status, candidate feedback, or repeated outreach to those who might already be contacted.

Five best sourcing automation tools that you should consider

If you want to increase your sourcing efficiency, there are a number of tools that can help. Automation can be the key to making your sourcing process easier and more efficient. If you’re looking for some automated tools that will help streamline your sourcing efforts, here are five options worth considering:

1. Nurturebox 

Nurturebox helps you automate and scale your candidate outreach efforts to attract the best talent for your business.

NurtureBox works seamlessly with your existing tools to automate candidate engagement, personalize experiences and give you the analytics needed to optimize results. On top of that, it contacts candidates with a multi-touch, multi-channel sequence of emails, calls, text messages, and LinkedIn or WhatsApp updates to engage them on the channels they are most likely to use.

This outreach helps you boost your candidate engagement and conversion rates. With NurtureBox, you can easily create a personalized experience for each candidate and analyze them in real-time. You can also track all candidate interactions through the platform’s easy-to-use dashboard and access your real-time data.

A single click lets you see each candidate's position in the recruitment process. It also helps you manage the hiring process with an easy-to-use interface that includes customizable email templates and automated messaging options.

Features of Nurturebox

  • Bulk import candidate contact details: Simply add the extension to your browser and extract all relevant data. This allows you to find, filter quickly, and fill in candidates before sending them off for screening.
  • You can also easily connect your existing ATS to Nurturebox, so that pipeline management becomes fully automated.
  • Access to hundreds of potential job seekers through LinkedIn, Naukri, and talent pools on your ATS.
  • Nurturebox enables you to engage with candidates over multiple channels, including email and Whatsapp, to boost candidate engagement. 
  • Monitor the status of each candidate you engage, identify candidates that are a good fit for your company or job opening and stay on top of engagement metrics.
  • Reach out to top candidates, get responses faster and streamline your recruiting processes with verified contact information, personalization of content, and automation of your drip campaign.
  • Track your outreach efforts; see what's working best with the candidates you're targeting, and access analytics on all engagement touchpoints.

Pros 

  • Availability of automated imports from LinkedIn search. 
  • Availability of multichannel engagement with automated follow-ups. 
  • A unified dashboard keeps track of the candidate’s status and engagement rates with your messages. 
  • Direct export data from LinkedIn search directly to your ATS. 
  • It lets you keep an eye on every candidate with the help of an activity log. 
  • Automatically sync candidate profiles and activity to your ATS and outreach platform so that you don't have duplicate data.
  • Comes with a free forever plan. 
  • Pulls all the information about the candidate and stores it on your ATS with their LinkedIn resume.

Cons 

  • Works only with a few ATS software. 

2. SeekOut 

SeekOut is a talent intelligence platform where modern recruiters can quickly find and engage with qualified candidates.

With the support of AI-powered search technology, recruiters can tap into fully vetted talent pools of millions of global profiles, find skilled candidates with unprecedented speed and precision—and engage them instantly. In addition, it boosts the way you perform searches by utilizing advanced AI/ML techniques and helps you efficiently use custom boolean searches and custom filters. 

Through the availability of automated drip campaigns, you can actively engage with qualified candidates with verified contact information to get better candidate engagement. It also can deeply analyze talent pools and aid in developing informed decisions. 

Features of SeekOut 

  • Access to millions of candidates from multiple platforms. 
  • It lets you create diverse talent pools with advanced search capabilities. 
  • It lets you fill your open positions fast with the talent rediscovery feature that enables you to mine your talent pool.  
  • It lets you personalize your messages with the power of AI that boosts your candidate engagement rates. 

Pros 

  • Intelligent search capabilities. 
  • Personalized AI messages to boost candidate engagement. 
  • Automated drip campaigns with personalization. 

Cons 

  • Throws incorrect contact information. 
  • It won’t let users upload candidate information directly to a campaign from the search page. 
  • You may find it challenging to automate follow-ups. 

3. SmartRecruiters 

SmartRecruiters’ Talent Acquisition Suite is a modern recruitment platform that helps companies find, attract and hire great candidates.

SmartRecruiters improves upon older applicant tracking systems by providing an application that hiring managers find easy to use. In addition, the software offers features for candidate management, including sourcing and outreach, applicant tracking; resourcing; reporting on positions filled and time to fill.

