As we move toward the end of this year, we cannot help but realize how looming recruitment has been for hiring managers. The looming challenge to retain top talents around the industry seemed to have existed post-pandemic. Not only this, the skills gap among the talents has turned out to be a notable factor contributing to the overall slow progress.
It’s because of factors like skills gap and post-pandemic struggle, recruiters have highly thought of novel recruiting trends. Some of these trends have been around but are gaining prominence now. Organizations that adapt to the newer ways of recruitment process carry more chances of bouncing back soon.
Engaging candidates at an early stage
A major trend among companies is that they are hiring candidates by proactively engaging with them. You can say that this was a trend usually practiced while hiring C-suite executives. With time, this trend is majorly being tried out for hiring entry-level positions. Why are recruiters embracing proactive engagement in recruitment? It’s because passive recruitment is no more as effective as used to be.
The new age thinking of recruiters drives them to approach candidates early during the hiring process. The attempt by recruiters is made to build a relationship with candidates to pursue employment. Recruiters do this to find their way among other competitors & pick the top talents for their organization.
Using the latest screening tools for recruitment
Advanced screening tools are considered one of the most effective recruiting trends at the moment. Skill tests, resume analyzing, and conducting interviews are clearly age-old methods of hiring candidates. However, these methods do not provide quantifiable results on the abilities of candidates. In order to reduce the time taken in screening candidates more effectively, skill tests are important.
Along with skills tests, many organizations are focusing increasingly on behavioral assessments. Such tests reveal insights into the core attributes of candidates—that reveals qualities such as motivation & work ethics.
Open to remote work opportunities
The pandemic times has seen companies transitioning into hybrid and remote mode of work. According to McKinsey & Company, more companies were seen to embrace the new style of working. It has been found that remote work brings in more advantages to employees & the company. For most companies, the transition hasn’t been smooth & easy. In all this, organizations found a recruiting trend to focus on— employee experience.
Businesses are taking employee experience seriously & providing more remote work opportunities. About 77% of employees choose to work remotely as it removes the need to travel every day to work. Turns out individuals have become more productive at work and attained a full work-life balance. Organizations providing remote work options are getting more responses from candidates.
Now, that we are acquainted with the recruitment trends going on in the post-pandemic times, let’s directly get into recruitment workflows.
What is Recruitment Workflow?
The first critical step for any hiring process is creating an effective recruitment workflow. The whole point of building recruitment workflow is to have a better idea of how to implement the hiring process. With a recruitment workflow an organization can manage hiring in an easier way. Prepare a streamlined workflow to entirely understand the details of recruiting workflow.
Your hiring process may include steps that vary with the position you’re trying to fill in. For instance, if you’re looking to hire freshers at entry-level positions, consider job fairs at college campuses as part of your recruitment workflow. On the other hand, if you’re hiring senior executives you must have a different approach.
Typically, the stages of recruitment workflow consists of four steps:
- Identification
The beginning of any recruitment process—when the need for hiring for a position arises. The reason why you need to hire can vary: it can be either because an employee is leaving or you want more people on the team. Try creating a chart for every role works well in this case.
Usually, the news to fill in a position comes from a senior executive. It is then taken up by a recruiter, who then proceeds to start the hiring cycle. By tracking significant hiring analytics, the whole hiring process runs as per planning.
- Investigation
The second step in the recruitment workflow is going to be the part where research goes into defining the role. Recruiters should speculate & look closely into finding the right candidate. Without proper research or overlooking the details can lead to wrong hires. Take your time and find suitable candidates.
Reevaluate the existing job description, take help of tools like NurtureBox that has personalized JD options so that you can have interesting conversations with prospects. Define the daily activities of the role, talk clearly about the technologies they need to work with, and the deliverables required from the role.
- Communication
As easy as it sounds—effective communication is required. Talk with potential candidates and let them know everything related to the role. The more you speak with the candidates, the better you’ll be able to know what they think about your organization. With more conversations, recruiters can also gauge the intention of each candidate—how serious they are about the interview.
We would say that this step includes two parts—gathering the information, including some of that information in the job description, and sharing the description with candidates.
- Evaluation
The evaluation step comes right after the application is submitted. The entire recruitment workflow ranges from submitting applications to final hiring. The process includes assessments, interviews, assigned projects, and more. The steps included in the process depends on two major factors.
