How to Reach Job Seekers with 3 Recruiting Strategies

How to Reach Job Seekers with 3 Recruiting Strategies

 Do you want to know what is more challenging than finding job seekers these days? Learning how to reach job seekers. It can be a game of cat-and-mouse to have meaningful conversations with them and keep them engaged long enough to know whether they have the qualifications needed to make a great hire!

More than ever, it is essential to reach candidates as soon as possible and to be prepared when they are ready to convert. On the other hand, some candidates need several impressions before they engage with your content.

We’ll cover three strategies to stay connected to your job candidates with ease. We happen to like using the new  PivotCX Campaigns feature, but the strategies apply to recruiting in general.

 

1. Inform Past Applicants of a New Job Opening or a Re-opening

In the current employment market, candidates are getting more expensive, and job boards are raising their prices. With fresh, new traffic becoming harder to get, getting creative with how to reach job seekers can be a bloodline. 

One often-forgotten source of candidates is your past applicant pool. Some of the benefits of reaching these job seekers are that they are already familiar with your company and you don’t have to pay extra to get their contact information.

It’s likely that you already have a gauge on the people you would like to contact from your past applicant pool. Perhaps, there were two or three excellent candidates, but you could only hire one. The perfect time to get a hold of them is when a new, similar role opens. Additionally, there’s only one way to know whether these applicants are still in the market for a new job or might now be ready to make a move. 

Employers can use PivotCX Campaigns to tap into their forgotten candidate pool of past applicants and get more bang for their buck by remarketing to past candidates.

2. Organize and Tap into your Talent Community

Knowing who is in your talent community or past applicant list helps you understand and discover what works best to attract their attention to your job posts and keep them engaged for as long as possible.

You can run A/B tests by segmenting your candidates, such as dividing half your list and changing messages or altering the delivery cadence. This allows you to gain insights into how you reach out to job applicants; for example, you can find the length and type of message that works best for your candidates.

You can also be more granular in your approach to diverse candidates depending on their location, the position they applied for, how long ago they applied to the job, medium, source, etc.

Whether from an ATC, CRM, or even from a spreadsheet, PivotCX Campaigns allows you to attach a series of messages to any candidate list to make reaching out to applicants easier. 

 

3. Remind Candidates about their Recent Job Application

 Life gets busy, especially when trying to find a new job. Candidates want to optimize their chances to make it past the pile of resumes on any recruiter’s desk by applying to as many jobs as they can.

The downside is that they’ve lost track of which employers they applied to or the job details after a couple of days. Thus, it is essential to be fast and persistent when reaching out to job applicants. 

This is why PivotCX Campaigns aim to nudge job applicants who might have fallen off the application track. With time delays between automated messages that can be customized down to the minute, it’s easy to set the right cadence to reach candidates when they are more likely to respond to your message. 

Keep it human by reaching out to job seekers. Letting them know that you’ve seen their application and are interested can give you a leg up over employers that never bother to reach out to applicants or take three months to even get in touch with them.

 Figuring out how to reach candidates takes time, but these strategies can help you leverage what you already know about job seekers and make it easier to find the perfect fit for your job opening.  

 

 

Thankful for 2021: How COVID put PivotCX on the Path to Success

Thankful for 2021: How COVID put PivotCX on the Path to Success

With so much uncertainty due to the pandemic at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, it would have been hard to believe the year we’ve had and even harder to acknowledge that at this point, I would be thankful for 2021 and how COVID put PivotCX on the path to success.

The Beginning of the End…

 Last March, my start-up PivotCX (formerly known as WorkHere), had an awful, terrible, horrible month.

When COVID-19 hit, we lost 85% of our revenue. 

It was a business nightmare! I dreaded answering the phone. One after another, customers would call, apologize for canceling, and blame the pandemic — nothing else we could do about it.

But why? Our software was terrible. It was so bad we had started a live chat service to operate the software, so our customers didn’t have to. I thought long and hard about shutting it down. 

Things were so uncertain in April of 2020; no one knew what would happen with COVID. At the time, there were no vaccines and even fewer answers.

All but three of our best long-term accounts left us. Then, our VP of Sales and CTO both left the company.  

To make matters worse, we were close to running out of money. I had to shift gears and build new software since we didn’t have money for a development team. 

Looking back on it, I’m not surprised by the cancellations. Our product was a poorly executed “Yelp for Jobs,” and it was 100% extra during the pandemic. The company was in zombie mode; churn numbers were high, and the product delivered little value versus every other job board. 

Salvageable Pieces

Consequently, we talked to the three accounts that stayed onboard. In all cases, the customer used our live human chat service to engage job applicants right after applying. Just think, you apply on Indeed, and you get a text message a few seconds later and can immediately talk to someone about your application. The service wasn’t sexy: it was high touch, and everyone was in love with AI and chatbots.

As I talked to these three customers, three themes came out:

  • First, our service was critical to our customer’s business in the pandemic. 
  • Second, our customers were saving incredible amounts of time by having our chat teams handle everything from application to interview.
  • And last of all, EVERYONE liked having live people the candidates could talk to and ask questions. It was a huge competitive advantage for our customers and it helped them differentiate them from their competitors who deployed chatbots.

On the Path to Success

Instead of closing down, my remaining cofounder, Howard Bates, and I decided we would take the rest of 2020 to make new software and see if we could make something great happen.

