As you’ll hardly find career lifers today, scenarios when people hop jobs every second or third year become part of our day-to-day routine.
Lead nurturing is an intrinsic part of recruiting and hiring.
This article has been designed to share five pieces of advice on how to interest prospective candidates in your job opportunities and keep them involved in the future.
Let’s get started.
Basics of Candidate Nurturing
Similar to lead nurturing, candidate nurturing means the process when recruiters engage with talented professionals at every step of the process. It allows the developing of talent pools (further talent pipelines) and being ready when the time requires hiring more candidates.
Often, the process of candidate nurturing works as follows:
- Running nurture campaigns. This stage includes a series of messages that get triggered as soon as a candidate gets interested in a job advert. Often, it’s the moment a prospective employee opts for job information. Next, they start receiving not pushy but branded content that gets candidates informed, engaged, and hooked.
- Craft your prospects’ personas. Designing the targeted personas should be the first activity on the list of your recruitment errands. What hard and soft skills should an ideal candidate for the role have? What are their interests? What can be their reason for changing an employer? Collecting as many details about your potential ideal candidates as possible will help craft a highly targeted message to connect with them.
- Choosing the right timing. It’s essential to present information depending on what your prospects’ expectations are. Similar to social media posting, outreach to prospects should be performed during the course of the day. As a recruiter, you probably already have data on when candidates interact with your messages the most favorably. If not, you can always check your concept through your own experience and testing.
- Using recruitment automation tools. As extensive as candidate nurturing can be, without an automation tool, the process can quickly zap all your recruitment resources. The good thing is that there are network-specific tools to facilitate the nurturing process. Linked Helper is one of them. The software allows sending a chain of automated messages on LinkedIn, thus establishing loyal relationships with potential candidates throughout every stage of the hiring process.
5 Tips on Candidate Nurturing
We’ve cherry-picked these five sure-fire tips that will help you craft an ideal candidate nurturing strategy:
Take Advantage of LinkedIn Automation
LinkedIn is the number one channel for finding and nurturing ideal professionals. Luckily, what you used to have to perform manually can be automated today.
Let’s break it down with an example:
The afore-mentioned Linked Helper helps you target suitable potential employees based on the details and keywords they share on their profile pages. Thus, the software will like and/or comment on their last posts and endorse their professional skills, i.e., perform a selected number of actions to establish the first contact with the prospects. Next, candidates will start receiving a chain of personalized messages depending on how they interact with every touchpoint.
Run Industry Events
Event marketing is picking up steam. You’ll hardly find a brand that does not organize and run educational events aimed at promoting their company as knowledgeable and opportunistic for employees.
Additionally, holding industry events helps meet your prospects in person, and learn more about their interests, expectations, and, importantly, qualifications.
For candidates, such events are also beneficial as they help build connections and associate with your brand’s values.
Get the Most out of Candidate Personas
Effective nurturing activities must involve your Marketing Department as they will help characterize prospects relying on the details they have about the company’s target audience and their journey.
The team will help you outline an ideal candidate and those that are close to an ideal.
Such information will enable you to build personalized content campaigns that resonate with such personas and guide them towards the application process.
Embrace Social Networks
With the growing number of social network users, these networks have become an essential recruitment channel for many. What social media do your candidates prefer the most? These are the networks you should choose for your future campaigns.
Community groups and niche social media communities for professionals are the places to join and be active at.
Don’t Undervalue Email Campaigns
Outreach emails should be tidily intertwined with your lead nurturing strategy as most of your potential candidates are likely to check their inboxes several times a day.
Yes, there are chances that your emails can get buried in the box.
Nonetheless, if your emails are personalized and timely and follow previous touchpoints with your prospects made via other channels, they are likely to get noticed and responded to.
Conclusion
The recruitment process includes multiple aspects, and lead nurturing is one of them if you wish to have passive candidates coming.
Getting potential employees interested and engaged before they even start considering a transition to a new company means getting your brand as a preferred employer noticed in advance.
The tips we share above will help you build a talent pipeline before potential candidates even become jobseekers.