Two things characterize recruitment in 2020: new technologies and employee branding:
- Employee branding deserves as much attention as your consumer-facing brand.
- New technologies such as mobile-friendly career pages, social media strategies, and online recruitment management software are no longer a plus—they are a necessity.
These two things fuel your competitive advantage against other employers in your industry and raise the chances of landing promising talent.
As an advocate of efficient and effective recruitment, SkillFuel breaks down the ways you can improve and succeed in your recruitment process.
Part 1: Understanding Employee Branding
The success of your recruitment efforts rests on employee branding because it guides the way you craft the candidate experience, create the careers page, and build social media strategies.
Your employer brand is your reputation not as a provider of goods or services, but as a workplace. It’s how attractive you are to a potential candidate—your relative value from the point of view of applicants. Meanwhile, employee branding is a set of strategies that aims to improve and preserve a positive employer brand.
Why is it important? Because no promising talent would want to be part of a company with a negative employer reputation. As much as possible, people would apply for a business that’s known to treat its employees fairly and take interest in their professional development.
Benefits of Employee Branding
Apart from having a concrete guide in creating recruitment strategies, companies that invest in their employer branding:
Receive More InMail Responses
LinkedIn data shows that businesses with a strong employer brand have a 31% higher response rate than those with a weaker brand.
Receive More Applicants
Exemplary companies see 2.5 times more applicants per job post on LinkedIn.
Reduce Hiring Costs
A strong employer brand reduces the cost per hire by as much as 43%.
Bottom line: the more sterling your reputation, the better you will fare in online recruitment. So this is where your online recruitment strategy begins.
Building a Formidable Employer Branding
When the employer’s image is concerned, it can be tempting to let the work speak for itself. Companies tend to cite employee satisfaction surveys that reveal their workforce is content, fulfilled, and, seemingly, has nothing negative to say about the organization.
However, this complacency can land you in hot water. If you don’t take control of your employer brand, somebody else will. If the employer is silent, the noise about the company—factual or not—will dominate the discussion and possibly discourage potential candidates.
So before focusing on how to find the right candidate for the job, active steps must be taken to polish the company’s image.
1. Build an Employer Value Proposition (EVP)
The EVP is a short, bulleted point list of reasons your company should be chosen by applicants—a list of factors that put your organization a notch above competing employers. Examples include continuous training programs, opportunities for promotion, corporate social responsibility, and so on. This is the foundation of a strong recruitment process improvement plan. A strong employer brand rests on the belief that whatever the competing employer can do, you can do better.
2. Use Social Media to Its Fullest
One look at brand giants will show you that social media is a powerful way to reinforce employer brand. Whatever your EVP is, your digital profiles are the perfect platforms to demonstrate it. For example, you can post pictures of your latest training session or company activities that give back to the community.
3. Recognize Your Employees
Let your employees take center stage in your social media profiles. Feature stellar workers, let them share their daily experiences, or showcase their journey as part of your corporate family. By presenting your workers in a warm and productive environment, you convey the message that the people side of your business is thriving and well-cared for.
Part 2: Strategies to Amplify Online Recruitment
With technology and a strong employer branding in place, your hiring department can implement methods to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your recruitment and selection process.
Create a Powerful Career Page
Unless you have sourced candidates from LinkedIn, online applicants will head to your Career Page to assess whether they’re a good fit for the position and the company.
This point of contact is crucial; the page has a lot to accomplish, namely 1) encourage the reader to stay; 2) reflect your employer branding; and 3) provide all information that a candidate may need.
Display Compelling Text
To encourage visitors to stay, go beyond bland captions that only state the name of the page. Create short banners that summarize the company mission and the difference your organization is making. Apart from compensation and benefits, applicants are interested in the impact of their future role on the stakeholders’ lives.
Be Mobile-Friendly
About 78% of US job seekers apply for jobs on their mobile devices, which make mobile-friendly career pages a more attractive choice. A slow mobile site with misplaced buttons and disproportionate text will cost you promising talent, especially if competing employers boast sleek, mobile-friendly career sites.
Reinforce Your EVP
Once you’ve placed the information applicants are looking for (job title, duties and responsibilities, compensation, working hours, company address, etc.), take the opportunity to show snippets of life in the organization. A virtual tour of the office or a day-in-the-life video, for instance, helps applicants visualize themselves in the company and keeps them motivated to pursue the application.
Create an Accurate Job Description
No matter how convincing your careers page is, if the job descriptions contain vague or insufficient information, promising candidates would be discouraged to follow through with the application.