The determining factor one would be the role you’re hiring for. If the role requires the candidate to communicate more effectively, schedule more interviews to test their people skills. For a more technical role, test the candidate’s technical skills to solve problems. The second factor would be highlighting the company culture. From this, it’s easy to show whether as an organization you like collaborative team efforts or individual work.
Technology plays an important role in making each of these steps much easier & faster. That’s why you should check out tools like NurtureBox that makes recruitment processes a cakewalk for recruiters.
Benefits of Recruitment Workflow
When we ask recruiters about their overall experience of hiring, we find them agreeing on one thing—recruitment is time-consuming. The best way out to turn this over is to have an effective flowchart or a recruitment workflow that defines the way hiring can be carried out. Having a proper roadmap to how you want the hiring to proceed. With a proper mapping of hiring plans, it all becomes clear for recruiters and candidates.
Create a well-thought out flowchart to visualize the recruitment process. Help your teammates to properly understand the next steps in the process. Everyone involved in the task of finding the suitable candidates—filtering out the candidates that no longer stand relevant.
Flowcharts made for recruitment purposes are best to define the agenda, requirements, and what is not needed. Recruitment workflow ideally finds relevant candidates based on skills & experience. If you want consistency in the hiring process, then you must invest time in creating the perfect recruitment workflow. Improve communication with the rest of the team or hiring managers with a flowchart. Keep everyone on the same page with a clear understanding of what’s going on with a particular hiring process.
Finally, hire the most suitable candidates!
Do you need a flowchart symbol for recruitment workflow?
The answer to this would be a clear “yes”. At the start of creating any workflow, you should know about the symbols thoroughly. With the right recruitment workflow, it’s easier to understand the entire process of recruitment in stages. You can see the roadmap clearly and know the steps you need to follow on the way. Reach your goal in a time that you set.
Take help of tools that help you with the flowchart symbols and how they work. You can check out edrawsoft for the various symbols they provide for your flowchart.
How can you build a Flowchart for the Recruitment Process?
We know the significance of a fair and transparent recruitment process that every organization aims to attain. An organization that has a seamless recruitment process is highly preferred by candidates. The recruitment process should consist of clear steps that get added to the flowchart.
- Know when you need to hire
Every organization needs a proper recruitment process because there’s a need to hire talent now & then. When talented candidates are hired, it gives more impetus to departments to grow. While hiring, HR must consult with departments to identify the requirements of the role to hire. A detailed discussion about the role can reveal what skills are to look for and how the candidate will fit into the company culture. Settle down to finalize the roles that are to be filled.
- Create the job description
After deciding on the role to hire, you need to write the job description for the same. Why are job descriptions important? Writing a solid job description is important because they make the first impression on your organization. A well-crafted job description says a lot about the company culture. That’s why sending out the right message is important.
Take help from NurtureBox’s personalized job description feature that helps you send the right message to candidates. Ensure that the JD has all the information a candidate needs to know about the role.
Few things to keep in mind while creating the job description:
-Job title
-Working hours
-Compensation
-Job location
-Qualifications & skills required
-Added skills
-Brief description of the role
- Search for the applicants
Once the requirements for the role & vacancies have been finalized, at this point you must proceed to find candidates to fill the position. Recruiters now make use of social media along with the usual job portals to look for potential candidates. Thanks to the various platforms we have now, advertising for openings have become easier. Social media is a powerful tool now to advertise for jobs and speed up the recruitment process.
Job advertisements can be published on newspapers, career websites, notice boards, job fairs, and social media. About 4.48 billion people use social media worldwide, it’s no surprise that everyone is on some social media platform now.
Recruiters are using so much of the social media now to hire candidates of their choice. This is a great way to fill the roles quickly than ever before.
Let us take a quick look at the best ways to post for jobs on social media
The most preferred platform for candidate search, LinkedIn is the go-to place for any recruiter. You can literally find all active and passive candidates on this social media platform—which has expanded exponentially over the years. Make use of LinkedIn’s paid job postings to reach to your target audience. Include the ‘easy apply’ feature on LinkedIn to help candidates speed up their application process.
- Facebook’s ‘We are hiring’
Facebook has an approximately 2.9 billion monthly active users—which proves that the platform is still going strong. Posting on Facebook about job openings isn’t a bad idea afterall. In fact, there are Facebook groups that are particularly created for sharing information on job openings, new roles, and more. Like LinkedIn, sharing job posts on Facebook can increase your chances of getting hold of suitable candidates.
