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Using CRM for Alumni Networking and Boomerang Hiring Programs

August 24, 2023

11 Best Software for Recruitment Agencies in 2023 - Recruiterflow Blog

In today's competitive job market, companies are constantly seeking innovative ways to attract and retain top talent. One such innovation that has revolutionized the recruitment process is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Originally used in the sales and marketing industry to manage customer interactions, CRM has now found its way into the world of recruitment. This article explores how CRM can be leveraged to create a seamless candidate experience, particularly in alumni networking and boomerang hiring programs.

To source and nurture talent at scale — while maintaining a focus on candidate experience — the most strategic recruiting orgs use advanced applicant tracking systems with candidate relationship management (CRM) capabilities to best manage opportunities in their pipeline, track their status and progress in terms of funnel movement, and advance them from one TA stage to the next with ease.

Importance of candidate nurturing in recruitment

Recruitment is not just about filling vacancies; it's about finding the right fit for both the candidate and the organization. This is where candidate nurturing plays a crucial role. By building relationships with potential candidates, recruiters can create a pipeline of talent that can be tapped into when opportunities arise. CRM allows recruiters to track and nurture candidates throughout the recruitment process, ensuring that no potential candidate slips through the cracks.

Candidate nurturing involves personalized communication, such as follow-up emails, newsletters, and invitations to networking events. By keeping candidates engaged and informed, recruiters can maintain their interest and keep them in the loop about future opportunities. This personalized approach not only enhances the candidate experience but also strengthens the employer brand, as candidates feel valued and appreciated.

Enhancing candidate experience through CRM

The candidate experience is a critical factor in attracting and retaining top talent. In today's digital age, candidates expect a seamless and personalized experience throughout the recruitment process. This is where CRM comes into play. With CRM software, recruiters can easily track and manage candidate interactions, ensuring that each candidate receives the attention they deserve.

CRM allows recruiters to automate various aspects of the recruitment process, such as scheduling interviews, sending personalized emails, and providing timely feedback. By streamlining these processes, recruiters can focus on building relationships with candidates, rather than getting bogged down in administrative tasks. This not only saves time but also enhances the candidate experience by providing a seamless and efficient recruitment journey.

Leveraging CRM for candidate interaction

Candidate interaction is key to successful recruitment. By leveraging CRM, recruiters can effectively engage and communicate with candidates at every stage of the recruitment process. CRM provides a centralized platform for storing candidate information, such as resumes, interview notes, and feedback. This allows recruiters to have a holistic view of each candidate, enabling them to tailor their interactions and communication based on individual preferences and needs.

A Complete Guide to Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) For Recruiters  - Recruiterflow Blog

CRM also enables recruiters to track candidate engagement across various channels, such as email, social media, and events. By analyzing this data, recruiters can gain insights into candidate behavior and preferences, allowing them to further personalize their interactions. For example, if a candidate has shown a particular interest in a specific industry or skill set, recruiters can provide relevant content or invite them to industry-specific events. This level of personalization not only enhances the candidate experience but also increases the chances of attracting and retaining top talent.

Alumni networking and its role in recruitment

Alumni networking has long been recognized as a powerful tool for recruitment. Leveraging the networks of former employees can provide access to a pool of talented individuals who are already familiar with the organization's culture and values. CRM can play a crucial role in facilitating and managing alumni networking programs.

Alumni Networks: An Underutilized Recruiting Strategy

With CRM, recruiters can easily keep track of alumni and their current employment status. By maintaining regular communication with alumni, recruiters can stay updated on their career progression and identify potential opportunities for rejoining the organization. CRM also allows recruiters to segment alumni based on various criteria, such as skills, experience, and location, enabling targeted outreach and engagement.

Boomerang hiring programs and their benefits

Boomerang hiring programs, which involve rehiring former employees, have gained popularity in recent years. Organizations have realized the value of bringing back employees who already have a deep understanding of the company culture and processes. CRM can be instrumental in implementing and managing boomerang hiring programs.

Boomerang Hiring – A New Rising Recruitment Strategy & Its Benefits

CRM enables recruiters to maintain a comprehensive database of former employees, including their skills, experience, and reasons for leaving. By tracking the career progressions of former employees, recruiters can identify potential opportunities for rehiring. CRM also allows recruiters to stay connected with former employees through personalized communication, such as newsletters and invitations to company events. This helps to nurture relationships and keep former employees engaged, increasing the likelihood of their return.

How CRM can support alumni networking and boomerang hiring

CRM provides a centralized platform for managing and tracking alumni networking and boomerang hiring programs. By utilizing CRM, recruiters can easily segment and target alumni based on specific criteria, such as skills, experience, and location. This enables recruiters to send personalized messages and invitations to relevant alumni, increasing the chances of their engagement.

CRM also allows recruiters to track and manage interactions with alumni, ensuring that each touchpoint is meaningful and personalized. By analyzing data on alumni engagement, recruiters can identify trends and preferences, enabling them to tailor their outreach strategies. For example, if certain alumni have shown a particular interest in a specific department or role, recruiters can provide targeted information and opportunities in those areas.

Case studies of successful CRM implementation in recruitment

Several organizations have successfully implemented CRM in their recruitment processes, resulting in improved candidate experiences and increased retention rates. One such case study is Group928, was able to streamline their recruitment processes and provide a personalized experience for candidates. They implemented automated email campaigns, personalized landing pages, and targeted messaging to engage candidates throughout the recruitment journey. As a result, XYZ Company saw a significant increase in candidate satisfaction and a higher conversion rate from application to hire.

Group928 | LinkedIn

Another case study is Sagesa Healthcare utilized CRM to enhance their alumni networking program. By maintaining regular communication with former employees and leveraging CRM's segmentation capabilities, ABC Corporation was able to identify and rehire top talent. This resulted in reduced recruitment costs and increased employee satisfaction, as the rehired employees already had a deep understanding of the organization's values and processes.

Homepage - Sagesa Healthcare

Best practices for utilizing CRM in candidate interaction

To effectively leverage CRM for candidate interaction, it is important to follow some best practices. Firstly, it is crucial to ensure that the CRM system is integrated with other recruitment tools and systems, such as applicant tracking systems and HR databases. This allows for seamless data sharing and a comprehensive view of each candidate.

Secondly, it is important to regularly update and maintain candidate data within the CRM system. This includes tracking candidate interactions, updating contact information, and recording feedback from interviews and assessments. By keeping the data accurate and up-to-date, recruiters can effectively personalize their interactions and provide a seamless candidate experience.

Lastly, it is essential to analyze and leverage the data collected through CRM. By identifying trends, preferences, and patterns in candidate behavior, recruiters can further personalize their interactions and communication. This data-driven approach not only enhances the candidate experience but also improves the overall recruitment process.

Conclusion: The future of CRM in recruitment revolution

As the recruitment landscape continues to evolve, CRM will play an increasingly vital role in creating a seamless candidate experience. By leveraging CRM, recruiters can effectively nurture candidates, enhance their experience, and promote alumni networking and boomerang hiring programs. The case studies and best practices highlighted in this article demonstrate the potential of CRM in revolutionizing recruitment.

To stay ahead in the recruitment game, organizations need to embrace CRM as a powerful tool for candidate interaction. By utilizing CRM to its full potential, recruiters can attract top talent, improve retention rates, and build a strong employer brand. The future of recruitment lies in the seamless integration of CRM into the recruitment process, creating a win-win situation for both candidates and organizations.

To learn more about leveraging CRM for seamless candidate interaction and revolutionize your recruitment process, contact us today!

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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