Top 8 Outbound Recruiting Trends to Watch Out for in 2023

March 24, 2023

If you’ve been in the recruitment space for quite some time now, you‘ve probably experienced how uncertain the talent industry has become. Hiring teams must deal with exceptional pressure, work long hours, and race against time to fill open roles. Especially during the last five years, talent shortages followed by The Great Resignation, and now the daunting signs of recession have made talent acquisition even more tricky.

With the growing challenges of recruiting, the primary approach toward getting quality candidates is changing. Although recruiters have largely relied on inbound applications for the past few decades, it doesn’t work effectively anymore. An effective outbound recruiting strategy solves a major chunk of recruitment problems.

Like sales, outbound recruiting revolves around proactively reaching out, engaging, and closing candidates. With over 73% of candidates today being passive job seekers, recruiters cannot afford to wait for good applicants.

So the road to redemption is – embracing outbound. It’s a productive, scalable, cost-efficient, and effective approach that helps in hiring quickly and empowers quality talent acquisition.

This blog will discuss why outbound recruitment is booming and the top 8 trends you must know to ride the wave and optimize your recruitment. Let’s get started.

Why is Outbound Recruitment the Key to Acquiring Top Talent Today?

It’s a candidate-driven market landscape, and recruiters need to take control of their hiring. The demand for skilled talent is considerably higher than the supply, and outbound recruitment is the perfect opportunity for hiring teams to target the right candidates and hire fast.

Here are the top reasons why outbound recruitment has become the need of the hour:

Access to Passive Candidates: Outbound recruitment allows you to reach out to passive candidates who may not be actively looking for a job but could be a great fit for your company. These candidates may be open to hearing about new opportunities if approached in a professional and non-intrusive manner.

Personalized Candidate Experience: Like in sales, getting a candidate’s complete attention and interest is only possible through personal touch. Unlike inbound, the outbound approach allows for initiating highly welcoming conversations. As a result, you build good relationships with your potential employees.

Increased Reach: Outbound recruitment tactics such as social media, email campaigns, and targeted advertising enable recruiters to reach a wider audience and increase their chances of attracting top talent. For example, suppose your company is looking for a software engineer with specific experience in a particular language. In that case, you can target ads and LinkedIn posts to individuals with that language listed in their skills section.

By reaching out to passive candidates, increasing reach through various sourcing tactics, and building relationships with potential hires, companies can create a pipeline of top talent for current and future hiring needs. Additionally, outbound recruitment helps companies stand out from their competition by proactively seeking out the best talent rather than simply waiting for resumes.

Top 8 Outbound Recruiting Trends in 2023

#1 Hiring Powered by Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are rapidly shaping how companies approach outbound recruitment today. These technologies automate most manual and time-consuming tasks associated with outbound recruitment, freeing recruiters to focus on more strategic and value-adding activities.

One of the key ways in which AI and ML impact outbound recruitment is through chatbots. Chatbots can be integrated into a company's career website or social media channels, allowing candidates to engage with the company and receive information about open roles 24/7. Interestingly, these intelligent chatbots can also use natural language processing to understand and respond to candidate questions, providing a more personalized and engaging candidate experience.

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Another optimal use case of AI in outbound recruiting is predictive analytics. It can analyze large amounts of data, such as candidate resumes and application information, to identify top candidates and predict which individuals are most likely to be a good fit for a role. Companies can then identify and prioritize the most promising candidates, shorten the recruitment process, and improve the chances of making a successful hire.

Additionally, scheduling interviews and other recruitment-related tasks can also be streamlined using AI. The goal is to reduce the administrative burden on recruiters and improve the overall efficiency of the recruitment process.

Remember, the AI-based performance analysis of your outbound recruitment campaigns provides valuable insights into what is working and what needs to be improved.

#2 Virtual and Hybrid Recruitment

The shift towards remote work has led to an increased usage of virtual recruitment methods, such as virtual interviews, online assessments, and video conferencing. Hybrid recruitment, which combines in-person and virtual elements, is also becoming popular as companies balance the need for personal interaction with the convenience of remote recruitment. According to a survey by FlexJobs, 69% of job seekers would be interested in a hybrid work arrangement, where they could work from home part of the time.

Virtual recruitment has become increasingly popular due to the pandemic, as it allows companies to continue the recruitment process even when in-person interviews are impossible. It also offers candidates greater flexibility, as they can participate in interviews from the comfort of their own homes. Furthermore, virtual recruitment can help companies to reach a wider pool of candidates, as geographical restrictions are no longer a factor.

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On the other hand, hybrid recruitment offers companies the best of both worlds. It allows for a combination of virtual and in-person recruitment methods. This strengthens companies’ relationships with candidates and helps them assess their fit with the company culture through virtual methods while conducting more in-depth interviews and assessments.

#3 Social Media Recruitment

Companies use social media to showcase their company culture and values, attracting top talent who align with their company mission.

92% of recruiters use or plan to use social media for recruitment. By leveraging social media, organizations can reach a large and diverse audience, increase their visibility, and improve their brand reputation.

If you’re wondering about the effectiveness already, job postings shared on social media receive 30% more applicants compared to conventional postings.

