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    How Recruitment Marketers Can Utilize Data to Drive Candidate Success

    More than two million job vacancies are currently available throughout the UK. And so, while it’s still a difficult market to cut through the noise as several organizations restructure in a post-pandemic world, savvy recruiters – and their marketing departments – are tapping into insight in a bid to stand out from the crowd.
    That’s because they realize that a generic ‘InMail’ message via LinkedIn or cold email sent off-the-cuff is unlikely to pique interest in a job seeker who wants more from their recruitment contact if they’re searching for a role with an organization that displays a similar level of passion as them and fits with their culture and values, a flat, impersonal piece of communication simply won’t cut it.
    Yes, there will be recruiters out there who will experience some success when they send out hundreds of ‘batch and blast’ marketing messages to scores of recipients in their contact base. But when a blanket piece of irrelevant content is loosely received by all – and subsequently ignored or deleted altogether – are they making the most of their time, effort, and resources?
    Plus, does this type of content show that they’re genuinely interested in ensuring the right candidate applies for the right job? Perhaps not.
    Like customers searching for products or services, candidates want to feel like the brands they’re communicating with and understand their wants and needs in real-time. That means delivering hyper-personalized content covering available roles that suit that individual’s of-the-moment circumstances – from location to salary requirements – and skillset.
    When that type of marketing message hits the bullseye, recruiters are in a solid position to not only successfully fill a vacancy but attract more talent in the future because they’ve taken the time to get to know their recipients and have responded to their interests. Plus, word-of-mouth endorsement can be an exciting thing.
    Moving away from delivering bland messages
    So, can recruiters make sure they’re sending ultra-individualized comms that effectively cut through the online noise? It comes back to data. When savvy professionals unlock and understand their insight, they’re better placed to deliver digital comms to the right person at the right time.
    Many recruiters have seen them plug in marketing automation to do the ‘heavy lifting’ for them. Armed with an intuitive tool, users can extract critical information on each candidate’s preferences and respond swiftly to their online behaviors.
    To put this into context, if a candidate searches for a particular role and has downloaded a recruitment brand’s guide on ‘The X skills a modern-day construction manager needs,’ users can take this piece of detail and tailor comms specifically for that individual. It could be an invite to a relevant webinar with a construction company CEO or a blog covering the questions to ask in an interview.
    It’s all about utilizing the data they’re already sat on and creating something meaningful for each audience member.
    How to evaluate the strength of your content
    When roles become available, many recruitment marketers might opt to place all their vacancies in a newsletter sent to their database. And for them, a high open and click rate of that email is the measure of success.
    However, while it might be a good piece of content, these ‘vanity metrics’ don’t always tell the whole story. For example, a candidate could have accidentally gone into the email while scrolling through their newsfeed. If they’ve then hit ‘delete’ seconds later, it shows they’re not interested, but the statistics will tell a different tale.
    Instead, recruiters who have plugged in automation can unlock the powers of lead scoring. This means placing a metaphorical figure against each interaction – a ‘9’ for highly engaged recipients down to a ‘1’ for those who aren’t that bothered. As a result, recruiters, and their marketing teams, can prioritize the more significant numbers for further communication because they know they’re speaking to someone keen.
    Not every piece of comms will work
    And finally, it might not be something recruiters, and their marketing teams want to hear, but there won’t always be a winning outcome to every single email sent. That’s because nobody gets things spot-on all the time. So, why should they expect their content to achieve the impossible?
    The difference here though is that, when professionals have data and marketing automation to lean on, they’re immediately in a better position to deliver digital comms that land perfectly into the right person’s inbox at the right time.
    They can also use their clever tool to analyze each email, newsletter, or webpage to understand what’s working and what’s not. And when the latter occurs, they can swiftly tweak and alter copy to try another way of breaking through the noise.
    Overall, recruitment marketers who arm themselves with data – and use it to drive effective content – should soon see their success rate soar, putting themselves way ahead of the competition as a result.
    By Adam Oldfield, CEO at marketing automation platform Force24.
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    3 Reasons Why Recruiters Should Invest in Marketing Automation

    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.
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    Attracting Tech Talent in a New Location

    When reaching out to a new talent market, your existing recruitment marketing strategy may not cut it. New markets bring new competitors, new biases, and new questions to answer with your messaging. How can leaders in recruitment marketing and employer branding do it? That’s what Appian and its Recruitment Marketing Strategist, Chris Fitzner, are figuring out.
    Appian, a US-based tech brand that offers an automation platform to businesses, recently acquired a small company in Seville, Spain. Rather than simply absorb the Seville team, Appian decided to grow its presence in Seville—“to capture that spirit there, and capture that culture,” as Fitzner puts it.
    Research Your New Talent Market
    Fitzner’s team started with the facts: They researched tech professionals in the Seville area to build data-centered profiles of who they needed to reach. Using LinkedIn’s Talent Insights platform, Appian identified the market’s main hitters, broken out by title, industry, and experience.
    Learn What You’re Up Against in Your New Market
    Appian’s approach to sketching out its growth challenges provides a useful framework for other teams hoping to enter new talent markets. First, using the list of major players they’d built when researching their new talent market, Fitzner’s team categorized their competitors: home-grown Seville companies, companies (like Appian) that had recently acquired Seville companies, and large consultancies that hire remote talent from Seville.
    Then, to understand their biggest recruitment hurdles, Fitzner’s team returned to their data, specifically location data. Their website analytics revealed almost no visits from local talent, and Appian’s only Seville-based LinkedIn engagement was from the local employees they’d just acquired.
    Build Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy
    When entering a new talent market, posting a job listing to Glassdoor or Indeed isn’t enough. “You have to get into where they’re actively looking,” Fitzner advises, which means devoting more attention to local job boards.
    “Who is Appian?” was still an obstacle for Appian’s recruiters on LinkedIn, so they began serving ads to targeted audiences in advance of reaching out via InMail, which earned them higher open rates.
    Adapt What You Already Know About Good Marketing
    When building a recruitment marketing strategy, innovation is great, but Fitzner cautions against reinventing the wheel, especially for those coming from a recruiting background. “There are already a lot of existing resources out there,” he says. “Look at existing marketing principles. Learn email marketing. Learn content marketing. Learn the basics of SEO. Learn how to establish a good PR/media program.”

    To follow Chris Fitzner’s work in employer branding, connect with him on LinkedIn. For more strategies and data-driven insights that you can act on to improve your company, get in touch.

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