Employer Branding – Doing the Right Things📝
Employer branding has gained unprecedented importance as it is now established that a strong employment brand gets 3.5 times more applications per position than the competition. Read from CareerBuilder report.
This also helps establish the fact that our Candidate experience needs attention & to be re-looked. Most employers overlook the fact that they are being compared strategically by all applicants when choosing them over others. Source: Forbes.
A healthy introspection can help bring in the answers to question like – Are we doing the right things? Are we doing things the right way? Without a doubt, the interview sessions & that the method needs its process & methodology.
Attract – Experience – Leaving a positive Impression
First, comes, attracting the right talent. There are around 18 established sources for candidates. Are these sources or channels working in our favor to find the right talent? A quick check can reveal the percentage of clicks to application ratio. You can understand which channel is working well & which one is not. Sometimes, technical glitches are the real culprits behind a huge number of drop offs. Then comes the existing employees. Whether you are a big company or small, the employees form an important source of information for prospective applicants. Is the existing pool of employees sharing the good things about the enterprise? – Employees are the best brand ambassadors as they talk about & spread word of mouth without direct incentives. Although, if incentivized, they act pro-actively on behalf of recruiters for spreading the word. It’s their present interaction with their immediate seniors or inter-department along with the overall culture of the organization that helps them do so.
At that juncture comes the first circle of influence for recruiters and these are the connected pool of applicants that are constantly monitoring the activities of the recruiters on social channels. This pool is the next best bet to influence as they help distribute information about open job positions by way of messages & shares in their circles.
Is the connected pool of candidates (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) aware about the employment brand & its activities?
Then comes the face-to-face & the fact that interviews leave them with a lasting impression, it needs to be a real good one. Poor first impressions, leave the candidates from considering these companies all together & bad ones – mind if you may, the bad word travels faster. Candidates have even reported not ‘buying’ products from these enterprises altogether. What needs to be done here is – Some simple things like an acknowledgment emails & personal thank you notes take this to a long way & leave a positive impression. Even “Not-Selected” and personalized emails help do the damage control which would other lead to spreading the bad word. Even a feedback survey about the entire recruitment process could bring about a significant amount of learning from the candidates and could prove to help the process continually.
To get things right, the whole journey for the candidate should be role-played before it gets to the candidate & then the experience should be delivered with a wow factor. Some engagement in breaks, reading materials, write-ups or emails about company information & culture is small acts that help candidates decide their future employers. There could be some minor tweaks required & few new employer branding solutions introduced, but it pays well regarding attracting the right candidates & more importantly keeping them for a long time. If the budgets permit, add some in-expensive giveaways like branded notebooks, pens, etc. They help the candidate build a reliable recall with the brand in the future, and the goodies never go un-noticed.
We need to use the candidate interview as an opportunity to leave a positive impression about the brand, irrespective of the fact whether the candidate is selected & remains un-appointed for some reason. Let’s just work towards, creating a unique way of doing things that are not experienced with other brands or companies otherwise.
This article first appeared on www.CareerBuilderforEmployers.co.in/Blog