Complete Information
The first step is to outline the duties and responsibilities clearly, as well as other factors applicants are looking for, like the compensation (if possible), the address of the facility they will be assigned to, the supervisor they’ll report to, and the qualifications for the post. The qualifications should clearly indicate which credentials are required and which simply give the candidate an advantage.
Opportunities for Growth
According to Gallup, what high-quality candidates have in common is they look for opportunities, as opposed to lower-quality candidates who are more likely to seek immediate requirements, like wages and work hours.
The cream of the crop would choose companies that offer the opportunity to make full use of their skillset and encourage them to excel in their expertise. High-quality candidates want to be challenged, both intellectually and creatively.
If your company wants to capture these highly driven and motivated individuals, the job descriptions should go beyond basic bullet points; they must state how the role can lead to professional growth
Amplify Your Social Media Strategies
Jobseekers spend a significant amount of time online, creating numerous opportunities for you to build employee brand awareness and demonstrate your strengths as an employer. Take advantage on two equally powerful social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook by having a social media integrated recruitment software
Although Instagram holds promise in online recruitment, it is one of the least used platforms, understandably. Because it’s a photo-sharing app, it’s used mainly for showcasing products or services, supported by the business-friendly features that Instagram has launched a few years ago. Moreover, Instagram doesn’t exude the same professional atmosphere as LinkedIn, so it’s not a conducive place to look for and reach out to passive candidates.
The untapped potential, however, is that it offers a huge space to reinforce employer brand. As mentioned earlier, a key strategy is to highlight current employees or company activities as part of your EVP. Your Instagram account, though dedicated to product photography, can showcase life inside the organization now and then.
Instagram may not lure candidates to your careers page directly, but it can generate employer brand awareness and reinforce the foundations of your EVP.
Facebook has a wider recruitment application than Instagram. In fact, companies with a larger workforce and consequently, have bigger recruiting needs opt to recruit on Facebook by creating a Facebook page dedicated to hiring and building a follower-base of potential candidates. This enables them to cultivate relationships even before candidates sign up for the brand. More importantly, a Facebook careers page creates a targeted audience, making it easier to post targeted content.
For instance, such a Facebook page would be perfect for posting job vacancy alerts, which redirect to the career page on the company website. It immediately notifies passive candidates and, thanks to the highly shareable nature of social media posts, enables them to refer the position to their peers.
A Facebook page also offers your organization to demonstrate thought leadership in your industry. Posting insights about industry developments and joining relevant conversations (Women’s Month, Earth Day, etc.) builds your image as a grounded but innovative employer—one that applicants would want to be associated with.
Craft a Stellar Candidate Experience
Candidates who experience a positive application experience are more likely to complete the application process and make referrals to your company.
Crafting an excellent experience, however, is a tall order; it begs for a streamlining of hiring processes and greater transparency between the applicant and the recruitment team.
1. Use Advanced Recruitment Software
For companies with a sizable workforce and a steady stream of job vacancies, it pays to invest in a recruitment automation tool. This creates a bigger impact compared to social media strategies. By making the hiring team’s workload more manageable, the specialized app speeds up the process and makes it more convenient for the applicant.
2. Uphold Person-to-Person Interaction
Some recruitment teams consider face-to-face interactions antiquated and recommend companies to rely solely on exams and AI tools. While these automated tools improve recruitment greatly, it might not be able to assess culture fit, as company culture can only be understood by a person who is part of that culture. As such, face-to-face (or in the case of remote hiring, on-screen) interviews give the recruitment team a chance to assess how well the candidate will get along with the rest of the organization.
3. Communicate as much as possible
Candidates hate to be left out in the dark, and research shows that lack of response from employers is a major frustration for job searchers. Timely and engaging communication with your candidates doesn't have to be time-consuming or difficult.
With the help of social media recruitment tools and management software, it’s easier now more than ever to communicate with your candidates. It can be as simple as shooting them an email message or creating automated replies on Facebook messenger. Either way, at least they know that you’ll respond to them as soon as you can instead of being completely ignored.
Keep Innovating Your Recruitment Process
Trends indicate that recruitment processes will only be more reliant on online platforms in the future. Just as organizations migrated from traditional recruitment to today’s multi-channel hiring processes, the way we hire will certainly change in the coming years, as well.
As such, a recruitment team that continuously innovates and finds ways to improve its recruitment processes will always be first in line to land the best candidates.
