Land higher quality candidates with strong employer branding
In this current competitive job market, you need to stand out to the right talent – and one of the best ways you can attract high-quality candidates is to make sure you have strong employer branding. Here’s how.
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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.
Start Building a Talent Pool Today to Empower Your Growth Tomorrow
2020 taught us several things about the future of work. One of them is the connection between proactive talent acquisition and future-readiness. The candidate market is still incredibly competitive, and organisations are hard-pressed to attract and hire skilled team members. The days of merely trading resumes and rejection letters with your applicants are over; it’s time to start building a talent pool and reaping the rewards of an improved candidate experience. Why building a talent pool is better If you are simply sending rejection letters to everyone who doesn’t make the cut for your vacancy, you are not making the most of the talent you’re attracting. According to a survey released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in June 2021, nearly a third of businesses are struggling to find suitable candidates to hire. The chief reason for this is a lack of applicants, as candidates continue to be cautious and more selective with their roles in the wake of the uncertainty of 2020. If so many Australian businesses are struggling to attract applicants at all, then why do most organisations continue to rely on reactive hiring? Building a talent pool of people is a much more proactive and brand-friendly approach to sustainable organisational growth. What is a talent pool, anyway? Essentially, a talent pool is a database of candidates who have previously shown interest in joining your organisation. For whatever reason, they may not have made the cut for the role they applied for initially. However, they could be a great fit for your team and are open to hearing about suitable vacancies in the future. Building a talent pool and maintaining it well is key to reducing your time to hire, improving your employer brand, and growing your organisation sustainably, even in a tough candidate market. A good talent pool includes a variety of details about each candidate, including: How they came in contact with your organisation; The kind of roles they want to be considered for; Their key strengths and skills; Where they are currently working, and; Notes about their suitability and fit from their interviews. Benefits of building a talent pool We’ve already mentioned that building a talent pool is more proactive and efficient than starting a recruitment campaign from scratch. But there are myriad benefits of effective talent pool development. Let’s take a look at these in more detail: A live digital talent pool When well-managed, your talent pool is a “live” database of up-to-date candidate information. You have a record of each candidate’s availability, skills, and experience. You also have the confidence that they would like to work with your organisation. With this, you increase your productivity and reduce the manual admin of posting and managing a new job ad every time you hire. A better candidate experience In a market that’s currently led by candidates, you have to make a good impression and be sure not to burn any bridges. Most candidates face rejection letter after rejection letter if they hear back from an organisation at all. Repeatedly iterating their value to potential employers with little to no positive feedback takes its toll. The process often leaves a bad taste in a candidates mouth about the brands in question. So, how do you overcome this? By creating an exceptional candidate experience. Set your organisation apart by talent pooling, rather than rejecting most of your candidates. Instead of saying, “You’re not right for my organisation,” you can say, “You’re not the best fit for this role right now,” and maintain contact. Keep your top candidates looped into your latest news and career opportunities. Contact them regularly to see where they’re at and keep them posted on upcoming vacancies. A talent engagement tool helps to automate this process and the resulting positive candidate interactions go a long way towards strengthening your employer brand. Reduced time to hire With a growing database of interested candidates, your organisation is empowered to hit the ground running with every new hire. Review your talent pool first and reach out to suitable candidates directly when a new role becomes available. A traditional recruitment campaign is only necessary if no one in your talent pool fits the bill for that role. You’ll reduce your time to hire and enjoy a smoother hiring process overall. Lower cost per hire Logically, it follows that a reduced time to hire implies a reduced cost per hire. You save time and money when you pay for fewer advertisements, limit time spent on interviews, and time spent waiting for applicant responses. And, you reduce the risk of a “bad hire” and the damage it could do to your productivity and culture. You can combine this strategy with powerful talent acquisition software to get the most out of every campaign and save time along the way. Improved quality of hire If you are always hiring reactively, you are constantly under the pump to fill roles as they come up. You run the risk of hiring a candidate in a rush without thoroughly investigating their competencies and culture fit. Flash forward to four weeks in. You may have spent a lot of time and money hiring a candidate who can’t hit their KPIs and doesn’t gel with their team at all. The best way to avoid this kind of catastrophe is to build and nurture a talent pool. This proactive strategy cuts out a lot of time and resources when it’s time to hire. And, you gain the confidence that your new team member is engaged, lives your purpose, and contributes to your culture. Increased access to passive candidates A passive candidate is someone who is not actively searching for a new role but is open to being figuratively (or literally) tapped on the shoulder and offered an interview. Astoundingly, about 70% of the global workforce is made up of passive candidates! That’s a lot of people who aren’t scouring job boards for a new role but wouldn’t say no to the right opportunity. We unpack the difference
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
Improving Candidate Experience Leads to Effective Talent Acquisition
