How to Reach Job Seekers with 3 Recruiting Strategies

How to Reach Job Seekers with 3 Recruiting Strategies

by | Dec 10, 2021 | Blog, New Product Feature, recruiting

 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.  

 

 

Quick Thought: Job Seekers are Scarce

Quick Thought: Job Seekers are Scarce

by | Aug 3, 2023 | Blog

Just a quick thought:

Business = Process + People + Assets

If a business is really the sum of the people executing a process using company assets, then maybe it’s time to think harder about the people part of the equation.

People are now the scarce part of the story. It hasn’t been that way in most of our lifetimes. It will be, at least until 2046 when the US DOL says the labor market will start expanding again.

Recruiting Short Staffed

Recruiting Short Staffed

by | Jul 27, 2023 | Blog, recruiting

In today’s job market, there is a significant talent shortage, and many companies are finding it challenging to recruit the right candidates. This issue is further compounded by the fact that most recruiting teams are understaffed, making finding and hiring qualified candidates even more difficult.

To put it into perspective, imagine if your customer service team were taking 3-4 weeks to follow up with customers. You would quickly realize that you need more customer service representatives to handle the increasing workload. You might even consider bringing in an outsourced call center to help manage the influx of customer inquiries.

Similarly, if your sales team was taking two weeks to follow up on a lead, you would likely hire more BDRs and sales reps to help speed up the sales process. In some cases, you might even consider outsourcing your sales efforts to an agency.

Given the urgency of these situations, it’s essential to look at recruiting emergencies in the same way. Companies need to take swift action to address their talent needs and ensure that they have the resources and support necessary to find and attract top candidates in today’s competitive job market.

If you can’t help being short-staffed, then you still don’t have to settle for 1-2 week turnaround times. With a communications hub like PivotCX your recruiters can be engaging with 3x the number of candidates as before. Make sure your recruiters have the right tools, and they’ll be able to meet their goals. 

5 Ways PivotCX Improves Recruiter Productivity

5 Ways PivotCX Improves Recruiter Productivity

by | Jul 20, 2023 | Blog

Recruiting is a challenging task that requires a lot of time and effort to find the right candidates for a position. Recruiters often struggle with managing their workload and meeting the hiring targets on time. In this blog post, we will discuss five ways to improve recruiter productivity and streamline the hiring process.

1. Measure Response Time

Response time is a critical factor in candidate experience, and it can significantly impact the hiring process. Measuring response time for Candidate Development Representatives (CDRs), recruiters, and candidates can help recruiters to identify areas for improvement. A quick response time can create a positive impression and enhance the candidate’s interest in the company. On the other hand, a delayed response can lead to a negative experience and may result in the candidate accepting another job offer.

2. Measure Engagement Rates

Engagement rates can help recruiters to determine how many candidates are actively engaged in the hiring process. It is essential to track how many candidates have had a human-to-human conversation with the recruiting team. Measuring engagement rates can help recruiters identify areas of improvement and adjust their recruitment strategy accordingly.

3. Find Out Time to Offer

The time taken to make an offer to a candidate is critical in the hiring process. It is essential to determine how long it takes to move a candidate from the application stage to the offer stage. This information can help recruiters to identify bottlenecks in the hiring process and improve the time-to-hire metric. As 90% of candidates take the first job they are offered, it is vital to ensure that the company can make an offer quickly to secure the best candidates.

4. Secret Shop Your Hiring Process

Secret shopping your hiring process can help recruiters to identify areas for improvement and provide a better candidate experience. Recruiters can find their job on different platforms and apply under different names to test the application process. They can then evaluate how easy it was to apply, whether everything worked, and whether candidates were able to complete the application process. After applying, they can measure how long it takes until a recruiter contacts them and how long it takes until they have a human-to-human conversation.

5. Add CDRs to Your Team

Adding Candidate Development Representatives (CDRs) to the recruitment team can help to improve productivity and streamline the hiring process. CDRs can be responsible for making contact with candidates and ensuring that they do not fall through the cracks. This responsibility can free up recruiters to focus on building relationships with candidates and hiring managers. This approach can help to ensure that candidates are not lost during the hiring process due to lack of communication.

Conclusion

Improving recruiter productivity is critical to the success of any recruitment team. Measuring response time, engagement rates, and time-to-offer can help recruiters to identify areas for improvement. Secret shopping the hiring process can help to identify friction points and provide a better candidate experience. Adding CDRs to the team can help to streamline the hiring process. By implementing these five strategies, recruiters can improve productivity and meet their hiring targets on time.

