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Nurture and Drip Marketing for Recruiters

By Mike McKerns

As I'm sure you already know, recruiting and marketing have a lot in common. Both have prospects, pipelines, and leads. Writing a good job description is an artform that uses techniques directly from the marketing copy writer's playbook. The techniques recruiters use to attract candidates and the challenges they face staying top of mind are no different than what is being used down the hall in the marketing department.

In the marketing world, we can leverage drip and nurture marketing campaigns to stay top of mind with our prospects and these exact same techniques fit nicely into a recruiter's tool kit as well.

A drip marketing campaign is the easiest to implement. It's a type of automated email campaign that allows you to send out a series of scheduled and personalized emails to your contact database over an extended period of time. Drip marketing helps you to stay engaged with not quite ready candidates over a longer period of time through consistent touch points.

Once you determine the goal of your drip campaign (stay top of mind with candidates, gain more referrals, etc.) use an automation tool like HubSpot or Active Campaign to share content on a defined schedule. Some examples of content you may want to email are

  • A list of jobs you'd love to see referrals to
  • Updates on how your company has flourished over the past year
  • Interviews with current employees
  • Anything that sets you apart from your competitors as an employer

A nurture marketing campaign takes a bit more planning but can be highly effective. This type of campaign is built around a series of emails that are sent based on a candidate's behavior. The campaign will deliver timely, targeted information that helps guide them through their job search (or any goal that you set).

As the candidate receives emails, they are presented with information based on your goals and their actions. Specific behavioral data matters in nurture campaigns, for example, how many times a candidate visited your website, which articles or guides they've read, and what jobs the applied to in the past. The goal is to deliver educational value while encouraging engagement. Unlike drip marketing, the nurture campaign is triggered by these actions, creating an even more personalized sending schedule.

It can often take a lot of work to bring candidates into your database. If they are someone you'd like to hire one day, it's a good idea to keep in touch and using a little automation will help make the effort easy and scalable.

About the author:

Mike McKerns is the editor-in-chief of HR Insights and the founder of Mamu Media, the SMART content division of Haley Marketing. He can be reached at mike@mamumediallc.com.