4 Things To Address For An Amazing Employer Brand
” Do you know what candidates are looking for in your Employer Brand? By understanding what candidates are looking for, you can identify how to tailor your messaging and content strategy, and the best areas to focus your efforts and attention. Whether or not your organization has done anything to actively manage your Employer Brand, you already have one! And potential candidates are examining it before deciding if your organization is right for them. According to LinkedIn, 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a role. There are a number of components that go into an Employer Brand, and all of these things work together to shape your overall Employer Brand. Here are the ten components that comprise your Employer Brand: Things you can control: Careers site Recruitment advertisements Website and blog Culture and organisational values Candidate communication Things you can influence: Employee stories and advocacy Social media channels Organisation reviews Things you can indirectly influence: Public perception Accolades and awards. So what are candidates looking for? And how can you attract the right people to help your organization? Your mission Candidates are looking for more than a paycheck. They’re looking for an opportunity to contribute towards a valuable mission. For millennials, this is particularly important, as according to the latest statistics, 78% saying they want their employer’s values to match their own. To capture the attention of potential candidates, create a cohesive narrative about why you’re here and what’s important to you as an organization. Your commitment to this mission should be the thread that connects all of your print and online materials, from your careers page and corporate philanthropy, to social media and employee testimonials. Give people a flavor of what drives the work you do. Real information about employee experience When investigating an organization’s Employer Brand, candidates aren’t interested in corporate jargon about your products and services. They want to know what it’s like to work for you, from those who know you best and are doing the work themselves. The best way to do this is by filling your careers site and social channels with real employee profile stories, whether they be video or written, or both. This makes your brand more relatable and personal. People respond well and are most engaged with compelling visual imagery, a “day in the life” photos and videos. These make a far greater impact than essays of text. An active, engaging social media presence We live in a digital world, so social media is therefore crucial in your Employer Brand strategy. We cannot overstate the importance of social media in your Employer Brand, considering this digital world we live in now. Up to 57% of job seekers use social media in their hiring search. How much time can you invest in this channel, and what is your strategy? Tailor your content to style of each social media account. For example, Twitter is perfect for concise summaries of key industry news (such as industry blog posts and recent awards or milestones for your organization). Compelling visuals work well on Instagram. Facebook and LinkedIn allows you to create longer posts. Ensure your social media manager keeps all of your content on-brand as well, to give viewers a sense of unique company identity.” Positive candidate experience The experience you create for candidates can seem intangible and difficult to communicate and represent. But it’s a hugely important part of your Employer Brand because it’s so personal and candidates are paying such close attention. 78% of candidates say the overall candidate experience at a company is an indicator of how well the organisation values its employees. That means that job seekers look at your candidate experience as “proof” that you do, in fact, live up to your company values. Create a positive candidate experience by making sure your processes are short, efficient, fair, and involve good communication. Keep your application process is brief, intuitive to use, and relatively easy. Many candidates will simply give up if you ask for pages of information. Also, remember to communicate with prospective talent throughout the recruitment process and respect their time and effort. An automated email or text message confirming submission of the application should be a given, but adding a personalized touch from a recruiter within a few days (even a simple “we are still processing your application and will be in touch soon”) is even better. And remember, the candidate experience doesn’t stop when you’ve made your hiring decision. Notifying individuals who didn’t get the job is particularly important, as 80% of people say they wouldn’t apply for another job at a company if they fail to hear back about a position. Leaving candidates with a positive impression of your company ensures that you have prospective talent waiting in the pipeline the next time you’re ready to hire. By understanding what candidates are looking for in your Employer Brand, you can review and fortify your strategies to strengthen and promote your Employer Brand.
The Talent Scout Episode 67: What Benefits Do Employees Actually Want?
During this episode, you will find out what employee benefits actually attract and retain them.
Behind the scenes: Our experience upgrading Ruby on Rails.