Speed Up Recruiting with Dynamic Lists

by | Jul 14, 2023 | Blog, New Product Feature

PivotCX is excited to announce our dynamic lists feature!

We already let users sort candidates by all sorts of filters such as location, job title, or application date. Now you can save those filters and use them to make dynamic lists.

Let’s say you have a list of candidates from Indianapolis, IN. Whenever a candidate meets the criteria for the list (for example, they live in Indianapolis, IN), they are automatically included in the list. The moment they no longer meet it, (their city is no longer Indianapolis), then they are removed from the list.

Learn more about how to make and use dynamic lists here: (insert link to help article).

There are all sorts of ways to use dynamic lists in your recruiting communications. Here are 4 simple ways you can start using dynamic lists today:

 

  1. Re-engage with Past Applicants – create a list of past applicants to a particular position and have it update automatically every time someone applies for that position. If ever the position opens up, you’ll have ready-to-go an up-to-date list of everyone who has applied to it in the past.

  2. Use for Job Fairs – Create a dynamic of list of everyone who has visited you at your job fair. As they fill out your your apply form at the booth, they’ll be added to your list in real-time. Then you can send everyone from the list a quick follow-up message after the job fair, thanking them for coming and inviting them to apply online.

  3. Send location-specific messages to candidates or employees – Pivot lets recruiters filter contacts by almost everything: from the job they applied to, to where they’re located. Make a dynamic of list of everyone from a particular location and then send them timely messages pertinent to them.

  4. Follow up with Interviews – make a dynamic list of everyone who hasn’t scheduled an interview yet. Then regularly schedule out messages with your calendly link to them to invite them to interview. You’ll then start to see less ghosting and more interviews on your calendar.

The Math of Candidate Quality

The Math of Candidate Quality

by | Jul 13, 2023 | Blog, recruiting

One of the most misunderstood concepts in recruiting is candidate quality. When you deal with a small number of candidates, it’s easy to think finding great people is easy. As you scale your recruiting efforts up, something surprising happens:

When I get more applicants, the quality goes down! I have to do a lot more work to find interesting and hireable people.

Unfortunately, recruiting is subject to the Law of Large Numbers. The law of large numbers states the larger the sample size, the more the results will trend toward their expected value.

Consider this:

10 applications 4 qualified, 40% Quality

100 applications 14 qualified, 14% Quality

1000 applications, 132 qualified, 13.2% Quality

10,000 applications 1,290 qualified 12.9% Quality

When you only have a few candidates, things can look unnaturally easy. As you get more candidates, you see the quality decrease. But you know what? That’s ok. It’s how math will always work. The more you scale up, the more accurate your measure of quality will actually be.

Ok, so what is a quality candidate, anyway?

The standard way to measure that is simply to figure out what percentage of candidates are actually qualified:

A better way to measure quality

Around 30-40% of candidates will never engage with your recruiting efforts. Whether you call, text, or use smoke signals doesn’t matter. They will simply not respond. We believe the best measure is the percentage of qualified and engaged candidates. Here’s the math:

This is hard to measure if you don’t have a communications hub like Pivot. But when you do, you can analyze your candidate sources for the number of engaged candidates they supply… and you’ll be surprised by the difference between sources. Ultimately, there is one inescapable rule:

You cannot hire people you cannot talk to.

Recruiting Shouldn’t Be an Emergency.

Recruiting Shouldn’t Be an Emergency.

by | Jul 6, 2023 | Blog, recruiting

If you feel like making hires is always done in fire drill fashion, you are not alone. It’s especially hard to recruit well when you are small or you are not a hyper-growth startup. If you think about it, the reason recruiting feels like an emergency is simple:

 

 

 

 

Since we don’t hire every day, we don’t give it every-day priority.

Rule 1: Always be recruiting.

Rule 2: See rule #1.

The single biggest recruiting mistake is stopping. Why is it a mistake to stop recruiting?

• It takes lead time to restart the recruiting engine.  It takes time to push buttons, refresh content, and post jobs.

• It costs money to restart the engine. You’ll have to sponsor jobs to get candidates quickly.

• You will not build a talent community,which further increases future recruiting costs.

• Managers will retain poor performers because they don’t have confidence there will be a new person quickly.

• You’ll fail to exploit opportunity if you can’t staff up quickly.

