It's the season for planning, giving, and hoping 2021 brings a return to some level of normalcy. Now's the time to get your data set up for a stronger hiring year.

Turn Stale Candidate Data Into An Engaged Audience With 3 Simple Steps‍

Your CRM is more than just a spot to capture applicant data and screen candidates. It’s a place where you can engage, interest, and build loyalty with a captive audience.

Whether you have 500 or 50,000 potential candidates in your CRM, this talent pool is ready and eager to learn more about what your organization has to offer them – your potential employees. Each and every candidate is there for a reason: they have expressed interest in your organization by either applying or attending an event, through an employee referral program, or they have simply Googled you. They came to you. And now it’s up to you to not lose them.

‍Are you leveraging that data to build momentum, or are you just letting that data get stale?‍

Regardless of what phase you are in your CRM use, there are several ways that you can reap rewards to turn a stale database of potential candidates into an engaged audience who is ready to commit to you as their future employer.

‍Know your Audience: Understand and Organize‍

Marketing departments have long been leveraging buyer personas to help them create tailored and targeted messaging to reach a consumer audience. Developing personas as part of your talent strategy can help you to better understand who you are seeking and what messaging your team needs to put out there to resonate with your ideal candidates. Invading Your Persona Space  is an excellent recorded ATAP webinar to get you started.

After you have developed personas, identify those members within your CRM who fit the criteria and tag them accordingly. This makes sending tailored outgoing communications a more effective and streamlined process that will ensure the content is relevant to its readers as it’s distributed.

If you have yet to create personas, organizing the members in your CRM should still be a priority. Identify different categories to which your talent audience could be divided and proceed by tagging members to those categories. Common categories could include areas of interest, location, and career level.

With this simple step in place, you will begin to better understand who your CRM members are and assess the population to align it with our overall talent strategy.

‍Content Curating: Repurpose or Develop‍

Your goal is to captivate your audience and keep them interested in your brand. The most effective way to do this is by giving them the information they desire.

Candidates want to know:
·   Company culture (will they like it there)
·   Types of work (what they can do there)
·   Employee profiles and life (what are people like there)
·   Rewards (what will they get)
·   Opportunity (is there a spot for them)

Identify 3-5 topics under each of these categories to provide diversity and consistency throughout all of your communications.

Existing content is your greatest asset. Existing content has already been approved and published publicly, which means it will require minimal effort to tailor it for your CRM audience.

Creating new content when existing content doesn’t exist will always be needed. This gives you the opportunity to really showcase a particular category. Additional approvals may be needed which means you will need to confirm with your internal channels before publishing new content.

Candidates didn’t join your CRM to sit there and never hear from you again. They are hoping to learn more and are looking for opportunities that meet their needs. Sharing your inside story with them increases the relationship with you and further establishes their interest in your company.

‍Align, Distribute, Measure‍

After organizing your talent audience in your CRM and mapping out content, it is time to align your content to your audience. This is a critical step in the process! Content must be relevant to the selected audience. Retirement information, for example, would not be shared with early-career individuals. Instead, it would more relevant for the GenX’ers in your CRM. Another example would be ensuring you are sharing the right career interests; sending Accountants information about the Engineering department might create a greater chance of “delete before reading” behavior.

When communication is ready to launch, it’s time to distribute. Stealing from the marketing team, a general rule of thumb is that Tuesdays (specifically at 10am), Wednesdays, and Thursdays are your best days to distribute. Mondays are the days that candidates are preparing for their work week, while on Fridays they are already thinking of the weekend. All that said, tracking your open rates in your system will help you identify the most optimal times to send communications.

Quick tips to help with those open rates:
·   Personalize your sender name
·   Be smart about your subject line (skip the click bait!!)
·   Keep it simple

Your CRM system comes fully equipped with data tracking and analytics to provide you information about the effectiveness of each piece of content distributed. Tracking by the audience, distribution date, content points, and volume will help you to continuously hone and evolve your strategy towards greater success.

There is no better time than the present to capitalize on your existing talent audience. You’ve already invested a considerable amount of time, money, and resources to have a CRM, and now is the time to make it work for you. The more your talent audience knows, the better they will be able to understand if your organization is the right fit for them. OR if opportunities in your organization are worth pursuing.