What is Scout Talent software? Here at Scout Talent, we consider ourselves very lucky to have such a broad range of users across several industries. We love connecting with the many stakeholders who are involved in their company’s talent acquisition solutions. We’ve spent most of this year knee-deep in an upgrade project that most of our users normally wouldn’t hear about. We wanted to share our reflections on an expansive software project we’ve been working on. This will give you a peek into the work we do behind the scenes at Scout to keep our software suite innovative. Under the hood, our software operates exactly as you would expect a modular and open product suite to operate. Its infrastructure is hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS; a scalable cloud computing service), and it uses React (an open-source interface library) and MySQL (an open-source relational database management system) as its technologies. Ruby on Rails (RoR), is the framework that ties it all together. What is Ruby on Rails (RoR)? If you’re not from a technology background, you may be wondering why you’re reading about the nuts and bolts of our software. To give you insight into our software back-end, we’ll be exploring RoR (the framework that ties it all together), and what we found when we upgraded to the newest version. Before diving in, it’s best to explore what RoR actually means and how it functions. Rails is a programming framework, while Ruby is the underlying programming language. Thinking of it in simpler terms, Rails is the house, while Ruby is the bricks. Each individual brick contributes to the framework of the house as a whole, and allows you to build and upgrade as time goes on. Long story short, RoR is an extremely popular open-source framework. Some of the largest companies in the world use it (think Shopify, Airbnb, and Kickstarter, to name a few). Scout also uses RoR, and we do so for many reasons. It simplifies the development processes by providing conventions on repetitive tasks (such as retrieving and storing data from our database). The simplicity of these conventions lets us concentrate on solving business problems, not technical problems. Why did we have to upgrade Ruby on Rails? Some of Scout Talent’s software has been around for over ten years. During this time, it has helped companies small and large transform their recruitment process and secure the best talent. As technology evolves so quickly, we’ve had to be strategic about how we’ve upgraded our underlying software over the years. When new RoR versions are released and improvements are implemented, software becomes more disconnected from the latest version of the framework. The longer you run an old version of RoR, the less opportunity you have to take advantage of its new improvements. We wanted to continue to provide the best possible experience for users of our software suite. We knew that upgrading this year was going to provide better ways of handling business logic behind the scenes, allow us to continue prioritising security and stability, and give us a big boost in our quest for performance improvement. While these benefits give great incentive to upgrade, the reality is that it’s not that simple. It’s important to find the right balance between time investment, platform maintenance, change management plans, and ensuring users aren’t negatively impacted during the upgrade. Upgrading in this way gave us better ways of handling business logic internally, helped us prioritise security, improve performance, and ensure stability for Scout tech users. What was our process? Here’s where we jump into the nuts and bolts of it. There were many steps in the overall process. The first was to replicate and upgrade the codebase to work with the latest version of Ruby on Rails. This means we could test how :Recruit performed with this version of the software. To do this, we created a new server to run the upgraded version. Once the software was stable, we then created a load balancer in AWS. A load balancer is a device or process by which traffic (i.e. web requests) is diverted to different servers. Think of it like a railroad switch that guides requests down diverging paths to prioritise speed and efficiency. Then we created a method to split the traffic between the existing version of :Recruit (that clients were currently using) and the newer, upgraded version of :Recruit. This way we could test the upgrade with minimal disruption. At this point, it’s all about testing! We spent a lot of time testing this upgrade in our staging environment (the sandbox where we find flaws and errors, and to challenge the system performance before going live). We identified issues in this environment by both automated and manual testing processes. Our goal was to fix any issues while continuing to add improvements. Once we were satisfied with the staging environment tests, we moved to a live environment and switched our beta users over to work on our upgraded version of :Recruit. These beta users consisted of our internal teams and divisions, all of whom use :Recruit daily. We observed them, the system, and our monitoring tools to make sure there were no kinks to iron out. When we were satisfied that we’d fixed all issues, we moved all users of :Recruit to the new server. Where are we now? With all traffic now on the new codebase, we’ve seen a performance increase of approximately 20% across :Recruit. The upgrade has allowed us to transition to a new way of handling background jobs. Users will feel the impact of improved email sending, report generation, integration performance, and much more. We also took this opportunity to improve our system-wide methods to roll out new features quickly, painlessly, and seamlessly. This will mean that you can continue to recruit the best talent for your organisation with zero disruption. Did it all go off without a hitch? Not entirely. We’re a pragmatic bunch, and while no framework upgrade is flawless, it was an overall
The Talent Scout Episode 66: 4 Ways Your Employees Can Help During The Recruitment Process
Find out more about how your employees can help during the recruitment process. Listen to the latest epsiode of The Talent Scout Podcast.
Experts Share 6 Key Talent Acquisition Trends for 2021 And Beyond.
