At Esanosys, we constantly look for new ways to use marketing automation software. After struggling to hire good people for our startup, I looked at ways to improve our hiring process. It took me some time to realize that hiring isn’t much different from sales and marketing. You start with creating a great job description and then reach out to a large pool of potential candidates who do not know about your startup yet. You then try selling them the startup job and the benefits. Many respond to your emails, we talk to some on phone and invite the best for face-to-face interviews at our office or in coffee shops, mostly to realize they aren’t a good fit. Some do not even go through our website to know about us in detail and I must admit it’s a turn off.
I can’t imagine someone joining us without knowing about us in detail. The high rejection rates make the whole process time consuming and tiring. Our recruiters felt the fatigue and lowered the criteria to onboard non-deserving candidates to meet their goals.
Sound similar to onboarding a SaaS customer at a heavy discount only to see them exit in a few months? That’s the problem, I believe which plagues sales managers and recruiters alike. Also, this process of hiring lacked intelligence which we are so accustomed to when we sell our services to a client. That’s when I looked at marketing automation for help. I did a small experiment and the results were exceptional. Without going into details of our recruitment campaign, lets discuss how marketing and sales technology can come to the rescue of recruiters.
Before we dig deeper let’s revisit marketing automation and how it helps salesmen and marketers. Marketing automation is a tool that is meant for both the marketing department and the sales department. While it helps the marketing department with the automation of mundane marketing tasks, it also raises the level of personalization present in marketing content quite a bit. With its unique lead management system, marketers can gather data about leads, nurture them accordingly by providing them personalized content, and finally handing those over to sales by assigning lead scores.
The sales department in turn benefits from the quality of leads that are handed over to them. Gone are the days when marketers handed sales under-qualified leads unprepared to buy a product. With lead scoring models in place, the sales department knows that the leads are sales-ready and prepared to buy.
Marketing automation if integrated properly with an organization’s CRM, gives a boost to its functionality. Marketers can segment better with CRM integration and the sales department get a full-view of what is happening around them. With so much information at their disposal, personalization becomes easier for both marketers and sales representatives.
The most important benefit of marketing automation and CRM is that it helps both the marketing and sales department to focus on the right leads, nurture them and ultimately qualify them as closed deals.
So, how can we use the same principle and logic when it comes to recruiting?
Well, if you think about it, the principles of hiring are very much similar to the principles of sales and marketing. Recruiters sift through thousands of resumes to shortlist a few hundred. Marketers also have to sift through thousands of contacts and nurture them to come up with few leads that they think might make the purchase. Recruiters contact the shortlisted candidates and out of them very few find the job interesting and agree for a telephonic interview. Similarly, once these leads have been passed on to sales, only a very few marketing qualified leads agree to talk with the sales rep. Meanwhile when it comes to the day of the interview, very few people turn up and as a result very few are selected. While the sales reps try to convince their sales qualified leads to make the buy, only one or two agree to buy. Now out of the one or two candidates selected for the job, if they are shown the door because of non-performance, vacancies are again created, as a result there is a repeat of the same process. Same thing is noticed when customers leave and the whole cycle starts all over. In many high growth stage companies like ours, it’s never ending cycle.
Now the similarities are becoming clearer to you, aren’t they? The way marketing and sales close deals are similar to the way recruiters recruit candidates for a job vacancy. When recruiters send emails to prospective candidates, they should follow up only with the ones who engage with the emails, visit the relevant pages on their website like about us, careers, work culture, etc. Positive actions such as following your organization on social media should not be ignored either because that acts as an interest towards your company. Candidates coming for the interview without even checking your organization’s website are a bad choice.
Using marketing automation and CRM will help recruiters sift through candidates easily. They can assign a scoring model just like marketers do and score them according to their actions. Candidates above a certain lead score are better candidates and should be called in for interviews because they stand a better chance of being the perfect fit in your organization.
When recruiters start using marketing automation and CRM for recruiting, they can follow up on candidates’ activities on social media channels. For example, if you are a recruiter and you want to recruit a Java programmer, you would like a candidate who is active on LinkedIn and GitHub and is probably widely followed for her Java related posts. Following relevant hashtags on social media also helps recruiters find passive candidates who might be a good fit for the job but aren’t actively looking. It is the same as creating a hashtag for promotion of a product.
Just like marketers nurture their leads who are not ready to make a purchase, recruiters too can nurture candidates by using email alerts when there is a job vacancy and recruiters get alerted by the actions taken by the candidate like whether they opened the email, clicked on a link, etc. Recruiters should also produce content for newsletters, so that their pool of candidates are always up-to-date about vacancies. Sending a quarterly newsletter to prospective candidates is not a widely known practice but might be a good try.
CRM and marketing automation systems have made the life of marketers and salespeople a lot easier. HRs and recruiters too have adopted complex candidate management systems, but wouldn’t it be great to have a system which will replace all manual tasks and increase the probability of getting the right candidate for the job. This system will not only save recruiters a lot of time, but also a lot of money in the long run.
