The use of nurture campaigns is second nature to most marketing teams. Someone shows interest in your product or service, that person joins your database through some kind of lead capture and then they’re sent content and engaged with in personalized ways with the intention of getting them closer and closer to a sale. It makes perfect sense!
There’s no reason why Recruitment Marketing teams shouldn’t be doing the same thing with candidates in their talent database. After all, your talent database is filled with candidates who have shown interest in your past roles, silver medalists, current and former team members and sourced talent.
With the right nurture campaign, you can resurface these candidates and engage them with targeted outreach campaigns to help build stronger relationships, reduce spending on job ads, hire roles faster and fill more open roles in general.
If you’re not already, now’s the time to launch a candidate nurture campaign within your organization. To help you do that, we’re sharing 4 examples of candidate nurture campaigns to base your strategy on.
Rally Note: To learn even more about nurture campaigns and other things you can do to make an impact on your hiring, download our ideabook, Quick Wins to Achieve Recruitment Marketing Impact.
A quick note about messaging before you start
No matter what kind of nurture campaign you launch, here are some practical tips to remember when crafting and launching your actual messaging:
- Personalize your communications so they’re relevant to the candidate (even adding their first name can boost your open and reply rate)
- Test your delivery method, messaging and timing to see what works best for your audience
- Keep messages brief yet informative to increase conversions
- Optimize email messages so they can be easily read on mobile devices
- Write enticing email subject lines (try A/B testing with different subject lines to see which one produces a higher open rate)
Now, onto the examples!
1. Cold sourcing outreach follow-up
One area that nurturing can be especially effective is in sourcing talent. While a candidate might not respond to a recruiter’s initial outreach message, over time and multiple messages, the likelihood of a response becomes higher.
Take LinkedIn, for example. One message in a candidate’s inbox can easily get overlooked, especially if that candidate is in high demand. But weekly messages are much more likely to make you stand out in their mailbox.
But this doesn’t mean spamming candidates with the same message over and over. A more helpful approach, both for you and the candidate, is to do more than just promote open jobs; spice up your messaging with employer branding content, for example.
The content topics that candidates engage with most, according to data from Rally Inside, our new analytics & benchmarking tool.
Blogs or employee stories can help your messages seem less intrusive, answer pressing questions they may have about your company and generally help them get to know you better — all things lending to a higher response rate.
Measure the success of your cold outreach nurture campaigns with the following metrics:
- Candidate engagement (including email opens and clicks)
- Response rate from candidates
- Applications from cold outreach
2. Reminder to complete a job application
If you’ve ever been side-tracked while online shopping, you know that you can expect a prompt email politely reminding you to complete your purchase. Well, you can do something similar with candidates who don’t finish their job applications.
A candidate dropping out of their application doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not interested in your opportunity. There could have been an emergency, the power could have gone out, the dog needed walking; a million things could have happened.
A simple application reminder from Cornerstone OnDemand.
With this in mind, a reminder to complete their job application can make all the difference in getting candidates back on track, finishing their applications and yielding more applicants for your open roles.
Don’t feel restricted to one form of communication when sending these reminders either; reminders can be sent in all kinds of ways, including email, text and even pop-ups triggered whenever an applicant goes to leave your careers site.
Measure the success of your application reminder nurture campaigns with the following metrics:
- Candidate engagement with emails (including opens and clicks)
- Abandoned and partially completed applications
3. Resurface existing talent from your database
Before putting in the time and energy to source new talent whenever a new role opens up, look to the people you’ve already put in the work to get into your network. They may not have been ready to apply when they first joined your database, but circumstances might be different now; the right opportunity at the right time is likely all it takes to win them over.
This can be as easy as sending an automated email sequence to candidates that fit the new role, which might require some audience segmenting on your part (i.e. the new role is an in-person tech position in Spain, so only send to tech candidates in and around Spain).
It’s also important to stress that resurfacing existing talent is a very budget-friendly approach to generating applicants. You could pay to place job ads for weeks, if not months, to find the perfect applicant, or you could put the call out to your talent database and find them without paying a cent.
Measure the success of your talent resurfacing nurture campaigns with the following metrics:
- Candidate engagement with emails (including opens and clicks)
- Applications from existing members of your talent database
4. Stay in touch throughout the recruitment process
The most common problem candidates cite for having a negative candidate experience is poor communication. To avoid this happening to you, keeping people engaged and informed through their entire candidate experience is a must.
This email from Beamery was sent to candidates who signed up for an upcoming hiring event. It checks all the boxes: it’s personalized, prompt and explains what to expect next.
But you likely know that; the bigger problem for many recruitment teams is having the time and resources to ensure this constant communication, especially for those dealing with high volume recruiting. This is where a CRM with email automation can save the day.
Instead of having someone responsible for manually crafting and sending messages with status updates and next steps at every step of the candidate journey, you can automate the process.
Simply craft the messages, target the right candidates with the right messaging and hit “start.” This opens up your team to take care of other tasks while also making sure that candidates receive the constant communication they need.
Measure the success of your multi-touch nurture campaigns with the following metrics:
- Candidate engagement with emails (including opens and clicks)
- Drop off rate at different parts of the candidate journey (i.e. after applying, first interview and so on)
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To see these strategies in action, download our free ideabook, 5 Quick Wins to Achieve Recruitment Marketing Impact. Plus, to combine with your new nurture campaigns, you’ll gain access to 4 other proven, actionable Recruitment Marketing tactics to meet your business and talent-related goals in today’s noisy, competitive market.
