Using Marketing Automation to Engage Passive Candidates

This article on using marketing automation to engage passive candidates follows on excellently from our Recruiter Clinic last week; How to engage with passive candidates.  It was written for us by Mindy Gofton, Head of Marketing Strategy and Innovation, at I-COM.

How often do you follow up with candidates you’ve placed? At the end of the first month? At the end of a three-month trial? When they’ve been in their job a year? Or two? How much contact is too much and how can you determine when candidates are ready to re-engage with a recruiter in order to take the next step in their careers?

Passive candidates are the golden fleece of the recruitment industry. Successfully placing a candidate into a good job will leave that candidate with a great deal of goodwill towards you and your firm, goodwill you can turn into repeat business as that candidate progresses in their career.

However, many recruitment firms struggle to keep the attention of passive candidates because of the time required to maintain relationships. Using marketing automation effectively, you can automate much of the communication process if you understand the pain points and goals of those candidates.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a tool that can help improve the efficiency of your marketing communications, while at the same time enabling you to personalise communication. Marketing automation platforms are generally comprised of an email marketing client, a CRM system, a reporting and attribution tool and the ability to generate custom workflows based on the actions taken by leads within the CRM in regards to your email campaigns and on your website.

When setup correctly, a marketing automation system will enable you to track the entire lifecycle of each candidate in your database on any device through which they access your website. You can also use it to track the lifetime value of your different campaigns, which means you can better assess the ROI of your content marketing and social media activities.

Using marketing automation, you can also ensure that you keep in touch with passive candidates at key points after their placement, without having to take the time to actively phone them up, making building that ongoing relationship more cost-effective.

The number of platforms offering marketing automation is growing all the time, but some of the most well known platforms include:

• Act-on
• HubSpot
• Marketo
• Eloqua
• SharpSpring

 

Which one you choose really is a matter of what fits best with your company’s budget and will integrate most easily with your website and internal systems. At I-COM we partner with SharpSpring as we find that it offers the best value for money for businesses just getting started with marketing automation.

Key dates in the relationship calendar

Using marketing automation, you can manage your ongoing touch points with candidates by automating the key contact points, asking for feedback and encouraging action. Imagine, at the end of a candidate’s first week, that your system automatically sends an email telling them that you hope they had a fantastic first week and asking them to get in touch to let you know how everything’s going, or to go to your website and fill in a feedback form about their experience working with you? That simple, automated task, probably just saved you 10 minutes for each candidate you place.

Then, at 3 months you could automate an email which congratulates them on reaching the end of their trial period and directing them to an article offering advice on getting through a 3-month review/appraisal and how to make an impression. You’ve let them know that they’re important to you and you’ve offered them some valuable help.

At 6 months you could send an email that suggests ways to help them demonstrate value so as to be in a great place to request a raise at the end of their first year.

When a candidate has been in their job for a year, you could, perhaps, send them a congratulatory message and ask them to fill in a survey about their year so far, designed to get them thinking about the next steps in their career, and sound them out about whether they’re settled or are starting to think about their next move.

You could then, depending on how they answer these questions, send a notification to the relevant consultant letting them know to get in touch with that candidate.

You can make all of these key communications, designed to interact on a personal level with a candidate, without having to take the time to make personal contact. The candidate gets a positive message and useful advice and you save time by only having to set up the emails and write the content once.

Use email and content to provide ongoing value

Even after a you’ve placed a candidate in a job, you can continue to provide ongoing value to that candidate through your expert knowledge of the industries in which you work. You understand the career paths available, the skillsets that each stage of that progression requires, and the areas where candidates often struggle to gain knowledge or acquire training. Using your understanding of the candidates you place, you can build segmented email campaigns offering specific help to your candidates, helping them to fix pain points and achieve goals.

Segment your candidates both by industry and by job type (and seniority) so that you are offering content that feels personalised for them because it directly relates to what they are experiencing in their jobs.

For example, if you work in the legal industry, you could build a segment for trainee solicitors. As part of the email strategy to keep them engaged, put together a guide to CPD resources for solicitors and maintain a calendar of legal events, using your email newsletters to update candidates on upcoming events. You might also want to invite candidates or clients to provide commentary on important changes in the law that impact solicitors, demonstrating both your insight into the industry and helping young trainee solicitors stay up to date on the prevalent issues of the day.

Use life of the lead, and lead scoring

Having a CRM that ties into a system that tracks all interaction between a candidate and your website and your emails means that you can react the moment that passive candidates become active by making use of lead scoring.

Set up your lead scoring to indicate the value of a specific type of interaction. For example, you might value a candidate reading a blog article at 1 point – they are engaging with your content, but are taking in your thought leadership content, not job hunting. You might value looking at a single job listing at 15 points – this candidate might not be actively looking, but the right position could tempt them to change roles. A candidate that looks at three or more jobs in one session is likely to be actively looking, so you might score this activity with an extra 10 points (on top of the 45 that they would get for looking at job listings).

When a candidate reaches a certain number of points you can then kick off an automated workflow designed to encourage them to update their CV. If a candidate updates their CV, you can set the system to notify the relevant consultant to get in touch.

By measuring how candidates interact with your email content and your website, you can use lead scoring and automated workflows to indicate the point at which a candidate is ready to start looking for their next position, either by monitoring when they begin looking at multiple job listings, or by encouraging them to update their CVs. If you build in points for person-to-person contact, you can verify their intentions and also ensure that you renew that relationship before they ever get to the point of speaking to any of your competitors.

What you need to get started

By now you can hopefully see the power of using an end-to-end tool that personalises communication based on a candidate’s actions, compared to using email marketing alone. However, you may find yourself a bit daunted by the prospect of having to build intricate workflows designed to predict every possible action.

That level of granularity is the end goal, not the starting point. At the start, you need a well-segmented candidate database and a commitment to creating detailed content that focuses on what your candidates will find useful.

Start off with a basic set of segments – by industry or job type, perhaps – and a minimal number of workflows.  As you see how candidates interact with your content, you can use the data to help you build that granularity over time and in the most effective way.

The next steps

The best way to get marketing automation up and running is to compare a few systems and find the one that you feel is the best fit for your business. You need to find a champion (or two) who will be responsible for learning the system and who will work with your marketing team and your consultants to ensure that they get the most out of the system.

Then you need to create a clear strategy that defines your initial segments, how you are going to engage with them and the content you need to produce.

Once you have a defined strategy, the only thing left to do is jump in – just make sure to track your results and use them to keep refining your program. If you’re doing this, then you should start to see increased candidate retention and concrete growth of your bottom line.