Subterms
Working with over three million candidates on the Hired marketplace, we celebrate diversity in the career paths, experiences, and skills people bring to the table. Professionals are more than their resume and we’re committed to helping everyone – including those who took the path less traveled – find their dream job. We talked to Jason […] More
Change is afoot in the world of work. We are in the midst of a concentrated shift from a client-driven job market to a candidate-driven one, meaning recruiters and HR teams need to adopt a new stance when it comes to sourcing talent.
The enormous upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic means candidates are in high demand. However, many companies are struggling to find the right people as the pool of suitable candidates is scarce. To add to the challenge, prospective employees also have a refreshed set of expectations around a more hybrid approach to working in this ultra-digital age.
As such, striking a balance between recruiting the best talent for the job while quickly fulfilling businesses’ urgent need for staff is becoming a challenge, particularly when looking to maintain desirable levels of staff retention. Perhaps recruitment strategies need a rethink as the world changes?
A striking set of statistics
The latest figures from Reed and the ‘UK Report on Jobs’ survey by KPMG and REC lay out how the most recent lockdown developments and further reopening of the UK economy have impacted recruitment:
Permanent placements have hit record growth
An upturn in temp billings is the fastest it has been for six years
May 2021 was Reed’s best month for job postings since before the 2008 financial crash
The demand for workers has increased at the fastest rate for over 23 years
The supply of permanent and temporary staff fell at the quickest rates on record.
However, although these results may be good news for job seekers, they present new challenges to recruiters looking to help businesses hire, as the spike in demand brings the labor and skills shortages that already existed in the UK into sharper focus.
With overall candidate availability declining at the quickest rate since May 2017, recruiters and HR teams must now pick out top talent from a rapidly shrinking pool. Plus, both starting salaries and temp pay are expanding at a sharp rate. Coupled with a growing desire for flexibility and a more hybrid approach to working, companies are under more pressure than ever to match up to candidates’ increasing expectations if they want to attract and retain the best staff.
Leveraging the opportunity
The shift from a client-driven market to a candidate-driven market means recruiters must adapt their approach to finding new talent by targeting passive candidates. When the demand outstrips supply, speed is of the essence, and consultants must move quickly if they want to snap up the best candidates for their clients.
As a recruiter, top talent will rarely fall into your lap — particularly in a highly competitive job market. Plus, just because someone is not actively looking for a new role does not mean they are not open to discussing and learning more about new opportunities. So, it is essential to proactively search for candidates already in employment and reach out to them to capture their interest in vacant positions.
Sourcing passive candidates, rather than waiting for them to come to you, has consistently garnered highly effective hiring success rates, with candidates sourced in this way proving to be more than twice as efficient as independent applicants.
For this strategy to be effective, recruiters and HR teams must make the best use of the digital resources at their disposal — as well as their professional network. For example, there are a wealth of finance and accounting candidates on social media, and platforms like LinkedIn are ideal for ‘headhunting’ skilled and high-level talent.
Step into the digital era
Recruitment is more competitive than ever before. And now that the market has become increasingly driven by candidates and their desires, it is the employer (and, in turn, their recruitment specialist) that needs to stand out and impress.
Candidates have come to expect more from prospective employers, and not just in terms of substantial pay packets and training programs — although these are also important to consider. After over a year of home working, many have come to enjoy a more flexible way of working and expect companies to offer it as a benefit. In fact, a recent survey by Barnett Waddingham found 34% of UK workers said they would resign from their current position if their employer failed to offer flexible working options.
In a climate where unsatisfied staff may be approached for — or seek out — alternative employment, employee retention is also more crucial than ever. Benefits such as flexible working can greatly improve productivity and job satisfaction, meaning staff is more likely to stay at a company.
Retaining new hires starts with the hiring process. The process must be tailored to employees’ new drive for a more remote and digitized experience while ensuring clear and consistent communication. To do this, recruiters need to make the most of the abundance of digital platforms available, using them in conjunction with more conventional hiring practices to provide the smoothest recruitment and onboarding experience possible.
By Julie Mott, Managing Director at Howett Thorpe. Julie is a highly respected and well-connected recruitment individual with over 20 years of experience working in the ever-changing industry.
