As a recruitment marketer, these challenges likely sound all too familiar:
- Re-engaging past candidates
- Nurturing new and passive talent
- Getting more engagement on your content
- Hiring faster without job ads
But good news! There is a solution to these challenges using something that you already own and have already paid for: the existing talent in your CRM!
Jackie Denner, Global Employer Brand, MongoDB.
We had the pleasure of sitting down with Jackie Denner, Global Employer Brand at MongoDB, to hear about her experience and lessons learned turning MongoDB’s existing talent in their CRM into an engaged talent community, largely through launching the company’s first talent newsletter.
Today, we’re sharing the top highlights from this conversation to help ensure that the right people within your CRM receive the right content, you understand how to measure the reception of your content strategy and that you generally walk away with a blueprint for building a content strategy that results in more engagement, referrals and hires!
Before anything else, however, the first step should be to understand the current state of your CRM.
Evaluate the current state of the talent in your CRM
Your CRM is filled with candidates who have shown interest in your past roles, silver medalists, current and former team members and sourced talent. But they are very rarely leveraged to their full potential.
Utilizing and building upon their current CRM was a goal of MongoDB’s when Jackie started in her role. She saw an opportunity to leverage the company’s CRM to:
- Continually keep candidates warm to help fill roles faster
- Nurture and engage quality passive candidates
- Keep the MongoDB brand front of mind
- Get all of the employer branding MongoDB was producing in front of an ideal audience
- Develop an alumni network to help with boomerang employees (Jackie plans to eventually pursue this)
After exploring the opportunity available with this data, and aligning with the company’s hiring goals, she and her team established a talent community, settling on a newsletter as the best way to communicate with this audience.
For a content strategy that went beyond job ads to work, however, she needed to first segment her audience.
Personalize your campaigns through segmentation
There are some scenarios where sending the same email to every person in your CRM makes sense. For example, automated emails confirming an application has been received or a company-wide update that affects all employees.
But more often than not, it’s best to segment your candidates and nurture them with messages and content more tailored to their wants and needs. You can segment candidates in your CRM by all kinds of characteristics, but the most common include:
- Location
- What business unit they belong to (i.e. engineering, sales, etc.)
- Interests (i.e. industry news, company updates, DEI initiatives, etc)
This kind of segmentation alone can help you make sure that each candidate receives content relevant to their career, geographic location and personal interests.
If there are many different types of candidates in your CRM and you don’t have the capacity to segment every one of them, try doing what Jackie did: start by just segmenting by major or high-priority business units, which, in MongoDB’s case, are sales, engineering and product, customer engineering and corporate.
To perform this kind of segmentation, you’re going to first need a mechanism for candidates to input the information you’ll need to segment them. This could be via a pop up form, or a form connected to various “Join Our Talent Community” buttons on your careers site.
Then, you’ll need a tool that automatically segments candidates based on this information, or at least makes it easy and quick to create segments manually. Have a look below at how this works with Gem, the tool that MongoDB uses for their segmentation (and CRM).
What is asked of candidates when they first sign up to join MongoDB’s talent community and how this information translates on the backend within Gem for segmentation purposes.
Before going out and investing in a completely new tool, for the sake of time, money and easy adoption, try looking at your existing tech stack to see if there are features related to segmentation that you’re not taking advantage of.
In MongoDB’s case, they were already using Gem as their CRM. Recruiters and other stakeholders were already familiar with the software, and it turned out that it also allowed Jackie to do exactly what she wanted: send out branded MongoDB newsletters to different talent segments from Gem.
Ensure content relevancy for each segment
In Jackie’s email content strategy, you’ll find blogs, articles, videos, social media posts and all sorts of other content. But the one trait that they all have is that they’re helpful specifically to the people they’re being sent to.
The newsletter being sent to MongoDB’s engineering and product segment, for example, consists of jobs and content relevant to engineering, such as an article detailing the tools used by current engineers at the company or a message from the company’s CTO. Soon, Jackie also plans to send DEI-specific newsletters to candidates who indicate an interest in hearing about MongoDB’s DEI initiatives.
