It used to be called reputation. Now it is known as employer branding. Whatever the nomenclature, recruitment is a ripe venue for shaping and managing a company’s brand. Impression counts in every step in the recruitment process – be it appealing or repellent. Each touch point sets the tone for existing employees and prospective candidates.
Traditional recruitment methods combined with social media platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterist, et al) are recruitment dark hole magnets. Candidates, both internal and external, complain about bad experiences citing ATS complexity, recruiter non-response, inflated company marketing, impersonal automation, and the like.
Supplementing formal ads with social media posts, marketing to different audiences, using a portfolio of approaches (corporate website, mobile apps, career pages, recruitment websites, social media pages, etc.), and ensuring courtesy in every step are key. It is also vital to build the employer’s brand into the recruitment strategy. By doing this, brand behaviors, not just promises, are created and, when well constructed, result in a positive candidate experience. The final product — employees who are company brand advocates.
Yes, impressions are made in every step along the way. Whilst automation enables volume, candidates plead for a personal touch. Whatever way the company’s reputation is managed, we at softfactors.com suggest that courtesy fused with a personal touch creates a markedly distinctive recruitment experience. How might this happen? Revisiting the company’s talent pool library for each new opening. Returning to the almost hired. Following-up with authenticated feedback. Using same level calls in the interview phase. Combining optimized recruitment technologies with personal touch points forms the perceptions of existing and prospective candidates. Change a bad experience into an exceptional one by continuously sculpting and managing recruitment processes into steps that are stimulating, differentiated, and appealing.
We’ve asked our blog panel members to comment about the realities of recruitment and how to shape a company’s brand in the talent marketplace. Our panel members are drawn from several geographies and multiple generations so you have a mix of comments to weigh up.
Recruitment has become so automated for the sake of time. A program screens for key words to determine who will receive the auto generated email turndown or will be forwarded to the individual who is completing the phone screen process for the hiring manager. The investment in long term employment relationships have been reduced to a few key strokes and someone else’s parameters determining who is getting through. There isn’t any personal involvement anymore.
But what if recruiting was like dating. Various dating portals determined to find you the best match for forever happiness are using similar programming to create a list of potential matches. More time is spent on finding forever love than in the recruitment process. Hours are spent in extensive chat sessions used to determine favorite food, wine, and activities to determine whether or not the first date is even worth it! Yet, recruiting often does not engage the primary stakeholder until the interview takes place- the first date.
Time is the most important investment in a long-term employment relationship. The first screen, the phone calls, the first interview are all factors in the applicant’s brand impression and are investments into the employer-employee relationship. The personal contact provides data to both parties that will determine if the essential information of whether or not this position, candidate or company is a good fit. And if there’s going to be another date.
Nowadays professional and private lives of the individual are more and more blending into one. Companies are trying to use this as a chance for promoting themselves and jobs they have on offer.
Promoting a company via Social Media is absolutely necessary in today’s market place. No organization can afford to loose talent by not being present on the Internet or promoting himself in the wrong way. Interestingly I have never looked for a new position using Facebook, I also have never read on new employers following their tweets. I read job ads, and I talk to people who are already working in the company. LinkedIn is as far as I get when it comes to employer branding. For me Facebook, Instagram etc. are channels only used in my private life, something I wish to keep separated from my professional career. Or would you “like” the Facebook page of a Financial Services Organization?
The same applies on recruitment processes. I prefer sending in my CV by email to an actual person with a name attached to it. Somebody I can call when in want of feedback and to answer questions I might have. Online application forms that are sent into the nowhere are not appealing to me; in prospect of a future employer they turn me of, not on.
Considering my year of birth (1981) I am falling into the category of Millennials (at least an old one), a group people expect to be Social Media experts and to use their smart phones for work and free time. Interestingly I meet more and more young(er) people that keep those separate, who switch off their work phones after leaving the office and who enjoy their free time without PowerPoint and emails from work. I meet people that prefer the traditional ways, who follow their gut feeling when it comes to a future employer and who are not blinded by organizations’ online presences. Apart from all the technical benefits we are a skeptical generation. And maybe that’s what organizations and their HRs need to focus on: How do you create a presence that is appealing without loosing the professional touch? How do you recruit efficiently without being too efficient?
