When you are recruiting for future opportunities, you have to work that much harder to build trust with potential candidates. You are engaging in more meaningful conversations to gain perspective on the career goals of the talent in your industry. Talent pipelining also allows you to better personalize your messages, answer questions, build relationships, and most importantly, to automate your job postings. Your candidate database and social media platforms become more than sourcing tools; they become relationship-building platforms.
How to Start Building Automation Funnels for Recruiting and Hiring
Recently, we shared why automated funnels are essential for recruiting, and in this post we’ll go into more details on how you can get started. Once you have identified the high-priority candidate persona that you’ll constantly need to market to in order to hire for ongoing open positions, along with the specific campaign (virtual hiring event, online apply for a specific position, email campaign for lead generation to an event), the following steps will help you and your team identify and agree on what success looks like and how to use metrics to predict what the result will be.
1) Create your content, information and details in advance
Treat this like a new product launch with all your creative, copy, and information planned out in advance so that you can focus on engaging your target audience and preparing for your event or digital resource come launch day. Collaborate with marketing, communications and your hiring managers to tweak and improve your process. Just like an in-person career fair or other event, goal setting and execution is important but so is learning what needs to be improved and enhanced for the next campaign.
2) Use automation to deliver content
Marketing automation can differentiate between a candidate who just accepted a new job (who might be interested in tips to succeed in a new role) versus one who is still looking (who might be interested in interview advice) versus one who isn’t actively looking for a new job at all (who might be interested in a report on new trends in their industry). This is what helps you deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.
3) Targeting with data can be highly specific
Using content marketing, landing pages, online hiring events, and other tools designed to generate leads gives you data on which candidates perform specific activities in your campaigns so that you can isolate and drive targeted and interested candidates to apply for specific job openings.
4) Develop your marketing by funnel stage
For example, automation can help you identify sourced candidates, or any prospective candidate that tracks through to your job listing or career site from any source, including social channels, paid job listings, online ad campaigns, or organic search. This audience will be more responsive to a compelling call to action, but it also gives you the opportunity to broaden your talent pipeline. This is where you’ll deliver your call to action and encourage prospective candidates to apply for your open positions, but also offer the option to opt in and subscribe to your newsletter or join your talent community. This is an excellent opportunity to engage with “window shoppers,” or candidates who might be checking out your company but are not ready to leave their current position unless they have a compelling reason to do so.
5) Data-driven results
Use the predictive data that you have (reach based on spend, for example) to define your goals for this automation campaign and use metrics to tell the story of what the result is going to be and the estimated revenue you will drive by filling these number of positions quickly and at what intervals. This is important both to optimize what future campaigns and funnels will look like, and for executive level reporting to ensure that recruiting team has a budget to scale efforts moving forward.
Using Automation to Plan for a Future Recruiting State
In any kind of economy bear or bull, we don’t know what the future has in store for us and how we, as talent acquisition leaders will be supporting the business. That’s especially true right now in a post-COVID-19 business world. What’s important is building out processes and funnels that can flex and move as your hiring and talent attraction needs change and evolve no matter the market or how big or small your Talent Acquisition team actually is.
