With a high-volume of applicants entering the workforce, we reached out to several successful organizations to understand how they were transforming their email marketing and nurtures to meet talent where they are today.
As an essential business providing veterinary care, PetWell Partners has had a unique experience of COVID-19’s impact on hiring. While many candidates are on the job market, others might not be eagerly jumping back into the workforce anytime soon in light of COVID-19.
For essential businesses like PetWell partners, nurture and automation has remained a priority that is critical to keeping up with demand.
Here’s how Debbie Totah, Director of Talent Acquisition at PetWell Partners continues to nurture talent and meet her organization’s hiring needs.
Q: What is your approach to nurturing top talent?
Debbie: Our approach to nurturing top talent is to personalize wherever we can and ensure it’s meaningful to the receiver. We want to ensure our frequency isn’t too much and is respectful of their time. We do this by referencing to whom or what event we know their information may have come from order to make a connection. Community building is a vital part of both our business and recruiting success.
Q: What roles are you hiring most frequently and what are the biggest challenges?
Debbie: We predominantly hire veterinarians, so very specialized roles. It’s a tough industry with a less than .05% unemployment rate of veterinarians. There is also a shortage of vets in the world and not enough graduating to replenish recruiting pipelines.
Q: How have you automated workflows to ensure your team remains efficient in making those hires?
Debbie: To stay competitive in this space, Lever’s recruiting CRM capabilities and building nurture campaigns to standardize the message has been successful for us, so we don’t recreate efforts across the team. We can see what’s working, share learnings, and replicate successes in improving our time to connect, which has a direct impact on time to hire.
Q: How do you measure recruiting success? What stats do you look at most?
Debbie: In our industry, it’s not high volume and typically is a long time to hire cycle, so those standard metrics are not a proper measurement to use from my experience. For us, it is more important to look at the number of candidates we have in play, time to connect and our offer acceptance rates. Those are the three metrics we focus on most to measure success.
>>Pro Tip: A recruiter productivity scorecard can help as you determine both measurements and ongoing performance check ins for your recruiting team.
Q: What advice would you give other essential businesses to stay competitive for top talent?
Debbie: Talk and text to reach out to candidates, followed by an email referencing the messages 5 days afterwards. In your messages, know something about the candidate, so that you can personalize the message — that way you are not just another recruiter reaching out. One example is to ask what they want and not make it just about what you need from the candidate.
>>Pro Tip: Leverage Grayscale’s texting integration with Lever to text candidates, automate outreach, and save the transcript to the candidate record.
To learn more about how to tailor and personalize your email marketing approach to top candidates and spark ideas on approaching them, download 7 Email Nurture Templates to Speed Hiring.