References:
Moreland, T. (2015). Leveraging Employer Branding as a Key Business Strategy. In D. Ulrich, W.A. Schiemann & L. Sartain (Ed.), The Rise of HR (pp.493- 498). Virginia: HR Certification Institute.
Your ideas and comments are welcomed.
]]>We all recognize and experience that the world of work is on a trajectory of continuous change. It is rapid. It is pervasive. And, at times, it is both overpowering and awe-inspiring.
In the recently published book, “The Rise of HR,” Diane J. Gherson and Seth Kahan, describe the multitude of changes, many based in technology, that provide striking challenges and substantial opportunities to HR professionals.
They gear us to think about today’s technologies (smart objects, wireless technology, big data analytics, cloud computing, and social media platforms) plus changes in the way we work (work done anywhere and anytime, mission-driven companies, reshaped employee expectations). Gherson and Kahan propose this combination of technologies and workplace changes demonstrate dramatic shifts that can and do impact existing HR practices, processes, and mindsets.
We propose that with this myriad of unceasing social and technological disruptions, the HR field is prompted to redefine its approaches and agenda. In turn, HR professionals need to be prepared and enabled. To quickly and thoroughly come up to speed and reshape their capabilities.
We’ve asked our blog panel members to talk about the skills, competencies and mindsets they believe are critical that HR professionals procure and develop to succeed in the very different world of work that is upon us.
A welcome to our panel members who graciously volunteered to contribute their ideas to each edition of this blog (actually glog as it is a group blog!). They are drawn from several geographies and multiple generations so you will discover a mix of ideas to mull over.
“The HR world has been changing and the skills needed are not just around people skills, solving employee issues, designing processes and implementing but it is more going towards business. I do think HR professionals are needed to be much more business oriented, understand the business, and speak their language but also to coach and challenge them. I see lately companies bringing business people to HR roles and I do think this brings additional value to the table.
The other challenge here is to be much more data oriented and much more analytical. The data is always a challenge as it is still hard to get the right data but also hard to make sense of the data for HR professionals. But, it is moving in the right direction. What is needed from HR next 10 years and what was needed 10 years ago are very different.
In the future, we will need to also anticipate much more in advance – especially with demographics changing, Y and Z generations demanding different things from the workforce.”
“I believe that foremost the mindset and attitude of HR professionals need to undergo a substantial change. We can only tackle the “disruptions” and the fast changing environment we are facing, if we shift from uniform and simplified processes to individualized solutions that serve the unique and complex realities of organizations and its members. This means we need to start thinking of organizations as living systems, rather than a collective of fixed structures and hierarchies.
To best serve this living system we must understand it’s dynamic and needs, engage in constructive dialogues and solutions that will serve as effectively as possible the system and its members. The HR professional of the future as I see it, will be a systemic-thinking, agile, creative and innovative navigator, that develops individualized solutions with the stakeholders involved and with that will guarantee the survival and growth of the system.”
“One of the future core competencies of HR professionals is to reduce things to the essential. Why is this so important nowadays? As a young person starting a career for example, you’ll look over tons of job offerings. But you’ll always encounter a huge amount of requirements, which in the end might hinder talents to go for the offering. The same principle can be applied to employees in various positions, because no one can take lots of recommendation of improvement in big amounts. So the information could literally get lost in translation (in its Latin meaning).”
Your ideas and comments are welcomed.
References:
Kahan, S. (2015). Twelve Predictions for a New World. In D. Ulrich, W.A. Schiemann & L. Sartain (Ed.), The Rise of HR (pp.41-46). Virginia: HR Certification Institute.
Gherson, D.J. (2015). HR Disrupted: The Next Agenda for Delivering Value. In D. Ulrich, W.A. Schiemann & L. Sartain (Ed.), The Rise of HR (pp. 303-308). Virginia: HR Certification Institute
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