Share this post: More
When it comes to crafting and delivering an email marketing campaign that attracts candidates and encourages them to find out more about the latest vacancy, measuring how each piece of content has done can help recruiters to truly understand if what they’re saying is hitting the mark.
As 300 billion marketing emails are sent to people’s inboxes every single day – on a global scale – it’s often difficult to not only achieve the desired cut-through when there’s so much competition from brands, but also know how well it’s been received… or not.
To overcome this hurdle, many recruiters might take this opportunity to analyze open and click-through rates to determine the success or failure of their latest email campaign – after all, many free email marketing platforms have this insight available at the click of a button. However, while these measurements are giving some of the detail, are they really telling the full story? Perhaps not.
That’s because this data doesn’t delve into the fact that several recipients might’ve seen the email and given it a short glance, but then hit ‘delete’ without truly engaging with it. Others could’ve accidentally clicked on the comms before discarding it altogether.
The point is, open and click-through rates never truly tell the whole tale. Yes, they might show how the latest email campaign has achieved above-industry rates because recipients have opened it, but there’s no bearing of the level of engagement that’s also been involved. And, for a savvy recruiter, they want to know that their vacancy or top tips email is driving the type of interaction that helps to get the right person into the right job.
So, while other recruiters are still accessing these so-called ‘vanity metrics’, forward-thinking professionals – who want to get ahead of the competition – should be exploring another form of analysis to truly cut through the online noise. That means plugging in marketing automation and tapping into the powers of lead scoring.
What is lead scoring?
This is where imaginary numbers are placed above the heads of every individual who has engaged with the recruiter. For those who have interacted with the brand lots – for example, downloaded a guide on interview techniques or spent time on a specific webpage covering a sector they’re interested in – they’re classed as being the ‘hottest leads’ and could therefore have a figure of ‘9’ or ‘99’ attached to them.
These individuals are the ones recruitment firms should be prioritizing with hyper-personalized comms because they’re already ‘bought in’ to what the organization has to say. What that results in is typically a greater level of engagement too because they want to hear from the company.
By focusing on those who are the most interactive, there is also a greater chance of a conversion-rich opportunity via a human touchpoint – such as a one-on-one phone call – and this can go a lot further than sending an irrelevant message that’s loosely received by all.
Always segment the audience
Technically this isn’t a metric, however, it plays a pivotal role in exactly how a recruiter analyses if their latest campaign delivers the correct message to the desired person, at the perfect time.
Segmenting individuals into specific groups based on their of-the-moment interests and interactions with the brand means that recruiters can send hyper-relevant content the recipient wants to read, rather than what the organization thinks they might be interested in.
This is a great way for recruiters to have a laser-beam focus on who to speak to, and when – all of which can be made possible in minutes, rather than hours, via savvy marketing automation.
Web engagement can tell a far greater story
Having discussed the powers of lead scoring and the importance of segmentation, another step recruiters should take if they’re to evaluate their campaigns effectively is via website interactions.
For example, is a candidate viewing videos on the ‘most frequently asked questions in an interview’? Or maybe they’re trawling a top tips guide on how to craft a must-see cover letter. These are critical areas that a recruiter can respond to in terms of personalizing their content. If they’re not tracking this type of activity, it’s a missed opportunity.
Plugging in marketing automation and accessing website data can equip recruitment brands with a deeper level of insight from each individual’s online experience, and provide detail into what they’re most interested in, in real-time.
While these metrics only scratch the surface at to what recruiters can do when armed with marketing automation, the important thing for them to remember is that they must be responsive to what the data is telling them. And, while it might seem disheartening to have unsubscribers or discover a piece of digital comms has received little engagement, it often tells a lot about a contact base – from the level of interaction to identifying whether they need to address the ‘send frequency’ or refresh content… before a competitor does.
About Sam Duggan: Head of marketing for marketing automation platform Force24, Sam has a laser-beam focus on driving bottom-line revenues by utilizing customer data.
