This is a guest post from FreshMail’s Joanna Wojcik. As Content Manager at FreshMail, Joanna is responsible for creating valuable material and building relationships with online communities where businesses meet. She can be contacted at joanna.wojcik@freshmail.com

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When it comes to acquiring highly skilled professionals —  such as mobile app developers or big data specialists   —  head hunters will tell you recruitment has more and more in common with marketing.

Potential employee to employer relationships are changing these days. Jobseekers have greater expectations of and requirements for companies that want to hire them. This means recruiters must start treating jobseekers not only as potential candidates, but also as customers.

Two of the most effective tools marketers use to reach customers are email and marketing automation. Recruiters must learn to adopt these channels in order to attract qualified candidates and increase their talent pool.

Why Email Marketing Is Worth The Effort

What do you gain by using the ins-and-outs of email marketing and marketing automation during the recruiting process? Here are three big things:

1. More free time to spend on other activities that demand your direct participation, such as interviews or skills assessments.
2. A bigger and better talent pool for your company. When you stay in touch with candidates, you never miss the opportunity to hire important specialists.
3. You build an employee-friendly image by treating potential and current employees with respect throughout the application process.

But how do you combine high volume mail and the effectiveness of marketing automation to attract new candidates? This is the magic of recruitment marketing. Let’s explore three ways to get it right.

Add Candidates to Your Database Automatically

Selecting applications and updating contact information are the most time-consuming part of a recruiter’s day-to-day job. Placing a subscription form on your career page — or on a dedicated landing page —  can help automate these tasks.

You can use this technique wherever you meet candidates: during an interview, job fair, networking event, or elsewhere. Don’t have internet access? Use a tablet with an app like FreshForm to collect email addresses while offline. When you’re connected again, the data will automatically synchronize with your subscriber lists. This is an additional opportunity to create interest and stay in touch with available candidates, which gives you a wider talent pool for future openings.

Before starting any recruitment campaign, it’s worth planning ahead to decide which data you will use in targeted communication with candidates. Do you want to segment your list by preferred employment location? Or by the type of positions a candidate is interested in?

By using the appropriate custom fields in the subscription form, data will be assigned to the corresponding candidates. How you plan to personalize emails will dictate what information you need to collect. With a single subscription form, you can obtain all necessary information for future campaigns.

When adding candidates to your email database, it’s important to use a double opt-in process. This ensures that every email address is valid, because it has been voluntarily and knowingly given with consent. When the the contact information in your database is correct and current, your email list contains only customers who value your emails and want to read them.

Similarly, always place your unsubscribe link in a noticeable position within the message. Making it easy to unsubscribe is actually beneficial. If job seekers find positions elsewhere, or change the focus of their job search, they can remove themselves from your contacts —  which saves you the trouble of trying to recruit people who are no longer interested.

Personalize Messages For All Your Candidates

Do you want to speak directly to potential new employees, and use their names in the headline? Or maybe you’re recruiting for several positions in different companies, located in different cities?

By using geotargeting and personalization, you can send fully tailored messages and invitations for employment tests to multiple candidates simultaneously. You can forget about manually sending hundreds of emails, which ensures candidates don’t feel as if they are just one of many with whom you come into contact.

Remember: 70 percent of brands do not personalise their email marketing messages, so this is big opportunity to stand out from the crowd. Personalized feedback is particularly important when candidates are not qualified for the position. Professional and individual messages will help you keep in touch with candidates when it’s time to fill new positions in the future.

Email marketing automation also allows you to send job offers that are carefully tailored to match a candidate’s preferences. This means they only receive interesting and relevant offers, and aren’t tempted to unsubscribe due to irrelevant messages.

Leverage The Magic Of Autoresponders

What do you do to maintain contact with candidates who have not found employment within your company yet? How do you keep them interested in what you might have to offer in the future?

Autoresponders — automatic messages sent after specific triggers — will help you program a series of messages to automatically send to your audience at the frequency you choose. In the case of open autoresponders, a campaign can be automatically delivered to subscribers after opening the previous message. Most importantly, the autoresponder’s content and time frame are set only once — then the process runs all by itself.

Using autoresponders, you can report news from your company and promote a friendly image to those who might work with you one day. Autoresponders give you the possibility to invite everyone in your database to events related to recruitment. Jobseekers will feel more noticed by your company and will keep in touch, giving you another chance to contact them in the future.

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When Ray Tomlinson sent the first email message in 1971, he probably didn’t know how it would change the daily lives of generations to come. Today, email is the most popular and widely used service on the Internet. It is estimated that by the end of 2018, the global number of email accounts will reach 5.2 billion. According to a recent McKinsey report, email is 40 times more effective for customer acquisition than social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Even the best recruiter can benefit from enlarging their applicant pool. After all, you want as many qualified people to choose from as possible. Taking advantage of the proven tools and methods used by email marketers can help you attract candidates the way marketers attract customers. The next time you need to fill highly specialized positions in your company, consider how email and marketing automation can bolster your recruitment efforts.