Twitter is considered a place where information, views on current events, political opinions are shared. In such a platform, it’s not hard to find companies posting or sharing about their job openings. Of course, there’s a character limit—that’s why you need to post exactly what you need to! For a job posting, you need to share a brief about the role, few other details, and link to the full job description. Keep the job title, job location, and responsibilities clear in the tweet. Remember, you need to grab attention from prospective candidates from this one tweet!
After the job postings have gone live, you’re sure to receive thousands of applications. Applicantions are going to flow in from different sources and you need to keep track of them all. It is your time now to screen the candidates and filter out the ones that fit the bill closest to your requirements. Before moving onto the next step of interviewing candidates, ensure that you filter out most candidates & narrow down to the least.
Keep few points in mind while you’re narrowing down on your potential candidates list. This has no formula—each organization can have their own of looking at things. But, a good practice for HRs is to be open to all possibilities. For instance, freshers with zero experience can stand out as a potential candidate, probably because they impress hiring managers during interviews.
- Interviewing the right candidates
Once you’re sure with the candidates you have shortlisted, it’s time for the next step—interviewing them. This step stands most important in the recruitment workflow process. Hiring managers need to go ahead and start interviewing candidates for direct communication. The steps included in interviews vary with each organization. Some organizations believe in having face-to-face conversations from the beginning. Through interviews, abilities and skills of each candidate is evaluated. Always keep the information on candidates ready with you for a better interaction.
- Pick candidates and make offers
The recruitment workflow process ends with this step. After carefully assessing the candidates based on their merit and abilities, you know who to hire. Once you have the candidate/candidates’ list in hand, talk to the referees of each one of them. Know about their work attitude or achievements. Many organizations take note of the LinkedIn recommendations a candidate has on their profiles. When a candidate looks good to go for, proceed to send out the offer letters.
While sourcing candidates isn’t easy, sourcing the ideal fit may be a daunting task. But, when you have the right tool to walk you through the process easily, finding candidates takes less time & effort. One such sourcing automation platform is NutureBox that acts as a game-changer for all recruiters. Reducing the overall time taken in hiring a candidate to creating the perfect talent pipeline for the next hire—it’s all done in one place!
NurtureBox provides some unique features like personalized JD option where you can send personalized JDs to candidates—increasing possibilities of a positive recruitment. Interacting with candidates becomes easier with the quick WhatsApp messaging option. Integrations such as Greenhouse, recruitee, Lemlist help recruiters extract candidate data and reachout to them in no time. Recruiters also get to send timely email reminders and email campaigns.
It all boils down to the point of making effective hiring with the right recruitment techniques. While recruitment workflow creation is an integral part of the process, we cannot undermine the role of advanced tools in it. Tools such as NurtureBox act like the perfect partner to every recruiter while they’re trying to catch the ideal fit for the roles. Have the perfect recruitment workflow out in front of you before you’re set to hire next and don’t forget to try out NurtureBox!
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Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.
Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.
Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.
From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:
- Build positive brand awareness
- Make your audience stick around for longer
- Get better traction on social media
- Gain more trust of your audience than ever
- Generate qualified leads
- Improve conversion rates
- Boost business visibility with SEO
- Position your brand as an authority
- Cultivate loyal brand fans
While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.
What is The Role of a Content Marketer?
A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.
As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.
To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.
Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:
- Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly.
- Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
- Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
- Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
- Types of content to be created
- Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
- Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.
- Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
- Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
- Continous publishing and distributing content
- Measuring and analyzing performance
How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?
Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.
Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.
Top Must-Have Skills in a Content Marketer
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
- Excellent Writing Skills
A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.
- Audience Research
Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.
- Keyword Research
Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.
- Data-oriented Content
Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..
- Project Management, Planning, and Publishing –
A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.
Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.
- Content Promotion
Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.
- Performance Analysis
Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.
Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.
Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona
Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:
- What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
- How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
- What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
- Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
- Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
- What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
- Where do they look for a new job?
- What are their career and life goals?
Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.
Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process
Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?
You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.
Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.
Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.
As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.
Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description
Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.
Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:
- Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.
- Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.
- Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.
- Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.
- About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?
Content Marketer Job Description Template
Role
The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.
Responsibilities
- Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
- Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
- Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
- Include and optimize all content for SEO
- Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
- Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence
Requirements
- Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
- Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
- A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
- Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
- Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
- Fluency in English or any other required language
Soft Skills
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Excellent writing and editing skills
- The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
- The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
- Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables
Step 4: Source Candidates
Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.
- Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
- 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.
