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At first glance, human resources might seem like an odd use of digital marketing technology. After all, most of us think of Marketing Cloud as a solution for acquiring prospects and engaging with customers. But in today’s hiring environment—where top talent is always in high demand—marketing and HR share key similarities.
Just as the best marketers must manage relationships throughout the prospect-to-customer lifecycle, HR departments need to create awareness for their open opportunities, acquire a pool of potential candidates, engage applicants throughout the hiring process, then efficiently onboard those selected.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for journey management, right?
It comes as no surprise that the new-hire journey for most Salesforce candidates starts on our career site. Using a small piece of Javascript, Predictive Intelligence begins tracking each candidate’s clicks, searches and browsing behavior while on the site. Even if the candidate is anonymous, the information is stored—once the recruit identifies him or herself by applying, the browsing data is retroactively connected to their record.
To connect candidates with the right jobs, Marketing Cloud enables us to build affinity maps, which serve up additional recommendations for relevant positions for each candidate. We’re able to see what sort of roles a recruit is most interested in, and then start to predict other next-best open positions for them to apply for.
The data we’ve gathered using Marketing Cloud also enables us to target recruits on social networks using targeted Facebook ads. By placing relevant digital ads that encourage application, we’re staying top-of-mind for potential new hires.
Beyond this, we use lookalike modeling on social. For example, we look at our own current engineers at Salesforce and their characteristics on social to help us organically find other potential candidates on Facebook. During our pilot program, we targeted 30,000 potential engineering recruits based upon lookalike models, and could tailor content specifically to them.
Email serves as a great channel for staying connected with applicants and potential candidates throughout the recruiting process. We’re able to serve relevant content at appropriate times based on the potential role and how far along applicants are in the evaluation.
And it’s much more than your standard weekly email to prospective employees. For example, we’ve added in third-party capabilities where we automatically send engaged candidates additional screening questions or tests. This gives our HR team way more than just their resumes; they have their affinity, their scores from screening tests, and more. From there we can continuously recommend the right candidates for the right roles at the company in an efficient manner.
Once a recruit is hired, the onboarding journey begins. Our goal is to create passionate employees from the second they sign their offer letter, and we communicate with them throughout their entire first year. We begin their journey on their personal email address and as they start their role, the journey continues on their @salesforce.com email address.
We’re very intentional about the content that is sent--each new employee receives a series of 20 communications throughout their first year. It’s not all going to come in on day one--there’s a well conceived learning path that allows new hires to digest all of the information.
Powering our recruiting and onboarding efforts through Marketing Cloud has been highly successful. With nearly 4,000 employees taken on personalized journeys, we’re getting engaged employees starting on day one. The email series during onboarding has almost a 90% email open rate--making it one of the highest email open rates we’ve ever seen internally! Another benefit: Because they’re receiving timely, relevant information, new hires now log 30% less help desk tickets.
At Salesforce, Marketing Cloud isn’t just for the marketing team. In addition to HR journeys, we’ve taken journeys to the next level by applying it to our events, sales enablement experiences, and app adoption programs.
Why not join us? All you have to do is select a persona and go on a journey with us. You can choose from scenarios such as a retail customer, banking customer, new employee, and event attendee. Over the course of seven days you’ll experience what a real customer would experience and see emails, ads, mobile messages, recommendations, and more. It’s a great way to see the power of an connected journey in action.
