By now, it's no secret the talent landscape is out of whack. Competition is fierce when it comes to attracting top talent, in no small part because job seekers have been in the driver's seat these past few years.
Let's take a look at the numbers.
- 6 million Americans are out of work
- 37% of job seekers are passive
- 11 million open roles in America right now
- 6.4 million separations Ð including layoffs and quits
To stand out and truly attract right-fit talent passive or otherwise organizations need to make future-proof changes to their recruitment marketing strategies that meet the expectations of today and the future of work.
Start by focusing your efforts
Building awareness is one of the first steps to bolstering your talent pipeline, an essential tactic to help organizations weather whatever the job market brings their way. It starts with leveraging your position and technology to impact the world positively.
To attract, retain and ultimately hire candidates, you need to make them feel valued, positive and heard. Simultaneously, you need to free up and empower recruiters to do the part of the job they enjoy: building relationships.
That's easier said than done. Unfortunately, it takes 25 days for talent to hear back from a recruiter, and only 7% of brands communicate anything beyond job alerts.
When looking at the Fortune 500, a whopping 76% have a talent network or job alerts, and that's great. Around 54% send comms after communicating with talent. That's good news, too. Yet only 13% of them send an automated email reminding talent to complete an application, and only 7% send content other than jobs. There's still a lot of work to be done.
Three steps to build and maintain your talent pipeline
From the first moment you interact with talent, the experience should be positive, affirming and relevant. That engagement then needs to become increasingly relevant based on the stage and behavior of the prospect for conversion to occur. Once it does, you need to hold their interest and maintain a relationship to keep them warm to your brand.
Here's three steps to do just that.
1. Don't be reactionary
Building and maintaining your talent network takes action. Start by identifying the priority pipeline skill profiles you need to build while understanding what talent wants and needs from your organization to convert. Your job posts need to align with that. Identify your existing pipelines, including past applicants, and determine what content you can share with them to keep them engaged. Repeat these efforts on the regular. Remember, too, that your talent pool is your largest and most reliable source for hires. Focus on it, so you spend less time sorting through unqualified candidates. Then, ensure your efforts create efficiencies, delivering the progress you seek. Data does not lie.
2. Nurture your talent
To nurture candidates through the entire hiring lifecycle, you must strategically align your tech stack and the content you produce.
Based on our research on the Fortune 500, while 76% have a talent network, there's a significant drop-off in terms of nurture.
Nurture begins when a lead opts in to receive communication from your company. This opt-in mostly happens when a lead joins your talent network on your career site. However, it can also occur when meeting with a recruiter at an event or responding to a sourcer's outreach. Effective nurture melds valuable content marketing and smart email marketing, serving as the foundation for understanding and effectively targeting candidate personas. The more targeted you get with the content, messaging, and jobs you send talent network leads, the more seamless and valuable it will be for them. And that's how you keep them engaged and ready to consider a role with your organization.
3. Embrace HR Tech
To address the needs of building, maintaining and hiring from a robust talent pipeline, we at Symphony Talent have designed a change-proof integrated recruitment marketing platform complemented by creative services built for efficiency. The key to its success? Consolidate and optimize the hiring process. By integrating the sourcing, attraction, marketing, programmatic advertising, creative services, and vetting phases of hiring into a consolidated, efficient, and ever-improving pipeline, you are best positioned to meet the needs of the talent acquisition landscape, both now and down the line.
