I think one of the most exciting things about Recruitment Marketing is that it’s such a new space – which affords us the freedom to try new things and write the rules as we go!
Recently, at GE, we did just that. We tried out a new approach that was intended to provide our talent community with some real value without asking for anything in return. We sent an email out to one million leads in our talent community, sharing a link to take a Traitify career assessment to identify their best fit (at GE or anywhere else) based on their interests and personality type.
While we wanted to provide our talent community with a token of thanks for being part of our network, we ended up getting a ton more back in return than we bargained for!
Here are some of the results we saw after the initial mail-out:
- 50% boost in career site visitors compared to the previous week
- 25% increase in applicants compared with the same time period last year
- 44% email open rate, 28% click-through rate
- Candidates from 182 countries filled out the assessment
- Hundreds of people sent positive feedback about their results
- Improved information about the leads in our database to enhance sourcing efforts and the quality of conversations between recruiters, candidates and hiring managers
- More insights to personalize content marketing to our talent community
So why did we do this – what was the initial motivation? Let me give you the scoop:
In Talent Acquisition, I think that one of the most important things we do is connect people with the right opportunities for them. As a Recruitment Marketer on the TA team, we can build relationships between our company and candidates before they may be looking for a job. It’s an opportunity to help candidates find their fit, and there are new tools that can help us.
I first heard about Tratify’s personality-based career assessments about 18 months ago and I immediately felt this would be a great tool to support our vision at GE. Their assessment is really straightforward and visual. The visual component makes it quick (typically less than 90 seconds to complete) and also makes it work for the candidates in our network from around the globe who speak different languages.
However, it took some time to get things off the ground. This was a big undertaking and we had so many other things going on. In Recruitment Marketing, we’re always multi-tasking with so many initiatives we’re trying to impact. It was hard to know what to address first.
Finally, I had a bit of an epiphany. Rather than try to boil the ocean and roll out our full vision and plan for Traitify, a little step was better than not acting at all. So, we decided to send out an email to our talent network offering for them to take the assessment.
How we executed on the campaign:
We used our Recruitment Marketing Platform, Smashfly, to deploy the emails since that’s where all of our leads are stored and there’s an email marketing tool built into the platform.
In terms of timing, we decided on January because it coincided with the New Year resolution period—when people are setting career goals and thinking about ways to switch things up to meet those goals.
For the email itself, we made sure to keep it really short and sweet, with a clear call to action to encourage click throughs. We also put people’s names in the subject line, which seems to always have a positive impact on open rates for us.
The exact subject line we used for this communication was, “[First name], is your career fulfilling your purpose?” Several people commented back that seeing their names along with the career purpose prompt motivated them to open the email.
We also made sure to keep our partners at Traitify in the know about the date, time and volume we were anticipating. This way they were able to make sure everything was working seamlessly given the high volume of traffic we were expecting to come from GE.
What were our learnings?
- That candidates are craving this type of content! The best candidates don’t just want to land a job, they want to find a career that will help them feel fulfilled because it’s in line with their passions and skill sets. Also, that people respond well when brands provide them with something of value without asking for anything in return, and this is definitely true for employer brands.
- That the mobile candidate experience remains of critical importance—55% of the 70,000+ candidates who took this assessment did it using their mobile devices. This reinforced the importance of always testing our content, sites and other candidate experience touch points from both desktop and mobile.
- For high-importance messages like this one, don’t be afraid to follow up! We sent a second email out a few days later to people who opened the first email but did not click through to try and prompt them to action – and it paid off! Our second email, which was sent to nearly 300,000 people, had a 71% open rate and a 15% click-through rate.
- Lastly, this campaign was a good reminder to take baby steps towards your goal! Dividing up our Traitify implementation into smaller steps like this made it easier to start gaining momentum and seeing results.
So what’s next in our use of Traitify?
There are a few things we want to do. First, we want to customize some of our content marketing and messaging towards these new segments of people that were uncovered (Planners, Visionaries, Mentors, Action Takers, Analyzers). For instance, we could send Mentors our CEO’s state of the union address. For Analyzers, we could send them content that highlights key facts and figures associated with our products.
We also want to administer this tool to every employee at GE to see their best fit. We can use these results to aid with internal mobility efforts as well as to help build the best teams. For instance, if a team consists of three visionary types, it might be time to add a more action-oriented person to boost overall performance.
I hope our results and execution plan offers some inspiration for you to consider how you can best match candidates with opportunities at your organization. Or, how you can excel at your next email marketing campaign!
Oh, and lastly, if you’re interested in finding out about your own fit and seeing the experience for yourself, you can take the assessment on the GE career site.