Improving candidate experience leads to effective talent acquisition If there’s one thing that COVID-19 brought to the fore, it’s the candidate experience when searching for a new role. The pandemic created global uncertainty around the economy and its moving parts. Millions of people became candidates again. For some, it was the first time they’d been
Building a Positive Candidate Experience Into Your Recruitment Process
Have you ever spent hours on a job application only to never get a response from that company? Perhaps you prepared extensively for an interview only to be met by a disinterested hiring manager who can barely remember your name. All of these small moments add up to become the candidate experience when candidates are engaging with your recruitment process. Candidate experience can have a massive impact on an organization’s success. A positive candidate experience can make sourcing for new roles significantly easier as a result of a positive Employer Brand. A negative candidate experience will likely very quickly have candidates avoiding your open vacancies. It also can have a huge impact on company revenue with many burned candidates vowing to use a competitor’s service and urging their friends to do the same. An example of this in action is Virgin Media in the UK who discovered that their negative candidate experience was costing them more than £4.4 million per year. Candidate experience is a tricky balancing act. There are plenty of roles that can attract 100s of applications and though many recruiters have begun their respective careers by declaring they’ll give every candidate that they work with a personalized response, reality soon sets in. The truth is that if you’re hiring frequently you simply cannot give every candidate that applies for your roles a personalized experience. You can however use a combination of clever automation and efficient internal processes to gift your candidates moments of joy throughout their recruitment experience with you. This is where utilizing an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can give you the edge you need to ensure that the candidates you meet remain enthusiastic about your organization and your brand. Managing candidate expectations One of the first and simplest things that you can do to ensure that both you and your new candidate don’t start off on the wrong foot is to be clear on expectations. Using an ATS you can generate an email that is triggered and sent to candidates upon submission of an application. The content of this email is important and should say much more than ‘thank you for submitting an application to our organization’. As a rule of thumb, when crafting this message to your new candidates you should include: An anticipated timeline of the recruitment process – When can they expect to hear if they’ve been selected for an interview? How many interviews are they likely to attend? A contact number or email address that they can reach out to if they have any questions about the process or would like to follow up on their application. An acknowledgment that though this is an automated email, a real human is taking the time to review the candidate’s application. An acknowledgment that you appreciate the hard work the candidate has already demonstrated by submitting their application. While it is preferable that you follow up with candidates and let them know if they’re no longer being considered for the role, again your ATS should allow this automation, if that’s not something that you have the capacity to do for all applications then make it clear that due to the volume of applications you receive only candidates who are successful in their application will be contacted for interview. Failing to contact all of your candidates is far from the ideal, but if it’s something that you aren’t capable of then you do need to set that expectation with your candidates from the beginning. Though doing this is less about a positive candidate experience and is more so damage control. Providing candidate feedback A huge pain point for candidates is a feeling of wasted time that is generated when they are essentially ghosted by the hiring organization. As discussed, many candidates complain of submitting an application only to never receive any acknowledgment from the hiring organization. In some much more damaging instances, candidates have interviewed for a role and then never heard from the hiring organization again. With the candidate management technology that exists and is readily available today, ghosting candidates who have invested time and energy with your company just isn’t good enough anymore. Ignoring candidates you’re no longer interested in is a bad candidate experience and will negatively impact your Employer Brand. Providing feedback to candidates will look different depending on how far they are into your process. If you’ve not interviewed them, then a simple automated email to thank them for their time and explain that you’re proceeding with candidates who are a closer fit for the role and your organization is sufficient. Individuals that you’ve interviewed warrant more personalized feedback. This doesn’t need to be overly detailed but absolutely should be honest. In an ideal world, you’d call candidates but again if that’s not something you have the capacity for then at least make sure you email these candidates and release them from your recruitment process by giving them feedback. Empathy and respect At the end of the day, candidates really aren’t asking for much. All they want and need is an acknowledgement of the effort that they’ve made regardless of whether they’re a fit for the role or not. Work with your hiring team and train them in how to deliver an excellent interview for your candidates. Today’s failed applicant could be a superstar in a different role within your company, but they aren’t going to want to work with you if they’ve had a bad interview with a hiring manager who seems completely disinterested in them. Show your candidates the respect that they deserve for taking time out of their day to meet with you and your team in order to discuss your open vacancy. Improving your candidate experience overall will take a lot of work and it can seem like a daunting task. But you don’t have to do it all at once, find pain points and areas of contention within your recruitment process and work to improve them little by little. Small improvements within your recruitment
Are You Ready for ‘The Great Resignation’?
