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No matter how great, innovative or successful your company is, simply posting job ads and waiting for the best candidates to apply is not enough anymore.
Chief executives view the unavailability of talent and skills as the biggest threat to their business (PwC CEO Survey). Companies are also finding it harder to attract performers on a market that is becoming more and more competitive and are struggling to successfully fill position in under 12 weeks. Another study by MRI Network, revealed that 86% of recruiters feel the market is now candidate-driven and they are right.
This shift in paradigm is the reason why candidate experience is now a priority for recruitment and HR departments to stand out from the competition and land top talent, which is not an easy task. HR’s challenges goes beyond “just” the recruitment process.
What happens to those great other candidates you couldn’t hire because choosing the best is sometimes difficult? You may want to hire them anyway for another position. Or those former employees that left but you wish hadn’t, wouldn’t you want them to boomerang back? And what about all the other qualified and interesting people you had to reject?
This is where talent nurturing comes in.
What is talent nurturing?
Talent nurturing is a marketing-inspired method to help companies manage and nurture their candidates, allowing them to attract more talent and fill their positions quicker. The same way marketing professionals nurture their leads to turn them into customers, recruiters can nurture their candidates to turn them into happy employees.
Now you may be thinking “marketing is not my job”, “it all sounds complicated” or “I don’t have the right skills for the task”. This is why using the right tools and platform is key to the success of your talent nurturing process.
What are the advantages of a talent nurturing solution?
A talent pool without proper nurturing usually looks like a messy database of rejected candidates you asked if you could keep their CV on file in case something came up later (do you even ever contact them back?). A talent nurturing solution aims to help organize your talent pool to properly nurture your candidates.
Have a clear overview of who your candidates are…
Logically, getting to know your candidates is the first step to efficient and effective nurturing. Using the right nurturing platform is a way to build talent pipelines and segment candidates according to their work history, experience, geographic location, etc. Such an overview will help get to know your targets better and tailor your content strategy to best fit your candidates’ interests. Having organized detailed candidate profiles gives you insights on the type of candidates you are attracting. It can even help you find clues and pinpoint mistakes you may be making in your job ads or general employer branding and know where to improve.
… and make the most of your talent pool…
Once you have better knowledge of who your candidates are, you get to exploit and nurture your talent pool. When top talent show interest in an open position or a piece of content you’ve shared, you want to build on that and actively engage with them. Personalization and automation is the way to go to communicate efficiently and develop a relationship while making your life easier. For example, inform applicants of your recruiting process next steps, redirect them to an article or a video of your latest company trip or conference, share an interview of your CEO, share latest open positions, etc. Create workflows of content and track open and click rates to build your list of “cold”, “warm” and “hire-ready” candidates based on how engaged they are with your brand. This way, you know who to contact and who to keep nurturing, thus reducing sourcing costs.
Additionally, precisely monitoring through their journey and understanding which methods contribute the most to your recruiting efforts will clear up your hiring funnel and add hard data to your decision-making.
The more you show candidates you value them, the better chance of attracting top performers to work at your company. Organizing and nurturing every candidate in your hiring funnel and automating personalized communication is the best way to maintain a relationship with your applicants. This has a direct impact on future time to hire, quality of hire and employer branding that could further lead to better referrals, feeding the virtuous circle of talent nurturing.
Takeaways
In short, talent nurturing helps you:
Make the most of your talent pool and keep a clear view on what candidates are “cold”, “warm” or “hire-ready”
Manage all your content (automated recruiting emails, landing pages…) in one place
Measure the efficiency of your campaigns and the engagement of your candidates to test, learn, improve and hire faster and better.
Interested in learning more about how talent nurturing can help with successful recruiting?
Register to our webinar on Feb 6th at 3pm CET, (Paris time)!