Share this post: More
Tell us about your career journey. I graduated from SUNY Stony Brook with a BS in Mathematics. In my final year of studies, I started to form an interest in software development and took some introductory courses. Ultimately, post graduation, I was recruited into my first job as a Webmaster at a fast growing startup […] More
You passed your phone screen with flying colors. Next up? The (often-dreaded) video interview. A mainstay of the modern era, video technology is used by at least 60% of hiring teams. But while virtual interviews eliminate the need for time-consuming commutes, they also bring their own stressors—like spotty internet connection or unanticipated background noise. Wondering […] More
In a pre-pandemic world, the idea of interviewing for a new job without meeting the team in person would have seemed strange at best. Now, as many companies have shifted to remote work, many job candidates and employers have happily adopted remote interviews as the new standard. Remote interviews come with their benefits, but figuring […] More
In a pre-pandemic world, the idea of interviewing for a new job without meeting the team in person would have seemed strange at best. Now, as many companies have shifted to remote work, many job candidates and employers have happily adopted remote interviews as the new standard. Remote interviews come with their benefits, but figuring […] More
When the world is extremely busy online, ensuring that a carefully crafted piece of email content doesn’t end up straight in a candidate’s ‘delete’ folder, should be a high priority for a recruitment agency’s marketing department.
But when over 300 billion business emails are sent globally every day, it can often seem an uphill struggle when trying to cut through a vast amount of digital noise. However, industry professionals can give themselves a competitive advantage and ensure they’re speaking to the right people about the right jobs opportunities when they plug in intuitive marketing automation.
That’s because it’s designed to not only make life simpler but, in this instance, liberate marketing campaigns for recruiters who want to create and send humanized content that engages recipients with content they want to read via their preferred channels.
Here are some of the reasons why more recruitment agencies and their marketing teams should be turning to automation if they want to interact with candidates on a more granular level and improve their overall conversion rate…
1. Every piece of digital comms can be hyper-personalized
With savvy technology at their fingertips, marketers can analyze millions of pieces of critical data that tell them all about a candidate’s of-the-moment job interests and needs. From this insight, they can then begin to build up a more complete picture about their recipient and know the type of ultra-personalized content they will interact with.
When an enigmatic and energetic recruitment agency is keen to engage with a jobseeker about a relevant role, the last thing they want to do is be seen as another cold caller who sends the same tired – and often irrelevant – message to hundreds of other candidates that are ultimately received loosely by all. Not only is that a waste of time but can damage brand reputation immeasurably because those candidates will soon go to a competitor who understands their specific career requirements.
2. Have a problem with email deliverability? Not any more…
The latest news bulletin full of job roles has gone out but it’s received little to no engagement or had a vastly low engagement rate. If a marketing team experiences these problems, there could be an issue with deliverability.
Utilizing automation, marketers can begin to draw out the data that links to why engagement is low – for example, it could be that bot traffic is to blame or the bounce rate is high because the recruitment agency’s CRM isn’t automatically updating ‘dead’ email addresses when people leave their jobs and move on. Being equipped with this information, and acting on it, should help recruiter brands to stop these recurring issues at the earliest opportunity and ensure they’re sending emails to the right candidates.
3. Jobseekers feel they’re being supported throughout
A cold email sent without thought is likely to either be deleted straight away or ignored altogether by the recipient because a recruiter isn’t taking the time to get to know them – and it shows.
It’s important to help candidates throughout their next career move – and marketing teams can assist that nurturing process from start to finish. Not only will it build trust, but it’s an additional level of support that will endorse positive word-of-mouth and build brand loyalty.
A great way to foster a relationship with a jobhunter is via a five-step marketing automation email sequence, which is:
The ‘introduction’: explaining who the recruiter is and why they’re getting in touch
Next is ‘gain’: underlining what the candidate will achieve by taking up the recruiter’s services
Then there’s the ‘fear’ of missing out: designed to detail what would happen if the recipient did not act on the advice of this particular recruiter
The fourth stage is ‘social proof’: evidencing other candidates’ experiences through testimonials and case studies
And finally, ‘urgency’: requesting readers to act now before the opportunity goes to someone else.
By following this framework, recruiters and their marketing departments should begin to build up a bank of highly nurtured candidates who are receiving relevant roles for them.
It’s important to stress that automation shouldn’t do all of the work when it comes to the relationship between a recruitment brand and a job seeker. There have to be lots of human interaction throughout – after all it takes six touchpoints before someone is truly engaged. However, this technology should enable a deeper understanding of what every candidate is interested in at that specific moment in time while saving marketers several hours each week because they’re creating emails in seconds to strengthen their overall digital comms delivery.
By Adam Oldfield, CEO of marketing automation platform Force24.
Share this post: More