To put PivotCX on a path to success, we scraped together enough to hire a junior developer. Then we decided to build our new software by working closely with our three remaining customers. They told us what they needed, and we built it. 

By January of this year, we had $5,300 in revenue.  Our expenses were nearly four and a half times revenue. We only had a few months of runway left.  Our software was almost ready. 

 So, we did what any self-respecting entrepreneurs would do: hit the launch button

What a launch it was!

By July, we had hit $50,000 in monthly revenue.

In October, we were at $80,000. 

We’re now closing in on our first $100,000 month.

2021 has been nothing short of a miracle. Every day it feels like we are zeroing in on something special. It turns out enabling a better experience from apply-to-hi, and hi-to-hired for recruiters and job seekers is game-changing. 

COVID-19 provided us an opportunity to shift our focus, and put PivotCX on the path to success, but without listening to our customers, we could not have made it.

To the customers that stayed with us, Thank You for inspiring and guiding us.

Nurture a Great Candidate Experience in Recruiting

Nurture a Great Candidate Experience in Recruiting

With AI becoming more commonplace in our working lives, we’ve seen an increase in the ease and speed with which we can roll out tools like chatbots.

Where does this leave human-to-human conversation in the recruitment process?

Do job seekers prefer talking to a bot over a human?

As Mike explains, it becomes clear pretty quickly that chatbots still have their limitations.

In contrast, chat agents, or candidate advocates, can handle 300 – 400 conversations in a day. They are easy to train and adapt quickly to changes in script and the environment.

For this reason, we see a space to nurture the human to human connection in recruiting. In turn, they hand off highly qualified candidates to recruiters.

Join James Whitelock to discuss this is Mike Seidle, co-founder of WorkHere, now known as PivotCX.

Mike talks us through the value of a live conversation with a human instead of a bot and how you can manage this at scale.

#MarketingRules

    Want to learn more about how Pivot CX helps companies make quicker hires? Request a demo.

    Links in this episode:

    LinkedIn: @IndyMike (Mike Seidle) 

    Apple podcast: The Marketing Rules

    Image background by Dominika Roseclay

    Know the Facts and Act on Them with Mike Seidle on the Entrepreneur Way

    Know the Facts and Act on Them with Mike Seidle on the Entrepreneur Way

    On this episode, Mike Seidle, Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder at PivotCX, explains what “Know the Facts and Act on them” means to him and shares tips and his thoughts on several aspects of entrepreneurship.

    PivotCX reduces time-to-hire from weeks to days. They screen out unqualified and unengaged candidates with chat and SMS, so you don’t have to.

    Entrepreneurial Role Models:

    Howard Bates

    When business started difficulties overcame:

    “the hard part for me before I started my own business was that nobody else knew anything about what I was interested in.

    This would have been in the 1980s. I was very interested in building software; I was in high school…first off, they don’t let high schoolers be programmers and so I had to kind of make my own opportunities and so I did. And I started a little company that we would make software for little retailers and local businesses and it certainly beat doing other things that I could have done at age 16 as far as the money I made and everything.

    But more importantly I just learned so much about putting together a business and you can kind of approach business without fear once you do the first one”

    Favorite Books:

    Favorite Quote:

    “know the facts and act on them” Jack Welch

    Recommended Online Resources:

    • LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business and employment-oriented service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Founded on December 28, 2002, and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs.
    • Slack is where work flows. It’s where the people you need, the information you share, and the tools you use come together to get things done

    Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:

    “don’t be afraid to fail. And the first rule of being an entrepreneur is to do something. You can worry about doing it better next time”…[Listen for More]

     

    Other Quotes From the Chat with Mike Seidle:

    • “I would have probably focused less on raising capital and more on bringing a product to market and testing the market more than I did especially with Work Here”
    • “’know the facts and act on them’ by Jack Welch. I think that is an underrated secret to success, understanding and really knowing what’s really, really happening and not what you hope is happening, not what the people that are working for you, with you and around you are telling you is happening but actually knowing what you are really dealing with and then having the awareness and may be courage to act on what you are hearing”
    • “work on your business not in it”

    Want to learn more about how Pivot CX helps companies make quicker hires? Request a demo.

    Links in this episode:

    LinkedIn: @IndyMike (Mike Seidle) 

    Apple podcast: The Entrepreneur Way

    Image background by Dominika Roseclay

    Improving Human to Human Interaction in Recruiting

    Improving Human to Human Interaction in Recruiting

    On this occasion, Mike Seidle joins Nicola  Steel, host of The Spotlight Series podcast to talk about the importance of improving the human to human interaction in the recruitment process. Also, how it speeds up the process while improving the candidate experience. 

    When is it best to use chatbots and when a human is better? Chatbots are best for yes/ no questions but are terrible at carrying on conversations because they lack emotions such as empathy, adaptability and humor. His solution was to have live human conversations via text which is both efficient & inexpensive.

    When building his teams, Mike looks for exceptional communication skills, a love of learning & shared values.  His advice to entrepreneurs is to ask questions & really listen to the feedback & also keep your ego in check!

    His final piece of advice comes from Jack Welch – “Know the facts & act on them”!

    Mike is a serial entrepreneur who has founded 6 businesses. Last year, he had to reinvent his company very quickly when his revenue dropped by 85% & PivotCX was born.

    Links in this episode:

    LinkedIn: @IndyMike (Mike Seidle) 

    Apple podcast: The Spotlight Series

    Image background by Dominika Roseclay