Part 1: How to Turn Passive Leads into Hires|Part 1: How to Turn Passive Leads into Hires
nurturing-candidates-smashfly

Part 1: How to Turn Passive Leads into Hires

This series is a partnership with SmashFly covering the key elements and examples of nurture in a recruitment marketing strategy. Look for Part 2 and 3 on the SmashFly blog!

With unemployment rates at a low since 2008, attracting talent with ease is a thing of the past. Job applicants now hold more power when it comes to making the important decision of where they want to work. With more knowledge at the onset of applying for a job, job seekers are finding better fits, and more of them. Oftentimes, job seekers have multiple job offers when it comes time to make this critical decision. This is why it is so important to attract quality passive talent who is are aware of your organization and employer brand when they are ready to make a career change.

Welcome to the world of nurture

Marketers have been using nurture to generate engaged customer leads for years -- talent acquisition is no different. Nurturing strategies allow talent acquisition teams to generate interested leads who will apply for the right opportunities and ensures a positive candidate experience at every step of the journey. The key to providing this kind of candidate experience is implementing a modern recruitment marketing strategy that includes nurture.

What is recruitment marketing?

The changed landscape of talent acquisition requires a more proactive, multi-touch approach to attracting passive talent and converting them into applicants and ultimately hires. Recruitment marketing is every tactic that a talent acquisition team uses to fill jobs in the present and build a pipeline for the future.

The reason recruitment marketing is so important is because candidates are just like consumers. They research employers the same way consumers research products they want to buy, which brings them to Glassdoor. Although 80 percent of Glassdoor’s users are actively looking for jobs or are open to better opportunities, not every candidate is ready to actually apply unless they have all of the information they need (Source: Glassdoor U.S. Site Survey, October 2014). Most candidates identify themselves as passive, and 74 percent drop off at some point during the application process (Source: Smashfly, 2015).

Nurturing applicants is the best way to solve this problem. Capturing basic information from interested leads before they halt their application process gives you the opportunity to communicate with the candidate until the right job opens. Plus, it’s exhausting to start from square one when hiring for every new position.

According to Business Insider, the number of employers that claim they can’t fill open positions is growing. Modern recruiting organizations are building their own databases of interested leads to reach out to and nurture until the right job opportunity arrives. But first:

3 things to do before you nurture

Quality leads don’t just happen, you have to earn them. Follow these three important steps to set you on the path to providing the ultimate candidate experience, and ultimately hire amazing brand advocates:

  • Find and source candidates with critical skills. You determine your critical skills, then your team scours the web for passive candidates that fit what you’re looking for. The result is a targeted pipeline of cold leads you can reach out to and engage with.
  • Attract candidates through your employer brand. Candidates should be treated like consumers, and it takes 12 touch points before a consumer makes a decision (Source: Google and Inmar, 2013). The job description, career site content, social networks all impact a candidate’s decision to communicate with your organization. Think about which questions you need to answer for candidates to get them to engage with your organization. Are you helping them learn more about career opportunities? How can they benefit from being part of your organization?
  • Engage candidates to opt-in to communication with your organization. Tip: Not every call to action to candidates has to be “Apply Now!”. Give your leads different options for how they want to join your talent network. This could be directly within the apply flow before an application, a tab on your Facebook page, a call to action on the homepage of your careers site, or a link to your Glassdoor profile.

Through sourcing passive talent, attracting them to your employer brand and engaging them to join your talent network, you’ve effectively built a pipeline of warm leads that want to hear from your organization. How and what to communicate to these leads is where nurture comes in.

To find out more about how nurture can turn your leads into applicants and applicants into hires, download our eBook in partnership with SmashFly, Nurturing Candidates From Attraction to Hire: A Guide to the Ultimate Candidate Experience.