¿Email Marketing for your talent search?: transform your HR Department

A few months ago we carried out a project in which we applied digital marketing strategies for a recruitment campaign in collaboration with the human resources department of our client.

Today there is a shortage of certain job vacancies and we need to differentiate ourselves to attract talent to our company. One of the clearest examples is the shortage of programmers in this era due to massive digitalization.

The phases of the project were:

1. Analysis of the campaign’s target audience.
2. Definition of talent attraction strategies.
3. Implementation of selected marketing strategies.
4. Analysis and evaluation of the results obtained.

ANALYSIS OF TARGET PROFILES

Once the human resources department provided us with their needs, we analyzed the profile of the people they were looking for and we agreed on a strategy to hire 6 people with a junior profile for different positions they required and with the possibility of remote working. Therefore, our campaign was focused on young people, under 25 years of age, who want to take their first steps in the working world.

OUTREACH STRATEGIES TO ATTRACT TALENT

Due to the shortage of people for some jobs, you must learn to sell your company in such a way that the person who is applying for a position wants to join your team ahead of any other company. Read on to learn more about the proposal made to find the desired personnel.

We had a maximum of 6 weeks to complete the entire selection process, starting on the first day of February.

Given these characteristics, we divided the project into 4 phases:

1. Phase 1 (100% automated): the period in which to advertise and show interest in joining the company and continue receiving information regarding vacancies will be limited to two weeks.
2. Phase 2 (100% automated): at the end of the third week, registrations for the various vacancies will no longer be accepted.
3. Phase 3 (semi-automatic): information was requested to decide from among those people registered. Information was provided on to these whether or not to continue with the process.
4. Phase 4 (face-to-face): a workshop with the best-positioned candidates to get job vacancies.

You will know more detail about how the different phases were executed.

IMPLEMENTATION OF EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY

Once the target audience was set, the content that we needed for the selection process was proposed. Together with the client’s human resources team, the following information was prepared:

• General description of the job vacancies and graphic identity of the company to make the appropriate dissemination (universities, social networks, …).

• Two videos of less than 5 minutes each are needed in which we told what the company does and another one about life in the company (the perks of being part of your team).

• Information was necessary to register for the offers.

• Videos of less than 5 minutes where they know more about what tasks need to be performed daily according to the position for which you are applying and another with a roadmap of your professional career (where you can be in 10 years from now within the company) is indicated, if possible with a real example.

Once the content to be used was established, we began to prepare the automation corresponding to the first phases.

PHASE 1 AND 2: AUTOMATION IN THE EARLY STAGES OF THE SELECTION PROCESS

The first steps consisted of disseminating job vacancies through universities and social networks in such a way that they would fill out a brief contact form and then the rest of the information would be sent to them over the following weeks.

The illustration is provided to facilitate the understanding of these first phases. Phase 1 was composed of emails 1, 2, and 3. On the other hand, phase 2 used emails 4, 5, and 6. The content of these was:

• Email 1: general information about how the selection process will work, indicating the steps to follow, registration deadlines, and additional information that will be sent to their email.
• Email 2: it contains videos about what the company does and the advantages of being part of it. In addition, they needed to fill out a questionnaire to access the following emails.
• Email 3 (R): a reminder that the deadline for completing the questionnaire is approaching, if not completed we will no longer receive information about these job vacancies.
• Email 4: additional information about the jobs that were of interest to the applicant and more information on the professional development that they can have within the company.
• Email 5 (R): a reminder that the deadline for signup is nearing to end, if this questionnaire is not completed, it is understood that the applicant is no longer interested in the offer.
• Email 6: Thank you for registering and informing us of the next phases.

Conditions were usually linked to the action of answering a questionnaire, if you completed it you moved forward (green check) and if not, they took another path until the person was finally removed (red flag) or ended up completing the task to move on.

After this phase, there were several subgroups (segments) within the general group comprising the total number of initially registered people:

1. Signed up after phase 1.
2. There were 6 positions for 3 different profiles, so 3 subgroups were generated within those pending review.

PHASE 3: ANALYSIS OF APPLICATIONS

Resumes, recorded video interviews, or brief telephone interviews were requested to choose the 20 selected for the final workshop.

Except for the phone calls, the rest of the steps were carried out through the email marketing tool, including the final mails for those who passed the workshop phase (with information about the workshop and how to proceed to confirm attendance) and for those who had not.

PHASE 4: WORKSHOP AND FINAL DECISION

Confirmation of attendance to the workshop was managed through the sixth email and those who did not reply were contacted directly by our client’s human resources team.

As in phase 3, once the workshop was held, our client hired the 6 desired persons (after a final confirmation between the applicant and our client) and we also informed those who were not selected.

RESULTS ACHIEVED AND CAMPAIGN BUDGET

Thanks to the dissemination campaign and the fact that jobs allowed remote working, there was a great deal of interest, which waned as the process progressed.

We used a funnel (as in a sales funnel) to represent the evolution through each phase. The numbers observed show how many people completed each of the phases, i.e. the phase 1 questionnaire was completed by 92 people, and therefore they received information about the second phase.

At the end of the campaign, we got the following results:

In addition, we analyzed the outreach obtained, including through which media our emails were read.

PROJECT BUDGET

We have divided the budget into the following sections:

1. Initial analysis of the target public: taking into account the characteristics of the job vacancies, we analyzed how to search for potential members of the team.
2. Dissemination of job vacancies: plan prepared and executed to get people signed up in the offers following the LOPD when registering in the process.
3. Email marketing campaign: we planned the strategy so content delivery was automated for much of the process. Subsequent analyses of the results and data processing during the campaign are included.
4. Basic email marketing software training: 1-hour online training to the human resources team on how to manage the data of the registrants based on the information collected in the email marketing tool.

Knowing that 6 people were hired, it comes out to a cost of about 200 euros per person hired, without taking into account the workshop or the calls made by the human resources team (much less than usual).

This cost is quite low if you take into account the number of hours of interviews the staff saved, the number of people reached, and that they can reuse part of the process for future occasions (content or automation).

OUR CONCLUSIONS

If you are thinking of preparing a recruitment process or any other type of email marketing campaign, we give you the following tips:

• There are dozens of tools with which to perform these tasks, we are not going to advertise any in particular, but for this project, we were able to do it 100% free with this software. Among other things, the monthly fee will depend on the volume of subscribers and emails sent.
• You must differentiate yourself from the others, from the selection process itself. There are positions with a shortage of personnel and they have to choose among others. You have to learn to sell your company to both your current and future employees.
• Automate the initial phases (where more people with little interest will drop out) so as not to waste time on those who had no real interest in the job vacancy. With this, you get to the final stages with people who already know you better and may have more involvement. When selected people reach this stage they already know where they are going and this saves you from premature and unexpected departures of staff.
• It generates an easily manageable and intuitive database. This will be very useful when analyzing profiles for this or future processes.
• Use the results obtained, in real-time, from the email marketing campaign to optimize the process and outreach more people (in terms of diffusion or sales, for example).