3 Talent Community Campaigns that Nurture Candidates
Research shows that 47% of companies with talent networks never send another communication after the confirmation email. If talent is opting into your talent community—raising their hands to learn more about what it’s like to work at your company—don’t miss this opportunity to nurture an active candidate audience with your recruitment marketing content.
Here’s what Seth Godin says (often quoted but with good reason):
“Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”
SETH GODIN
Yes, your talent community members need to hear from you consistently. And yes, the communications need to be as relevant as possible to a wide variety of future candidates.
Whether you’re building your talent community content strategy for the first time or revamping current campaigns, this means you need a lot of engaging, targeted content to fuel your talent community and email email nurture efforts. In this post, we’ll share tips for scaling your content library and turning your talent community into a successful conversion channel.
Employee story content more effective than job alerts
So, what content do potential candidates find valuable? Candidates want insight. They’re signing up for your talent community because they want to learn more about what it’s like to work at your company. They want to be engaged by your organization’s personality, and be inspired by the work you do.
Real stories from employees both educate, entertain and inspire. And, 2022 data shows that when you compare culture and stories content to job-related content, stories and culture communications receive, on average, 47 percent more engagement.
Plus, you can get a ton of mileage out of your employee story content by repurposing them across your various talent community audience segments. In the example below, you hear Jeannette’s personal story about what it’s meant to her as a Latina woman to build a 15-year career at Colgate-Palmolive.
By using personalized subject lines and copy, the savvy recruitment marketer can repurpose this video to engage a variety of candidate segments. Jeannette’s story amplifies the voice of a successful Latina woman, demonstrates career growth in action, and shows the impact of working for a beloved brand like Colgate-Palmolive. That’s (at least) three distinct campaign emails, just from one story!
Engage Your Entire Talent Community with General Culture Stories
As you build your talent community nurture campaigns, employee story content that shows your mission, culture, and core values in action is an effective way to engage your entire database. These stories connect candidates to your employee value proposition, and show them what it’s like to work at your company no matter what role they’re in.
At the technology company GoTo, career growth and upskilling are an important part of their company culture. In this compilation video, candidates hear from multiple GoTo team members who have benefited from career growth opportunities at the company.
And as with all employee story content, this general culture video can be repurposed into employee spotlights, blog posts, and other mediums of content to get more mileage out of the stories.
Personalize Email Nurture Campaigns by Talent Category
In addition to general insight into your company culture, use your talent community to deliver personalized campaigns by segmenting your audience. If you’re not already, optimize your talent community sign up form so talent can express interest in specific positions or talent categories like early career, Women in STEM, and veterans. Then, create employee story-driven campaigns that speak to topics that resonate with this talent segment.
The global innovation leader, Intel, was looking to drive engagement with the 110,000 early career professionals that had opted into their talent community. Intel partnered with Stories Inc. to interview early career talent around the globe and create a three-email nurture campaign to bring the early career experience at Intel to life in an engaging way.
One topic that Intel found was resonating with their early career talent was building a network for life. One email featured LaToya’s story on this topic, shared below:
The targeted campaign was a success. The email campaign received a 50% open rate and more than 25,000 clicks. And, it drove more applications than any other 2022 email campaign. Read the full case study to learn more!
Talent Community Content Category: Job Category Stories
As you continue to segment your talent community, look to the job category (engineering, nursing, sales) as an effective way to group your audience and deliver a personalized email nurture campaign. Start with high priority job categories and interview current employees within those roles that are thriving in your culture. These stories will bring the role to life for talent and show them why they should do this job, here.
Below, we share a job category story from Ochsner Health System. Amidst a historic nursing shortage, Stories Inc. worked with Ochsner to highlight what makes a nursing career at the regional health system unique: supportive leadership, professional development, and incredible patient impact. See an example below:
Creating seven videos in all, Ochsner now has a series of nurse-specific content to deliver personalized insight to this critical talent category.
Turn your Talent Community into a Candidate Conversion Channel
If candidates have opted in to learn more about working at your company, don’t miss this opportunity to provide relevant, thoughtful insights through employee story-driven campaigns.
If you’d like to learn more about working with Stories Inc. to create talent community campaigns, schedule time with our team!
Candidate nurture tools are just one example of recruiting technology that needs content to run. Download our Complete Content Guide to Fuel Your Recruiting Technology.