Features of SmartRecruiters 

  • One-click job posting feature lets you spread the word about your openings across 300+ job boards.
  • You can use forms and micro-sites to capture leads, advertise on sources that reach many candidates, or funnel candidates directly from a career site.
  • With the help of AI, you can identify the best candidates from a broad pool of applicants.
  • It lets you create and implement recruiting strategies that engage passive and active candidates through various channels and helps you keep your candidate engagement straight throughout the recruitment process.
  • It has the availability of CRM that lets you manage a large pool of qualified candidates to get talents at your fingertips when you have to hire someone immediately. 

Pros 

  • In contrast to different ATS stages, it is easy to plan interviews.
  • A collaborative candidate management tool that allows the team to work in sync and streamline hiring.
  • It lets you keep track of candidates by storing resumes, references and performance ratings with each profile.

Cons 

  • The software does not always accurately populate your profile with information from the resume.
  • You may find difficulties while integrating with other ATS systems. 

4. Gem 

Gem is a Talent Engagement Platform that allows recruiters to be more effective, make better hiring decisions, establish better candidate engagement, and build diverse pipelines of potential candidates.

Moreover, it provides a single source of truth for all talent relationships, bringing together data and context from email inboxes, applicant tracking systems and social networks. By leveraging data to understand the entire recruiting process and preparing for what's coming, talent acquisition teams can be more proactive in their planning.

Features of Gem 

Gem can search for potential employees on LinkedIn, Facebook and GitHub, as well as in Greenhouse.

  • Talent compass helps recruiting teams uncover operational insights, benchmark performance, and improve hiring outcomes.
  • Gem's InMail feature allows you to send emails directly from the platform—and track their progress. The program also offers automation tools for creating email follow-up sequences based on user information.
  • CRM lets you collect, organize and analyze all your data in one place. This gives everyone a complete picture of what’s happening with candidates—and eliminates the risk that important information gets lost along the way.
  • You can use analytics to measure how much each sourcing, event, and campus recruiting initiative contributes to acquiring new talent pools.

Pros 

  • Easy to use interface for creating automated drip campaigns. 
  • The workflow for turning a project into an automated sequence is straightforward to set up.
  • Accurate analytics helps the TA team to stay on top of their progress. 

Cons

  • You cannot search a sequence by name, and you cannot archive leads that are not interested.
  • It integrates with selective ATS. 

5. Phantombuster 

Phantombuster automates your sales and marketing processes so that you can focus on building relationships with candidates instead of spending all day doing repetitive tasks. It’s an AI-powered sales assistant that finds qualified candidates for your open jobs, sends them personalized messages, and schedules interviews with them.

Moreover, it helps you build advanced workflows without struggling with writing complex codes to establish candidate engagement. 

Features of Phantombuster 

  • Harvest your prospects' contact information, including names and email addresses.
  • You can use the collected data to engage with candidates through social media or other communication channels.
  • More than 100 ready-made automation to help you reach your business goals. Import data seamlessly into any CRM tool.
  • You can source candidates and export them into a simple spreadsheet.
  • It lets you gather your analytics to improve the process.

Pros 

  • Easy to set up and use with tons of workflows. 
  • Extracted data are accurate and help you to engage with candidates under one roof. 
  • It comes with multiple precautions to save your social accounts from getting banned. 

Cons

  • The automation feature has limits, and you must upgrade to multiple features. 
  • There is a lack of flow information in some of the new phantoms.
  • Expensive option. 

Choosing the best sourcing automation tool 

Now that you have the five best options. It’s time to select the best tool that fits your needs.  If candidate sourcing is the main objective, use a tool dedicated to it while taking advantage of other options for enhancing candidate engagement.

To move forward, answer the simple questions, 

  • Do you want a tool that helps you source candidates from social platforms like LinkedIn?
  • Do you want features like automated email follow-ups for candidate engagement without sacrificing personalization?
  • Do you want a tool that seamlessly integrates with top ATS and fetches accurate candidate information?
  • Do you want to have a tool that allows you to keep track of everything that’s happening with every single candidate? 

If you answer yes, you have a couple of tools with all the mentioned features. But when you weigh down the pros and cons of each tool, Nurturebox is the best performer. 

Armed with many features, it eases the candidate sourcing process while keeping the candidate engagement rigid. It also has a browser extension that handles everything without leaving the candidate searching page. With a few clicks, you can create multiple campaigns for different job openings and export candidates to separate campaigns to streamline the sourcing process. 

Want to see Nurturebox in action? Get started with a free forever plan or schedule a demo and let us handle things for you! 

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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