Articles 
Are you struggling to fill open requisitions despite an ocean of candidate data? Segmentation increases the personalization and relevancy of recruiting, which results in faster transformation of your leads into engaged candidates and gold-medal hires.
The power of segmentation is everywhere: in Gmail’s suggested responses, Netflix’s “Top Picks for You,” and Amazon’s “Compare with similar items.” Segmentation is profoundly changing our society as the engine driving social media and today’s marketplaces. And when it comes to email communication, lead-nurturing emails get 4–10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts (Source: Aberdeen Group).
Apply Marketing Strategy and Tactics to Talent Segmentation
All recruitment software has to accommodate differences in geography, role, and seniority. But with HR tech that lets you adopt the segmentation you need rather than assigning out-of-the-box categories, you can make strategic adjustments to your recruiting tactics.
Strategic talent segmentation might focus on what stage of the recruiting process candidates are in, their responses to a particular marketing campaign, the year in which young candidates will graduate, or whether a candidate prefers email, a phone call, or a messaging platform as a communication channel.
Beyond traditional job seekers, talent segmentation is also being applied to transform Total Talent Management. Segmentation enables companies to identify and re-engage high performers from the contingent workforce as well as to promote career opportunities to current employees.
HR can target the right audience using profile information such as performance reviews, relocation interest, or updated skill-sets. Deloitte Australia utilizes their Open Talent Network to segment talent communities and send job alerts, notifications for new projects, and information update requests that are interesting and relevant to their high-performing contractors.
Improve Candidate Engagement Through Talent Segmentation
Candidate engagement has a direct relationship with time-to-hire and quality of hire.
When candidates receive relevant information, they are more likely to take action and to identify with your employer brand. You are able to share an Employer Value Proposition that resonates with that individual.
You’ll also be able to identify leads in the hiring sweet spot—qualified, available, and interested—and then make that population the focus of your recruiting efforts, segmenting them from other leads due to interest, availability and qualifications.
As a result of applying talent segmentation practices to their CRM system, the culinary giant Sodexo increased their candidate engagement to 89% last year.
Technology multinational Philips is also using highly segmented campaigns to achieve email marketing metrics that are nearly twice as high as industry average for open and CTR rates.
Career websites are another opportunity to segment audiences around specific hiring initiatives such as diversity, veterans, developers, or innovation labs.
For a U.S. tech firm competing with titans like Facebook and Google, over 40% of their IT hires were sourced from their career microsites. As a result, the cost of hiring processes shrank 60% thanks to their linked career site, CRM software, and ATS.
Targeted Talent Pipelines
As talent segmentation in workforce planning improves, they result in better quality of hire because the initial talent pool is more targeted. But given that your hiring needs are unique to your business proposition and can change rapidly, configurability is an imperative.
Recruiting tools that are not fully customizable to your talent pipelines miss the point: why segment if you can’t accommodate what makes your audience distinct?
Getting Started with Talent Segmentation
1. Flexibility Is Strength
Since you’ll need to regularly adapt your talent segmentation practices to keep current with shifts in the talent market, make sure you start with a flexible tool—not something you’ll have to start all over with in a few years.
Data platforms with unlimited fields let you keep evolving segmentation criteria without the messy hassle of deleting old labels to make room for the relevant categories. Ensure that all information you collect will be searchable and accessible from within your database.
2. Kick Off with an MVP
Begin by segmenting candidates in the most basic way possible given the data you already have—what might be called a “Minimum Viable Project .”
You might pick just one factor that differentiates your candidates, such as active versus passive, and use that factor to generate two lists that will receive different emails. For example, you might invite the former to apply to current openings and send the latter a great media piece about your work culture.
Starting simple keeps you from being overwhelmed, and it also simplifies the data analysis and makes it more likely for you to learn something valuable initially. With time, you’ll be able to develop more robust talent segmentation.
3. Data Metric Evolution
Before rolling out your talent segmentation campaign, get your data specialist involved. You’ll need some statistical knowledge to draw out sound, data-driven decisions from the results. Those conclusions can help you to continuously refine your campaign strategy.
But to achieve this level of agility, you’ll want to make sure your platform can be easily adjusted so that your tracking can adapt as you fine-tune your campaign.
Likewise, you’ll need to adjust your data reporting, which can be achieved with a configurable reporting solution. A reporting solution that lets you create your own data model allows you to isolate and visualize precisely the data that is relevant to your decision-making.
4. Databases That Are Forever Up-To-Date
Your talent segmentation is only as good as the information you collect. You can only target your messages as well as your ATS and CRM software can process your contacts.
To get candidate info up-to-date, use a variety of approaches—from sign-up forms to surveys to personal messages with links to profile update portals. Then make those approaches a part of every recruitment campaign—something easy to automate using a workflow. Databases that update themselves? Pure magic!
With recruitment marketing, you can easily create and maintain your audience segments to execute effective recruitment campaigns. Avature brought market segmentation to TA by introducing the first tools for candidate relationship management. These functionalities also support advanced segmentation for internal talent management based on employee attributes or on their progress through project steps.