It goes without saying that 2020 was a year like no other, and 2021 continued to bring even more unprecedented challenges, innovations and creative solutions. With the future of work well and truly here, HR professionals are being forced to look beyond the horizon and decipher key talent acquisition trends to survive and thrive. Once, people teams had the luxury of time to plan, test and tweak approaches. Now, many of us are taking it day by day: ten-year plans have been scrapped, and ‘business as usual’ is a distant memory. Many TA teams and HR leaders are looking for guidance. In times like these, we look to the experts for advice and predictions in an unpredictable landscape. Industry commentators like Hung Lee have their finger on the pulse of what it means to recruit in 2021, and can help make sense of a landscape that’s shifting every day. Speaking in a PageUp webinar, Hung Lee outlined his 8 key talent acquisition trends for 2021 and beyond. This is by no means an exhaustive list – but it is a good way to check that your organisation is on the right track. Here’s what we know so far about what matters in recruiting in 2021: Everyone is an international recruiter Digital transformation and automation take centre stage There are new challenges and considerations for diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) Alumni (former employees) become an organization‘s greatest asset Employer branding becomes a non-negotiable Internal mobility evolves into a key source of quality talent. 2020 was the year that HR truly stepped up and took a seat at the table. In 2021, it’s time to continue that momentum and take the lead in transforming workplaces for the new world of work. Talent acquisition trend 1: The global talent pool COVID-19 has accelerated once-distant trends and forced the world’s biggest work-from-home experiment. Even laggards have been forced to adopt remote tech – and organizations are realizing it can work. In spite of organizational complexities and the challenges of remote work, up to 37% of jobs can now be done fully remotely. In the US, there was a 150% increase in remote jobs from 2019 to 2020. In the UK, there was a 342% increase in the same period (Iain Moss, Adzuna, 2020). Organizations are getting into the groove of remote work, and this has opened up possibilities for a global network of talent. No longer constrained by brick and mortar offices, organizations can hire the best people in the world – not just their city. In 2021, everyone is an international recruiter. “Moving the job to where the people are is increasing,” says Hung Lee, curator of recruitment industry newsletter Recruiting Brainfood. Lee observes that “remote means anywhere” – and with technology improving and C-suite leaders enjoying the cost reduction of work-from-home arrangements, TA will shift from on-premise to remote hiring. This brings about major changes: Moving away from the traditional full-time hiring cycle, remote workers can be freelancers and contractors. This trend lends itself to a “try before you buy” approach, according to Lee. There is zero friction for talent to move from company to company – which means the employee experience is more important than ever Compensation is set by elite organizations. No longer confined to local salary benchmarks, smaller players may struggle to compete with salaries offered by large organizations. For many jobseekers, the ability to live in their hometown but get paid a New York-level salary is appealing – and makes it hard for local organizations to compete Competition for top talent is global. Talent acquisition trend 2: Digital transformation and automation becomes a priority In a year of constant disruption, even the most progressive companies have had to think on their feet. They’ve achieved this agility through workforce automation. Research shows that 92% of senior executives agree that the lockdown period has made digital transformation a priority. COVID-19 has forced the automation of in-person human roles, where possible. At the same time, remote working has flourished and given way to a raft of digitization and automation. RPA (recruitment process automation) has delivered unparalleled efficiencies in the recruiting process, spurred on by reduced TA headcount and recruiters simply having to do more with less. What was once paper-based, manual and resource-intensive (multiple recruiters and interviewing rooms, onerous rounds of shortlisting and assessments) has become streamlined and fully digital. Talent acquisition trend 3: Alumni form part of the talent community “Retain the relationship, not the employee” recruiting guru Bill Boorman advises. This year, cash-strapped and time-poor recruiting teams are turning to the ‘talent community’ – alumni, silver-medalists and internal talent – as a source of pre-vetted, quality hires. The return of the talent community creates a new job for recruiters – engaging talent even after they’ve left the organization. In the past, once someone walked out the door they were often gone for good. Now, HR teams are acquainting themselves with the concept of ‘Boomerang employees’ – those that leave the business then eventually return. These people are an invaluable source of qualified talent, external referrals and, when treated well, should become lasting employer brand champions. As people flow through the company from candidate to employee and eventually alumni, someone has to own and track this experience to ensure it’s a great one. Some organizations are approaching this by having a community manager that manages and engages people outside of the company. Others are developing alumni networks and using their career site as a leveraging point to attract alumni back. Hung Lee shares key ways to engage alumni: Make relationships the entire point Bridge community & company. Careers sites are a great way to do this Treat talent mobility the same as career development That development might exist outside the company Not a single career path but career optionality Talent acquisition trend 4: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) In a year that’s brought us a global pandemic, political unrest and a worldwide shift to remote work, it would take a lot to capture our attention. And yet in 2020, DE&I did just that. As Black Lives Matter protests spread awareness
The Talent Scout Episode 65: How To Write The Very Best Job Ads And Attract The Perfect Candidate
Check out Episode 65 of The Talent Scout podcast, where we discuss how to write the best job ads, and hire the very best candidates as a result.
Why a Bad Candidate Experience is Bad For Your Brand
Understand why a bad candidate experience is bad for your brand and how recruitment marketing can help.
The Talent Scout Episode 64: Employee Turnover – What’s Normal and How to Avoid Losing Your Best Talent
Check out Episode 64 of The Talent Scout podcast, where we discuss employee turnover and how to avoid losing your talent. https://player.captivate.fm/episode/a9159a51-7efc-4b46-ae45-36c640867059 If you enjoyed The Talent Scout podcast, sign-up to our newsletter to receive more helpful content.
How To Use Video Interviews To Wow Your Candidates
Use video interviews as an opportunity to excite candidates about the role & the organization. Scout can help by conducting video interviews for you.
How to make workplace wellbeing initiatives WFH friendly
How to make workplace wellbeing initiatives WFH friendly Across Australia, pandemic lockdown woes never seem to end. The corporate world feels the rippling consequences of ongoing lockdowns and work-from-home arrangements as staff start to disengage, burn out, and lose focus. But now is not the time to lose sight of the light at the end
