Tips to nurture job candidates in recruitment marketing

The act of nurturing a job candidate begins once the candidate consents to receive communication from your company. Candidates typically provide this consent when they join your company’s talent community. For the nurturing to be successful, you should provide the candidates with content valuable to them at the right times.

Let’s look at some of the most useful strategies to nurture job candidates.

Define candidate personas

The type of content you create for job candidates should depend on their personas. Defining these should then be the first step in a successful nurturing strategy. Get help from the hiring managers to understand the ideal persona for a particular role. You can expand the persona based on the quality and type of candidates you wish to engage.

The key elements to consider while defining job candidate personas include the following:

• Average age of the ideal candidate
• Work experience in years
• Necessary skills
• Educational background
• Personality(Collaborative, pro-active etc.)

Take help from your marketing team

You may know the persona of the job candidates you wish to connect with like the back of your hand. But when it comes to creating content for them, chances are high that the marketing team would be able to help you. Customized content and emailers are necessary for a meaningful candidate nurture strategy. Those are areas in which your marketing team could lend their expertise. Ask them to provide you with content that could help you engage with job candidates through the entire recruitment process.

Customize communication as much as possible

As mentioned before, candidate personas should dictate the kind of content that you create. For example, content that’s meant for someone looking for a managerial role should be distinct from what’s meant for a potential intern. Tailor your content as specifically for the target audience as possible. And when you find especially valuable talent, it pays to connect with them personally rather than sharing a pre-created piece of content. This makes them feel valued.

Regularly audit your contacts data

No matter how ingeniously designed your nurture campaigns are, they wouldn’t be fully effective unless your contacts data is error-free. Typical issues that arise in this regard include wrong information or duplicate contact entries in a list. Such errors make it that much harder to gain useful insights about your nurture campaigns. Without such insights, there is no way for you to optimize the campaigns. Audit your contacts database from time to time to ensure accuracy and keep it neatly organized.

Connect with talent using different media types

Written content can be powerful, especially for communicating descriptive information. However, there are instances when other media types could be effectively used. For instance, to communicate company culture, video clippings of office outings could be helpful. To celebrate someone getting promoted, an image(static or gif) could be an ideal medium. For employee testimonials, you could use a photo reel which shows different employees.

Stay connected with ex-employees

Provided an employee left your company on good terms, you could always maintain a connection with them, even if they are no more a part of the firm. For one thing, they may rejoin the company in the future for a different role than the one they adorned before.

To this end, with their consent, add their email ids to your email list. Periodically share content with them, including company newsletters and press releases. 

Use social media effectively

Part of the challenge in nurturing job candidates is that many of them wouldn’t necessarily be actively looking for a job. Such passive candidates wouldn’t check job boards or your careers webpage. So, your content should meet them where they are. Social media platforms are an obvious choice. And it’s not just LinkedIn you should consider, but also platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram where people spend a lot of their time. Online professional community forums are also potential spaces to engage with them.

Host online and offline events

Compared to content-marketing, event marketing is more resource intensive. Nonetheless, it is a great tool for nurturing talent. For one thing, hosting industry events helps establish your company as a thought leader, which bolsters your employer brand. Also, if the events- which could be webinars or online conferences- are of use to potential employees, they could be venues to engage with talent as well.

Make use of email marketing

The use of email came of age online during the late nineties. Though a couple of decades have passed since, the technology still seems to be popular. Which means you should embrace email marketing in your job candidate nurture efforts. It’s a given that many professionals check their email inbox multiple times per day. If your communication lands there, they would probably see it. If the communication is relevant to them, there is no reason for them to not click it open. Customize the flow of email content that should be shared with different candidates over a set period- say, a month. You could also automate so that the emails are sent if a candidate does a specific action online- like visiting your company’s careers site.

Track performance

It’s not enough to run nurture campaigns just for the sake of it. You should also track how they perform over a period of time. Based on the metrics you track, you could improvise a campaign. Some of the key metrics in this regard include the open rate for emails, click-through rate and the conversion rate. While optimizing a campaign, try to personalize the content according to the target audience. The better aligned the content is towards the candidate persona, the higher the chances are for them to engage with it.

TalentNet is a technology platform which serves as a single doorway into all types of talent- contingent, full-time or interns. Aside from helping build your own talent community, it’s also an easy-to-use tool for nurturing talent. You can post jobs for all types of talent from a single space. The platform supports two-way communication between talent and recruiters. You could also communicate with talent over multiple channels. These are just some of the reasons why brands including Meta, Capgemini, Pfizer and BP find TalentNet invaluable.

To learn more about how TalentNet’s tech platform can help you maximize your recruitment efforts book your demo with us today