Here are the top reasons why you need to consider social media recruitment as an outbound recruitment approach:

Allows companies to showcase their brand and company culture to a wider audience.
Provides an opportunity to engage with potential candidates and post job listings.
Targets specific audiences, such as alumni or current employees.
Reaches passive candidates who may need to actively search for a new job.
Allows hosting virtual events, such as webinars and live Q&A sessions to engage potential candidates further and showcase company culture.
An effective and cost-efficient way to attract top talent.

With the ability to reach a wider pool of candidates, engage with potential hires, and receive higher applicant volumes, social media recruitment is a vital tactic for companies looking to make their recruitment process more effective and efficient.

#4 Personalized Outreach

One aspect that outbound recruitment can only be effective with is personalized outreach. No doubt it was a trend in 2022 too, and is only growing in 2023. Personalized outreach involves tailored and targeted communications with potential candidates. This approach focuses on building relationships with potential candidates and creating a positive candidate experience.

A survey by TalentLyft found that 70% of job seekers say that personalized communication during the recruitment process would increase their interest in a job. It not only helps companies to stand out from the competition but also makes an impactful impression on potential candidates.

To get started with personalized outreach, companies can:

Research the potential candidate's background and interests
Personalize the subject line and message of emails and messages
Address the candidate by name and use specific details about their background and experience
Show that they have taken the time to understand their career goals and aspirations

#5 Employee Referral Programs

Referral programs are a popular and effective way for organizations to source new talent. The idea revolves around incentivizing current employees to refer friends and acquaintances for open positions within the company. This often results in higher quality candidates and saves time and resources typically spent on traditional recruitment methods such as job postings and agency searches.

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Studies show that referred candidates are more likely to stay with the company for longer periods and have higher job performance than those hired through other means. In fact, SHRM reports that referred candidates are 15% more likely to be hired and have a 45% higher retention rate than those sourced through job boards or other recruitment channels.

Moreover, employee referral programs can also improve company culture and employee satisfaction. When employees feel valued and invested in the company's success, they are more likely to refer top-notch candidates who align with the organization's values and goals.

#6 Diversity & Inclusion

If you look at the most emerging trends in outbound and the overall recruitment space, organizations chasing diversity and inclusion stand out. An inclusive workplace not only attracts top talent, but also leads to better business outcomes, such as increased innovation and employee satisfaction. Hence, it’s becoming increasingly popular among recruiters and candidates as a decision-making factor.

In order to evaluate your current diversity and plan your recruitment, here are some questions for you to begin figuring out:

How diverse is your current workforce?
Have you made diversity and inclusion a priority in your recruitment efforts?
How can you ensure a more diverse candidate pool in your recruitment process?

Let’s go through some of the easy and instant ways you can get started with your diversity and inclusion efforts:

Review your job descriptions and ensure they are inclusive and non-discriminatory
Reach out to underrepresented groups and communities
Partner with diversity-focused organizations or recruitment agencies
Consider diverse sources for job advertising and networking
Train your hiring managers on unconscious bias and diversity and inclusion best practices

#7 Programmatic Job Advertising

One of the most optimal and emerging ways for companies to reach targeted audiences with highly personalized and relevant job ads is through programmatic job advertising.

This technology automates the process of buying and displaying job ads, making it easier to reach a large audience and track the performance of recruitment campaigns. Programmatic job advertising can result in a 70% increase in candidate applications and a 50% decrease in cost per hire.

It uses algorithms to automate the placement of job ads across a wide range of online platforms, ensuring maximum exposure to the right audience.

Here’s how it functions:

It evaluates and selects the best online platforms for maximum exposure to the target audience.
Ad placement and targeting are constantly optimized in real-time based on performance data.
This leads to efficient, cost-effective, and targeted job advertising.

#8 Talent Communities

For modern organizations, engaging with potential candidates is not a ‘nice-to-have’ aspect anymore, they need to strategize it even before they have an open job position to fill.

Talent communities provide a way for organizations to build relationships with top talent, keep them updated on company news and opportunities, and have a pool of qualified candidates ready to apply when a suitable position becomes available.

Take a look at some of the biggest brands successfully leveraging talent communities:

Airbnb has built a strong talent community of travel enthusiasts and hospitality professionals passionate about the company's mission. They engage with this community regularly through events, webinars, and exclusive content, building a strong talent pipeline in the process.

Hubspot, a leading inbound marketing SaaS company, has built a talent community around its company culture and values. They regularly engage with members through virtual events and provide resources and opportunities for career development.

Jobvite survey suggests that the number of companies using talent communities has increased by 60% in the past two years, and 92% of companies using talent communities reported success in attracting new hires. In another study by the Talent Board, 80% of companies reported that talent communities improved the candidate experience.

With their proven success and growing popularity, talent communities have emerged as a fascinating outbound recruitment trend that organizations should consider incorporating into their recruitment strategy.

Boost Your Outbound Recruitment Efforts with Nurturebox

Outbound recruitment is the present and future of hiring. With the market landscape changing and most candidates being passive talent, fast-growth companies cannot wait for quality applications to kick in.

However, sourcing candidates, continuous engagement, and maintaining your talent pipeline can add to the hassle of already piling up recruitment tasks. Nurturebox enables you to accelerate and amplify your outbound recruitment efforts with complete automation of the talent pipeline. The Chrome extension works seamlessly with LinkedIn allowing you to connect with candidates through different channels, and integrates with your existing recruitment tech stack. Hence, you can focus on the human side of recruiting and automate the rest!

Also read: How to Automate Your Outbound Recruitment using Nurturebox

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.

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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.

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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.