A resignation boom may be on the horizon. Here’s what employers can do to prepare, and how to bounce back if you’ve already been affected. If you’re on LinkedIn, chances are you’ve heard of the term ‘The Great Resignation’. This term refers to the increase in resignations that employers are expecting as the Covid-19 pandemic slows down. According to Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M, during an interview with Bloomberg, “When there’s uncertainty, people tend to stay put, so there are pent-up resignations that didn’t happen over the past year. The numbers are multiplied, he says, by the many pandemic-related epiphanies—about family time, remote work, commuting, passion projects, life, and death, and what it all means—that can make people turn their back on the 9-to-5 office grind.” As an employer, what can you do to avoid ‘The Great Resignation’? Remote Work Needs to Be An Option Employees have gotten used to the home comforts associated with remote work. Not having the option to work remotely post-pandemic may make your employees consider changing jobs. In fact, a study done by Robert Half states that 1 in 3 employees who are currently working from home would look for a new job if they were required to return to the office. However, employers might be hesitant to allow all employees to continue to work with such freedom. Consider letting employees work remotely as a reward for consistent performance. Make Flexibility A Priority A job that’s flexible allows employees to have a greater work-life balance. A level of flexibility at work has come to be expected by employees as part of our ‘new normal’. Thinking about going back to strict 9-5 works hours? Think again. Wanting flexibility is nothing new. In fact, even before the pandemic, flexibility was important to employees. According to research done by Gallup, a global analytics firm, 54% of office workers say they’d leave their job for one that offers flexible work time. Consider a compromise: establish set times that an employee must be available, and allow them to schedule the remainder of their time around their lives. Learning Opportunities Will Retain Talent Employee Learning and Development may be low on your list of priorities with budgets being cut due to the pandemic – but it shouldn’t be. A sure-fire way to increase engagement? Empower your employees with opportunities to upskill. A focus on L&D as a pillar of your Employer Brand can do wonders in attracting and retaining talent. Now that in-person education is limited, consider an online Learning Management System (LMS). Scout Talent’s LMS, :Learning, gives you access to an intuitive platform to manage employee learning, as well as access to over 18,000 courses. So, You’ve Already Been Affected by ‘The Great Resignation? Making a bad hire is costly. Here’s how you can make the recruitment process as stress-free as possible. Use An Applicant Tracking System (ATS). A disorganised recruitment process can badly impact your Employer Brand and make candidates re-think working for you. An ATS can make the recruitment process a whole lot smoother. Scout Talent’s affordable ATS :Recruit</i > was built by recruiters for recruiters. This affordable software platform can help you manage your recruitment, easily screen candidates and communicate with candidates and your team with ease. Let The Experts Take Over An increase in recruitment activities may leave you feeling overwhelmed. Scout Talent offers affordable recruitment services including Recruitment Marketing, candidate attraction, shortlisting and selection and Employer Branding. To get regular information that adds value to your business, sign up to receive Scout Talent email updates. We promise to only send you information that you’ll find useful.
The Talent Scout Episode 57: How to maintain and strengthen your company culture
A company with a strong culture is one that has highly motivated and engaged employees. Typically, employees that are highly motivated and engaged perform better in their roles and are less likely to leave their organization. According to a survey carried out by the Queen’s School of Business, Disengaged workers have 37% higher absenteeism, 49%
