As recruiting trends towards marketing, incorporating successful inbound marketing strategies is becoming the standard. Smart companies know that the customers who are currently interested in purchasing their product aren’t their only valuable customers. It’s important to make the sale today, of course, but it’s also important to have future customers lined up who will be ready to close a deal tomorrow. Smart recruiters apply the same logic to candidates.

A healthy recruitment strategy includes nurture campaigns to prepare passive candidates to become your future employees. “The majority of people – 75% – are passive candidates, who could be tempted to apply for a new job if the right opportunity came along” says Vaida Vaitekunaite, product development manager at Candarine. “Even if you aren’t recruiting for certain roles right now, creating an inbound talent pipeline means you will have hundreds more resumes on file than taking the reactive approach to recruitment.” By nurturing candidate leads before you need them, you have a much larger pool of contacts who can become applicants once you need to fill a suitable position.

Especially in the modern job market, where having a career-long tenure at a single company is no longer the norm for many American workers, it is important to always be prepared to need to fill a position. In a 2015 iCIMS study surveying 2,092 adults across the USA, 41% of respondents had changed employers within the last three years and 43% said that they were looking for a new job in 2015. Higher employee turnover creates a demand, in turn, for increased hiring. Having a pipeline of passive talent ready prepares your company to smoothly manage an employee’s exit.

How to run a Successful Nurture Campaign

There are a number of things that contribute to a nurture campaign. We broke it down for you into seven keys to a successful nurture campaign!

1. Make it easy for candidates to open the conversation.

According to SmashFly’s 2015 Recruitment Marketing Report Card for the Fortune 500, 27% of companies in the Fortune 500 allow candidates to join their talent network without applying. Those companies understand the benefit of developing a talent network from which they can pull talent to fill positions quickly, easily, and efficiently in the future.

Allowing passive candidates to join your company’s talent network isn’t enough. You must also promote the talent network, so that passive candidates know that it’s an option. In a 2015 iCIMS whitepaper, 64% of job seekers surveyed were not aware that some companies have talent pools or talent communities where you can receive company updates, job alerts, and other announcements even if there are no job openings.

Make it both obvious that passive candidates are welcome and easy to join your talent network by strategically using CTAs on your career site and company website. Make it as simple initially as signing up with just a name and email address, and then gather more information in later communications.

2. Collect candidates from all sources.

Research by Glassdoor and SmashFly found that 74% of candidates don’t finish their applications when they apply online. Aside from what this may mean for the potential benefits of streamlining your initial application process and getting to the first interview or fifteen minute phone interview sooner, it also means that your applicant tracking system (ATS) is a good source of passive candidates for your talent network.

Don’t simply dismiss incomplete applications — save the contact information from those applications and add those candidates to your talent network. If you nurture them properly, you might be who they think of when they are ready to commit to making the leap with a new job.

3. Don’t overlook the potential of short-term nurture.

Don’t be satisfied with just adding candidates from incomplete applications to your talent network for long-term nurturing. Some of them may be almost ready to make the leap already, so try giving them a little extra nudge.

The Cheesecake Factory used short-term nurturing to nurture some candidates into completing their applications, with great success. Their automated candidate nurturing system sends an email reminder to candidates who don’t finish their application within two days. In 2014, the organization made 182 hires out of almost 1,000 candidates that were reminded to complete an application by that automated system.

That example shows both the power of nurturing candidates, even in the short-term, as well as the great value of automated candidate nurture systems. With an automated system, no candidates slip through the cracks and you also don’t have to redirect the efforts of your recruiters to doing follow-up tasks that can be completed effectively by a computer.

4. Share relevant content.

Send your passive candidates content and resources that they might find helpful and you’ll make a positive impression. “The more targeted you can get with the content, messaging and jobs you send talent network leads, the more seamless and valuable it will be for them” says Elyse Mayer, Content Manager at Smashfly Technologies. You should know what sorts of candidates you are interested in. Create personas for each major type of ideal candidate to help you better extrapolate what types of content would interest them.

You can also extend that beyond targeted materials and to materials shared on the company blog or social media channels. “When planning your publishing schedule, consider job candidates as a potential audience and develop resources that these individuals would find helpful” says Tracy Lewis, talent director at PR 20/20. “By integrating marketing and human resources, you can better get in front of top professionals when they are looking for job-related information—without the need for expensive advertising or the hiring of head hunters.”

Mix in company-specific information along with the content that’s purely of interest to the candidate. “Keep candidates in the loop about new opportunities that match their skillset, major company news (e.g. funding) and relevant events (e.g. graduate hiring fairs)” says Ben Slater, VP of Growth at Beamery. Employee stories now and then can also be a fun way of giving passive candidates a taste of your company’s culture and a glimpse at the the great coworkers they could have if they join your team.

5. Think outside of the box.

Email campaigns aren’t the only way to nurture candidates. Lewisrecommends communicating with passive candidates via social media for light contact, to keep your company on their minds. She also recommends holding informational interviews, even when you aren’t actively recruiting, to get to know your candidates a bit better and let them get to know you. Encourage candidates to keep you in the loop as their careers progress.

Want to know how to close the deal? Read the full article on the Happie blog!