Why Recruiters Need Marketing Automation
Given the facts that an average person changes jobs 12 times in their lifetime and that 91% of Millennials expect to change jobs every three years, and 86% of professionals in their 20’s are somewhat interested in changing their careers, it translates into a lot of opportunities for recruiters in the foreseeable future. For some, an internal transfer or a promotion may be considered a change, while others only consider it a job change if there is a jump to a new company. Either way, that’s a lot of job-hopping, which a recruiter can benefit from, but it also means a lot of data to process.
As a recruiter, you attract and nurture candidate leads, “sell” to those leads the idea of working with you as well as taking different job opportunities, coordinate and manage interviews, and the list goes on.
Relationships Are at The Heart of Recruiting
Building relationships is essential to recruit, and it’s becoming even more important as the number of jobs people are likely to hold throughout their careers has increased. The recruiter job is not over even after a successful candidate placement, as the exact candidate or position may soon become a viable avenue. People don’t change jobs just for a higher payment or better benefits and perks. They might experiment with a changing career focus or searching for a better work-life balance. They can also consider that their skills and abilities don’t fit their job anymore. They start looking for more interesting work or a better alignment between personal values and organizational priorities.
That’s the reason why as a recruiter, you now need to continue nurturing relationships even after reaching the goal of a successful placement. And it’s a lot to keep track of, and even the best recruiters need some help to keep the process running smoothly and efficiently. That help comes in the form of developing a lead generation strategy to maintain a strong pipeline full of quality candidates. In today’s digital world, recruiters need to find new ways to connect with candidates and employers and sustain these connections long term.
Making Relationships Digital with Marketing Automation
Even if nothing can replace the human touch when building and sustaining relationships, you now need to balance physical and digital outreach as a recruiter. To achieve this balance and make candidate and employer engagement alike more intelligent, more and more recruiters have turned to marketing automation.
What can a marketing automation platform do for you, you might be wondering? It can sustain your efforts in the lead nurturing, campaign planning and execution, campaign effectiveness measurement, and website visitor identification. In your objective of building relationships, marketing automation can help you engage with candidates and employers across multiple channels—email, social media, and events.
Why Marketing Automation Makes Sense for Recruiters
Surely you can do your job without the help of a marketing automation platform, such as Sugar Market—you’ve done so for years now. But you need it if you want to build and sustain a personalized, digital relationship in today’s tech-savvy recruiting market.
Specifically, marketing automation can help recruiters build stronger relationships by:
Engaging across platforms: There are numerous ways to approach your prospects/ candidates, from email to social media to text messages to phone calls. A marketing automation platform drives engagement across any number of platforms and measures the success of your efforts (e.g., to make clear that a conversation on Twitter and a click in an email both came from the same person).
Building trust: Driving engagement on multiple channels leads you towards consistent communication in more ways. For example, you might use these different channels to share thoughts on changes in the workplace, highlight career trends in various industries, or offer advice around topics like resume building, job seeking, or carrier mapping. And the more candidates and employers engage with you, the more likely they will trust you for their recruiting needs.
Improving knowledge about preferences: A marketing automation platform collects information every time users engage, which helps you build a profile that captures nuances like topics of interest, preferred channels for communication, or how likely they are to engage. Ideally, this identification should help you attract stronger candidates. It can help you determine the best channels to attract your target leads and help you cut down on screening activities to weed out completely unqualified leads.
And the more you know about candidates or employers, the more you can personalize your relationship with them.
Getting the timing right: Getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time is a must, and the knowledge about candidates and employers that a marketing automation platform captures for you, does that. For instance, it 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).
Nurturing relationships long-term: Even if someone isn’t ready to make a job change or a company doesn’t have an open position to fill right now, it doesn’t mean they won’t have those needs in the future. Therefore, you need to keep these candidates and employers warm by nurturing the relationship in the long-term. A marketing automation platform can help you build trust by continuing to drive engagement and capturing changes in activity and preferences so that you can personalize outreach accordingly with information that matches their unique needs at any given point in time.
Providing insight: How well did a campaign do? Did an email receive a lot of opens and clicks? Who acted from a personalized ad? A marketing automation platform can answer all these questions and more to provide insight on recruiting performance. You can then use this insight to understand what’s working well (and what’s not) to improve your future efforts.
Closing Thoughts
We have already agreed that today’s tech-savvy market demands data-backed, personalized relationships and marketing automation can deliver. Learn how to take advantage of data to make more informed decisions by integrating marketing automation tools into your organization’s CRM system.
This integration makes it easy to drive candidate and employer leads forward or push them back to a nurturing phase as needed and keep all information consistent and updated. In doing so, this marketing automation-CRM integration improves visibility and allows you to develop truly personalized, digital, one-on-one relationships at scale.
Ready to start developing new strategies to leverage your recruiting activities? See how Sugar Market can help!