You don’t have to have every job in the company posted all the time. There are reasonable limits. But you should always be recruiting for positions like:

Sales, Engineering, Production (people who make the product, provide service or bill hours), and Administrative Support

So, what do you do if someone applies and you just can’t hire them? It’s easy:

“That position is filled. Would it be OK if I reached out to you if the job opens in the future?”

Most candidates will happily say, “Yes,” and when you do go to make a hire, you’ll have people you can reach out to start the process immediately.

 

Eat Your TOFU ( Top of Funnel)

Eat Your TOFU ( Top of Funnel)

by | Jun 29, 2023 | Blog, recruiting

We get to look at a lot of recruiting pipelines. There’s a pretty consistent pattern:

There’s not a lot of engagement at the top of the funnel. When there is, it’s usually a chatbot that is putting candidates on hold for a few weeks until recruiters have time to work on the req.

Early pipeline engagement doesn’t happen on a schedule, and if we really want to make hires, it requires almost instant attention. Applicants just aren’t going to wait for recruiters who are stacked up with interviews, hiring manager calls, onboarding, and team meetings to call next week. In fact, this alone is a great reason to look at the SDR model:

What if someone was able to get to talent within a few minutes?

What if that person kept driving the pipeline for the recruiters? How many qualified candidates would get away?

Well, we’ve been doing this for two years. Pivot Live is a team of live humans that hook up to your inbound and outbound recruiting funnel and engage quickly. Every time. (Our human conversational recruiting specialists engage in an average of 5 minutes and four seconds after candidates apply or respond to the outreach).

The results? Well, Gartner’s SDR study wasn’t far off:

We generally increase the number of candidates who make it to an interview by 65%.

We reduce the advertising cost per candidate by an average of 50%.

Recruit Smarter, Not Harder! How to Make Technology Do the Heavy Lifting

Recruit Smarter, Not Harder! How to Make Technology Do the Heavy Lifting

by | Jun 22, 2023 | Blog, recruiting, Tech

We all know that recruiting can be daunting, especially when you have a large pool of candidates to choose from. However, with the right technology, you can recruit smarter, not harder, while maintaining the human touch.

 1. Identifying the Right Tools for Your Team

One of the most critical steps in making technology work for you is identifying the right tools for your organization. Many different software programs and platforms are available to help streamline the recruitment process. These tools can help you sort through resumes, schedule interviews, and even conduct initial screenings.

2. Reaching the Right Audience

Another critical factor in using technology to recruit smarter is ensuring that your job postings reach the right audience. By using targeted job boards and social media platforms, you can increase the visibility of your job postings and attract more qualified candidates.

3. Keep it human 

Finally, it is essential to remember that while technology can be a valuable resource, it should never replace the human touch in recruitment. Make sure you are still taking the time to interview candidates and get to know them personally.

By following these tips, you can make technology work for you and recruit smarter, not harder!

 

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Recruiting Takes a Lesson from Wartime Logistics

Recruiting Takes a Lesson from Wartime Logistics

by | Mar 21, 2023 | Blog, recruiting

One of the most often misunderstood aspects of fighting wars is the importance of logistics. You can’t fight for long without food, fuel, ammunition, and replacement troops. 

In warfighting, logistics are pretty much everything. General Dwight D. Eisenhower put it best, “You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.”

We save the accolades for brilliant tactics and strategy. Tactics and strategies, however, were assured success by boring, old logistics. In WW2, for example, only 3 in 10 US soldiers actually served in a combat role. The rest were truck drivers, deckhands, mechanics, radio operators, and a myriad of other support roles which might have never seen the front line. And yet their contribution decisively won the war.

Ok, so why does this matter in the talent acquisition world?

No CEO ever got accolades for incredible recruiting. Their bonuses are based on their profits which they can quickly pad to look better by cutting costs and laying people off. They have little incentive to improve recruiting processes or repurpose existing personnel rather than lay them off. Such measures might stave off shareholder pressure, but it won’t build a long-term successful business.

In business, we hand out accolades for brilliant marketing, winning sales, and shiny products. We don’t hand out the accolades for hiring the people that make all of the success happen. And yet every winning company recruits well. They know when to recruit and when not to, how to recruit, and how to keep and train up the people they have.

Now that we are in the talent shortage that all the academics predicted would happen (even without COVID), maybe it’s time to re-evaluate how to succeed. Maybe it’s time for CEOs and COOs to start looking at Talent Acquisition, Recruiting, or whatever you call hiring people as the best way to create winning business strategies. Success comes with consistency, and you won’t achieve that without a strong backbone to support the people in your company.

 

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