As a biopharmaceutical organization with over 26,000 clinical and commercial employees supporting customers in over 110 countries, Syneos operates in an incredibly competitive hiring landscape, especially in light of the pandemic’s heightened need for healthcare workers. But since coming aboard in 2019, Kerri Smith, Director, Global Commercial Recruiting Operations, and the Recruitment Marketing team have persevered to help Syneos increase their daily applications 10-fold!
Largely fuelling these achievements was the use of the right technology, namely personalized landing pages, text-based outreach, passive candidate nurturing and constant data-driven optimization.
While Syneos has used Recruitment Marketing technology for over a decade (they were actually one of the first companies to try it!), today we’re sharing how Syneos recently put this technology to use to achieve the most daily applications in Syneos history. Their success was recognized with a 2021 Rally Award for Best Use of Recruitment Marketing Technology! We hope this case study will give you some real pro tips for using tech in your own hiring efforts. Let’s dive in!
Personalized landing pages
With over 1.4 million candidates in their CRM, and an additional 40,000 added each year, Syneos has many different kinds of candidates. If they were to simply direct everyone to the same landing page, or drive them through the same application process, they would be alienating a large portion of their candidates.
Instead, through the Talemetry Recruitment Marketing Suite by Jobvite, Syneos delivers a personalized candidate experience using targeted career sites. For example, they segment their candidate pool into multiple personas and develop landing pages catered to each one, featuring employee stories and other relevant kinds of content. They can even dynamically change content on individual pages depending on who visits the site, which is a game changer when it comes to supporting international candidates in multiple languages.
An example of the kind of employee-driven content Syneos shares on their landing pages.
The Syneos Recruitment Marketing team is able to segment their candidate pool into multiple personas, and develop landing pages catered to each. All of their sites are mobile-friendly, which is especially important in light of Appcast’s findings that 61% of applications start on mobile.
Text message outreach
Syneos has spent a lot of time fine-tuning its email strategy, sending over 8,000 emails annually and increasing its year-over-year email usage by over 1,000 percent since 2019. However, to improve even further on their candidate communication efforts, the team at Syneos have begun to focus more on text messaging.
Knowing that candidates may not always be in front of their computer, especially Gen Z and Millennials, leveraging text messaging has allowed Syneos to get in front of candidates where they’re more likely to see the messages — on their phones. Plus, technology has evolved to the point where mass texting is as easy as mass email!
For example, using Jovite’s Intelligent Messaging feature, Syneos’ recruiters can create text-based hiring campaigns as easily as email campaigns. Through these targeted campaigns, they can reach thousands of candidates quickly with personalized texts, track conversation history and spin-off responses into one-on-one, candidate-recruiter conversations.
Rally note: need a few tips to get started? Check out our blog 6 Resourceful Ways to Use Text Recruiting Now.
Passive candidate nurturing
If you’re only focused on the candidates that show an active interest in joining your team, you’re missing out on a whole other source of talent — passive applicants who are interested in your company but not quite ready to apply yet. To nurture these passive candidates to apply, Syneos relies heavily on their talent network.
Within their talent network, passive candidates receive all kinds of helpful content from their Recruitment Marketing team, including culture-driven content, job notifications, event notifications and links to over 50 content pages, which cover topics ranging from employee testimonials to interview preparation.
Syneos even uses automated candidate engagement scoring to help them determine a candidate’s level of engagement for a job opportunity based upon their behavior. Essentially, they look at behavioral markers to identify interest levels and sort the engaged candidates from the unengaged. The more engaged an audience becomes, the more they shift their messaging and content to suit active job seekers rather than passive ones.
Continuous measurement and optimization
The road to achieving a 10x increase in daily applications has been an iterative one for Syneos. Using data from their Recruitment Marketing suite’s built-in analytics, candidate experience surveys and other tools and tactics described above, they’ve spent years optimizing every aspect of their recruiter ad spend, from the job sites they use to the agencies they work with, to the specific messaging they use in their job descriptions.
But the good news is that technology and guidance in the recruitment space aren’t as sparse as it was when Syneos first started. While they may have spent over a decade figuring out their process, hopefully, you can use their blueprint, and others like it, to improve your own organization’s Recruitment Marketing and employer branding efforts much more quickly.
