Hiring in the current employment market requires action and finesse. When there are more jobs available than there are skilled professionals to do them, the most courteous and strategic employers win the best talent. Many new recruiting and hiring strategies have been developed in the last ten years in order to respond aptly to the War for Talent. Sure, you could actively compete with your business contemporaries for the best talent. But why compete when you can nurture?
One of the most effective modern recruitment techniques is email nurturing. This is a friendly outreach method that HR professionals can use to build their talent network and fill roles when applicants are lacking. Through email nurturing, you can get in touch with great professionals and build that relationship into winning a great job candidate. Email nurturing is designed to help you turn passive candidates into promising leads.
What is Email Nurturing?
Email nurturing is one of the leading ways for HR to reach out to potential job candidates. The nurturing process involves a series of friendly emails that provide candidates with timely information and opportunities. It’s a way of building a conversation and keeping your passive candidates engaged even when there’s no ongoing conversation.
An email nurturing campaign might open with an explanation and an invitation to engage. The next email might include more information about the role and the company. The next one might be about benefits and the company culture. All the information you want candidates to know that might influence their decision, you can provide through an engaging email nurturing campaign. In other words, a series of useful and interesting emails about taking the job.
Tools to Enhance Your Email Nurturing
Every HR professional knows that tools can reshape a task. Depending on your recruitment style and the size of your company, your email nurture campaign can become much easier with the right software.
CRMs, for example, are great at putting together a profile of information and many are designed to feed that profile into personalized email templates. For HR of a large company, this kind of streamlining can empower your team to reach far more potential candidates per year.
Other tools like Litmus and Grammarly can check your emails for quality and impact, which can help you perfect your strategy before the first emails are out of the gate.
HR Email Nurturing Best Practices
1. Constant Talent Outreach
With email nurturing, you have the opportunity to seek out new talent and you have every reason to constantly grow your talent network. Passive candidates are those who are currently employed and/or satisfied with their situation but who might consider a role in your company if the circumstances were right. Email nurturing makes it possible to connect and build a relationship with hundreds to thousands of professionals so each time you encounter a promising professional online, start nurturing.
2. Open with Honest Flattery
In your first email, your passive candidates will want to know why you’re reaching out in the first place. Many professionals get boring canned invitations to apply for jobs all the time. What makes your email stand out should be open and honest flattery. Why did their profile catch your eye? What credentials, past work, or experiences made you think they would be a good fit for your open roles?
By conveying this, you not only flatter your candidates, you also tell them something about how they might be valued to the company and the nature of the work.
3. Reveal Your Sources
When you reach out, candidates also wonder how you heard of them. Did their LinkedIn profile dazzle you? Or did you get a referral from a past boss or coworker? Revealing this mystery opens the door to a personable and productive conversation where the candidate knows your vector of approach.
4. Ask What the Candidate is Looking For
Don’t just explain what the candidate can do for the company. Modern hiring is all about enticing great talent to choose your company. How do you entice each individual person? By asking. Remember to ask your candidates what they’re looking for in a role and what might persuade them to change roles. No doubt the answer will be useful to you.
5. Collect Templates but Write Personal Messages
Email nurturing templates are incredibly useful. They give you structure, tone, content, and an idea about how to spool out information in a conversational way. But they’re not a campaign on their own. When you’re reaching out to a candidate, this should be a connection between people. Some emails are simple or formulaic enough to automate safely. In most cases, the best communications will be done by planning from templates but making each message personal. Consider the candidate’s history, experience, and responses so far.
6. Relate as a Person
Include details about yourself. No one wants to email with a robot, and email campaigns open that risk. So put a piece of yourself into your messages. Use interesting facts about yourself as ice-breakers and example-answers to your questions. This kind of personability will relax most candidates and they’ll feel freer to share personal details. The important soft-skill details that no one shares with a robot.
7. Know When to Automate
Some emails can and should be automated. Anything you can automate will save you time and increase the speed of a good email nurturing campaign. Good times to automate include out-of-town messages and follow-ups on incomplete applications. Anything that you would genuinely say the same way to everyone can be smoothly automated.
8. Help Candidates to Self-Engage
When considering a new job, most people do a lot of research. So make that smooth and welcoming for passive candidates. Create a web portal that provides all the relevant information a prospective candidate might need. Create a social media funnel for candidates. Get candidates interested in your employer brand and powering their own engagement through activities, research, and conversation.
9. Welcome Referrals and Recommendations
“Is there anyone you’d like to refer?” is a question that every recruiter should be asking everyone they know. It’s an open, friendly invitation, just in case. It’s a great way to turn a few declines into a positive hire down the line. Many people know someone who’s in the industry or looking for a job, but they’d normally never mention it. By asking for referrals and recommendations with each conversation.
10. Invite Feedback
Finally, always invite feedback. Always welcome each contact you make to critique and leave comments. You never know when really useful insight, information, and opportunities can arise. Not to mention the useful survey data.
Contact us for more insights to attract new customers and nurture the customer relationships you have already built.