Beyond tailoring your content to be helpful to your respective audiences, it’s also important to offer content that’s unique to your company — that would make you stand out in a lineup and convince people to choose your company over others. For example, if you’re a non profit that fosters dogs, and you’re trying to attract more people to apply for fostering, try sharing stories of the dogs who have already found homes through your service and are now living their best lives with their new owners!
Jackie discussing the specific content included in different newsletters sent to different segments.
Another reason Jackie chose Gem is that it allowed her to create branded templates she could quickly modify and reuse for different segments. Whether she and her team are sending out a newsletter, event invite or anything else, using templates instead of building each email from scratch saves her time, stress and allows her to focus more on what’s most important: giving candidates the best possible content.
For example, here’s what the formatting of the template she uses for MongoDB’s newsletters looks like:
- The MongoDB logo at top
- A quick intro paragraph teasing the featured content
- A section with featured jobs tailored to each segment
- A section detailing pieces of content for the segment
- A #LifeAtMongoDB section that shares the latest social media posts about what people are saying about MongoDB across different business units (this section also includes a CTA under each post directing people back to the business unit’s specific careers page)
- A footer with MongoDB’s social profiles and other points of contact
To give you an idea of these templates in action, and how content differs from segment to segment, below are 4 different emails sent to 3 different segments of MongoDB’s talent community.
How templates are reused and content changes for different segments sent to members of MongoDB’s CRM. Notice the example on the far right; newsletters aren’t the only form of communication you can have with your talent community. With MongoDB beginning to host in-person hiring events again, they also use email campaigns to invite different segments to relevant events.
Measure, Pivot, Repeat
How do you know if your content is resonating with your audiences, or that your email campaigns are succeeding in general? Here’s what Jackie keeps track of to be able to answer these questions:
- Open rates: The more people open your emails, the better you’re getting at tailoring your subject lines and promoted topics to the audiences you’re sending to.
- Clicks: If more people are consistently clicking your content, that’s a sign that your overall strategy is headed in the right direction. Jackie also tracks links for the jobs she features so that if someone applies directly via the newsletter, she can make that connection. While she doesn’t currently do this, it can also be helpful to track each specific piece of content you feature to understand what gets the most clicks and what kinds of content to prioritize going forward.
- How many times candidates belonging to each segment are contacted: Are certain segments being forgotten about or falling through the cracks? Keeping track of contact frequency can help you understand this, as well as how well different segments respond to being contacted at different frequencies (i.e. maybe you can only contact a segment twice in a month before they stop opening your emails).
- How many of them click on links: If you’re seeing a higher percentage of each segment click on your links, that’s a great sign that they’re actually interested in the content you’re sending them. If not, it might be time to look at what you can change, such as experimenting with more or bolder CTAs under your content (i.e. Apply Now, Read Now, etc.)
- How many of them are hired by MongoDB: Do certain segments produce more hires? Why? Is there anything about their characteristics, or the content you’re sending them, that you can learn from and incorporate into your strategies for other segments?
The metrics tracked by Gem for MongoDB’s talent newsletter campaign.
Most of these metrics are tracked through Gem’s in-house analytics, but Jackie also uses a link tracking tool to be able to better understand how candidates are interacting with her content. For example, all job posts featured in MongoDB’s newsletters are tracked with this tool so that Jackie can directly connect any applications or hires that result from listed jobs in the newsletter.
Another “metric” that Jackie keeps track of is sending cadence. While she initially planned to send out a monthly newsletter to each segment, she realized after a few months that she didn’t have enough quality content to maintain this sending cadence. As a result, she switched to bi-monthly newsletters. This way, while candidates would receive fewer newsletters, the quality and helpfulness of each newsletter would be higher.
While these are the types of metrics that Jackie keeps track of, the more metrics you keep track of, the better you can understand what parts of your strategy are working, which aren’t and what you need to improve going forward.
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To learn even more about Jackie’s experience creating MongoDB’s first talent newsletter, how you can do the same and how to make sure every candidate in your CRM receives content they’ll love and engage with, watch our full on demand webinar, Building an Engaged Talent Community That Converts to Hires!
