Your strategy isn’t keeping up with what is now available to you – that’s it!
What makes for an effective candidate sourcing strategy is evolving quickly and right now you have a great opportunity to get ahead of the game if you can take the time to do it properly.
Advances in tech have put a lot of DIY marketing capability at the hands of recruitment agencies – and this is a great thing, but it also means more choice and more overwhelm for many and it can be a bit like putting a V8 on a pair of roller skates if you don’t have a clear objective!
Here’s what I recommend as the first steps in creating a state-of-the-art candidate sourcing system.
Ensure all Marketing Efforts Direct Candidates to your Database
For example, if you have a Facebook page, where you can, incentivize people to join your database community. Lead magnets are a good way to do this; it could be signing up to receive a valuable “How to guide” or inviting them to a webinar. Either way, you capture their details and onto your database, they go to be nurtured until such time they look for their next job. (If you are targeting people in the EU be mindful of GDPR)
This way you can build engagement with them on one core platform and if you do this well will be able to put the right job opportunities in front of them at the right time and also be front of mind so they call your agency first when they are looking.
Combining all your digital marketing efforts with the sole purpose to drive people to your heavily engaged database will turn your current candidate sourcing on its head. You will see a massive increase in the number of inbound applications and over time your results will increase as you build in scale and automation.
What Will I Need to do This?
1) You will need an email marketing program to drive your marketing automation that can trigger next actions based on user behaviour such as clicking a particular link or viewing a certain web page etc. There are many to choose from – Constant Contact, A Weber, Get Response etc.
2) Update and segment your current recruitment database and make a commitment to start sending regular highly valuable content to your key candidate communities at least once a month (once a week is ideal). The key here is no one size fits all. That is old school. Using an email marketing program, you will be able to have various content pieces going to different people as appropriate.
*Just adding a personalized subject line to emails can increase your open rates by 26%.
** A well-segmented database can increase your email revenue by a whopping 760%.
3) Outsource a project to a Virtual Assistant on Upwork to map your entire market of candidates and build an opt-in offer for them.
4) Run your current emails through an email validating service such as BriteVerify or NeverBounce to identify outdated emails and candidates you are missing with your automated communication.
5) Create a lead magnet and work with a recruitment digital marketing expert to create a digital strategy with the following initial objectives.
– To drive your target candidates to your database.
– To have them automatically segmented based on behaviours across your digital properties in order to receive relevant and timely content over time.
There are wider considerations for a fully optimized digital strategy such as SEO, retargeting users, refining your social media etc but rather than get overwhelmed with everything, I recommend starting with what you have; your database. Have it optimized first so that when you add and finesse your other strategies that drive people to your database those contacts will be fully maximized as they enter your candidate acquisition system.
If you are looking to build a candidate attraction system into your business this is the best place to start because it won’t get outdated. Email marketing, when done well far outperforms all other digital channels when it comes to ROI and has done for many years.
Right now, it has all the capability to deliver you a strong pipeline of candidates and with new advancements such as being able to retarget people now who open your emails with further advertising, this is only going to get better.
You will need to invest a little time to get this running, but once you do, you will have an asset that you can scale and automate to deliver you candidates for a long time into the future.
Thanks for reading!
Belinda
*According to Experian, emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened
**According to DMA, marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns
These are great tips Belinda
When you say
*Just adding a personalized subject line to emails can increase your open rates by 26%.
What would be some examples other than the usual signature, logo and contact details?
Other ideas such as sending your emails from your name (as opposed to your company), keeping your subject lines short so the full intro can be seen on mobile are a couple of other quick tips