Finding top talent is no easy feat. Yet, success can be amplified by applying your marketing mindset to the human resource acquisition strategy. We recommend treating job candidates in a similar fashion as you would leads.
Draw them into the funnel through enticing content, prioritize and grade them based on organizational fit, and then nurture them until the ink on the contract is signed.
1. Draw Job Candidates in through Inbound Marketing
One of the best ways to draw new leads to your agency is through inbound marketing, mainly the creation of targeted, optimized content and active social participation. The same goes for finding qualified job candidates.
When planning your publishing schedule, consider job candidates as a potential audience and develop resources that these individuals would find helpful. By integrating marketing and human resources, you can better get in front of top professionals when they are looking for job-related information—without the need for expensive advertising or the hiring of head hunters.
2. Grade and Prioritize Candidates
Candidates are not created equally, and it can be time intensive to thoroughly vet each application submitted without a process in place. This is why at PR 20/20 we decided to treat job candidates in the same fashion as we would leads. While your way of doing this may vary based on the technologies you have in place, here is how we handle it.
Our full job application is now created as a HubSpot form. Not only does this give us key qualification details, searchable within our contact database, but it also provides insight into their behaviors—how much time have they spent on the site, what content they read, how they found us, etc.
Our ideal hire is someone that is both qualified and has done their homework on the company. We want to know that they are interested in working at PR 20/20, not just at any agency. Much of this can be determined prior to that first interview through the application and subsequent tracking capabilities.
Using HubSpot, we can also set up smart lists based on those qualities and actions we want candidates to meet based on the available position. This way, when it comes time to hire, we can first sort through candidates that met specific criteria, instead of having to whittle down everyone that has applied.
For example, maybe we need an expert in content marketing who also has worked with Salesforce, has more than three years of experience and downloaded our Prototype Marketer ebook. We can easily pull these candidates to the top automatically.
3. Have a Pipeline of Candidates in Place
Just because you don’t need to hire today, doesn’t mean that you won’t tomorrow. We recommend planning for growth in advance, and always having a pipeline of potential candidates in mind should an opportunity transpire.
To do this, nurture available, top-quality candidates ongoing. This includes:
- Set up private Twitter lists of individuals that would be a good fit for your company, and communicate with them via social.
- As you would with agency leads, employ lead nurturing campaigns for job candidates that alert them of content and resources they may find helpful (i.e. training programs, talent-related articles, etc.).
- Hold informational interviews to get to know candidates a bit better (even when you’re not actively recruiting). Explain your hiring situation upfront, and encourage candidates to keep you in the loop as their careers’ progress.
What additional hiring pointers would you add? How do you find and capture top talent? Share your comments below.
