CATEGORY: Automationemail-marketing

Email automation buys recruiters more time and increased success

The average Briton will hold 6 jobs in their working life, so the concept of a job for life is well and truly a thing of the past. The recruitment industry is flourishing, enjoying a 20% growth in 2017, and according to REC it is forecast that it will grow by 4 per cent in 2018/19, 4.5 per cent in 2019/20 and 5 per cent in 2020/21. But the industry, like many others, is about to face a fundamental shift to embrace technology and automation to further increase their results.

Building relationships is fundamental to recruitment, perhaps becoming even more important as the number of jobs we hold throughout our careers has increased. For recruiters, job hopping means that candidates can stay on the radar even after a successful placement. Recruiters need to nurture these relationships as the same candidate may be a viable option at some point in the foreseeable future.

In today’s digital world, recruiters need to find new ways to connect with both candidates and employers and to sustain these connections long term. Whilst there is still no substitute for the personal touch, it is possible to provide this personal touch at scale with the help of email automation. Recruiters need to be able to balance physical and digital outreach when building and sustaining relationships and email is the perfect avenue.

According to Smart Insights the industry benchmark for recruitment and staffing business’ email campaigns are;

·         Open rate: 20.73%

·         Click Through Rate: 2.18%

·         Soft bounce: 0.53%

·         Hard bounce; 0.6%

Is this lower than you thought? Not if you compare it to the levels of interaction that you receive on social media – think how few comments and likes individual posts achieve as a comparison and then email remains a more appealing prospect. Email marketing is almost three times more effective than social media.

Email has the additional advantage of complex reporting, where you can see the engagement and interests of your audience through their interactions with your mails. How often and on what content your contacts click can give a clear indication of their motivations and interests.

Keep your clients up-to-date and aware of quality candidates by maintaining contact with them through email programmes and automations. Build the trust of your clients and inform them of your business’ development, so you are their first thought when they need to expand their team.

One of the toughest things with email automation is knowing where to start.  Here are a few suggestions to get you kicked off:

Application Acknowledgement

One of the biggest complaints of candidates today is the lack of follow up form recruiters and overall transparency of the recruiting process. Email automation can help with this process. You can start the relationship on the right foot with a campaign to every applicant acknowledging that you have received their application and will follow up with them in a specified time frame. If there is going to be a delay in your ability to go back to the applicant, then you can build another email for a slightly later point in time. This email can update them on progress and remind them of your timeline.

Sourced Candidates

The challenge with recruiting passive candidates is that it usually requires multiple contact attempts before the candidate will reply. This process can be extremely time consuming and difficult to track. With email automation you can build drip campaigns to warm up and nurture the candidates and gauge their interest in your current opportunities. You can schedule the campaign, reminders and follow ups within a set amount of time and interlace it with personal outreach like phone calls or personal emails.

Status Updates

There is always a bottleneck in your process that is completely out of your control. It could be a hiring manager who takes weeks to review the resumes of submitted candidates or is unavailable to conduct interviews for weeks at a time. Unfortunately for you, you have a handful of candidates who are anxiously awaiting next steps. Continue to keep them engaged by building a series of emails updating them on the status. Even if the emails repeat the same message, the candidates will appreciate you keeping them informed of the latest updates, even if the only news is no news.

Interview Prep

Maybe you have several candidates who are scheduled to interview with the hiring manager within the next couple of weeks. You could build a campaign to help them prep for the interview, and let them know you are available to answer questions or help them prep. The first email could provide some background information on the company and the hiring manager. Then, the second email could provide background on the interview format, including types of questions that will be asked or which part of their experience they should highlight during the interview. The opportunities are endless.

Reference Requests

Once a candidate makes it passed the interview, you may need to request references. Whilst this isn’t technically a campaign, you can build an automation that will trigger an email when you move the candidate to the reference stage of the hiring pipeline.  Since this is an email that you will send on a frequent basis why not have a template that you can simply rinse and repeat.

Rejections

No one likes being rejected, but it is not as bad as not hearing anything at all and being left wondering. Not following up with candidates is one of the quickest ways to make a bad impression and end a relationship. Whilst the candidate may not be a good fit for the current role, they may be perfect for a future one. There are always more rejections than successes, so you can save yourself time and effort by automating this stage of the process.

 

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If you would like to learn more about email marketing automation and get some help setting up your first automated campaign - we run a free series of workshops, our Marketing Automation Accelerator Programme