The Email Recruiting: Battle Plan a Digital Era Email Strategy- Part 3

The purpose of this series is to illustrate how to double your email recruiting results. Your battle plan is the foundational strategy for the battle of the inbox on the digital battlefield. To maximize the impact of your email recruiting campaigns, you need a digital strategy. This is the third piece to the puzzle of why a strategy is required to achieve promised improvements in your email success in this unique digital era. This third piece to the puzzle depicts the needs of your target audiences. This piece together fits nicely with the other two pieces (audience makeup and thinking) to complete the picture of the target talent persona.

What does your target audience need? The answer is quite simple; your target audience needs relevant and valuable information that will allow them to present the best version of themselves at work. The answer to what the target talent need is easy, your work to accomplish this task is complicated.

Improved skills & Up-to-date knowledge to stay atop their profession.
- Often referred to as lifetime learning, you have a need for state-of-the-art knowledge to keep up with the technology driven changes in our profession. In talent acquisition, the impact of automation has shifted the focus of recruiters/sourcers in the process. In the case of recruitment marketing platforms with its focus on inbound recruiting, a change has occurred from finding the prospects to engaging the target talent that is in the talent pipeline. The inbound automation has pulled the candidates into the pipeline to engage and nurture until they are ready to apply.
- Listening, coaching, and interpersonal skills are a premium in this digital era. Training to refocus or develop a particular skill set will be an integral part of each career journey. Your emails that lead people to “how to” or other profession based skill building content will be well received.
Career Coaching/Counseling.
- How Is The Market? In my past life as an executive recruiter, I spent a lot of sharing my knowledge and opinion of the job market with the talent that I recruited. Over the years, I found the network that was created by my recruiting calls would check in once or twice a year to see how the market was for their skills and abilities. It was kind of an informal career check-in. Perhaps, more than ever, that need exists in chaotic, turbulent and ever-changing job landscape.
- The impact of career coaching. The role of a recruiter/sourcer has shifted from the finding to the engagement and relationship phase of the recruiting. Knowing how to provide objective career advice in spite of representing a particular organization will become a very valued and respected skill you can offer. Your email can be the first step in that trust building relationship, especially if it is linked to a valuable profession or career oriented content that is insightful, relevant and applicable to your target audience.
A Delightful Candidate Experience
- Talent Is Restless. The surveys say that talent is open to hearing about jobs, but are not actively looking. Jobvite calls it job browsing. Indeed, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn, Monster and every job board purveyor suggest that our target talent visits their respective sites on a regular basis. Who can blame talent for being restless? We live in a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) age. That coupled with an ever increasing loyalty to our chosen professions has created a need for us invest in our careers, profession, and skills. What’s different now is that target talent is looking to us for information about our organization that is relevant to them at any point in their job search. The days of responding to a job posting with an application have changed to a Google commenced path that includes stops for employee videos, employee review sites (Glassdoor, Indeed, et al), social media platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, etc.), conversations with friends and family, and up to other a dozen other channels of information.
- The impact of a delightful candidate experience. The need for a great candidate experience at each stop on the candidate journey is at the forefront of connecting with the restless talent. A relationship focused recruiting evolves, the greater the opportunity for pipelines and communities of target talent to be viable solutions to a delightful candidate experience.

An email strategy built for this digital era needs a comprehensive target talent persona. We touched on three key areas of a target talent persona. First to unify the fragmented independent minded, diverse, multigenerational, and highly pursued target talent into a personalized email that will attract them. Second, mapping our email engagement with themes that will resonate with the consumer inspired mindfulness of our target audiences all along the candidate journey. Third, to fully engage the target audience, our talent personas need to address the professional needs/desires with an authentic and transparent talent brand. These talent personas become the foundation for the digital email strategy. The bad news is that some change will be required to implement them. The good news is that consumer marketers have pioneered the way for talent acquisition.

Outline: A Digital Era Email Strategy

The Inbox Is The Battlefield In The Digital War For Talent
The Email Recruiting Battle Plan: A Digital Era Email Strategy
- Who is Your Target Audience?
- How Does Your Target Audience Think?
- What Does Your Target Audience Need?
The First 3 Seconds-Guess What I Have For You.
The Next 5 Seconds-Why You Should Want It!
The Final 7 Seconds-How You Can Get It!
Before You Press Send–An Email Recruiting Checklist.

Images: Graphicstock