Capitalist Note: This post is part of a series on Building/Reinforcing Company Culture Through Great Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Practices.
Let's face it people, "company culture" is a loaded phrase. Some of it is real, some of it is aspirational, but one thing on my mind recently is that as we try to build the culture we want at our companies, we forget about the messages we send in our recruiting process.
So you're proud of your culture - cool! Let's dig in and see if you're reinforcing that culture in all the gritty details of your talent acquisition/recruiting process. Remember - if your TA/Recruiting process doesn't match and promote your culture, you're not going to get the fit/matches you need in the candidate marketplace.
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It's fitting that I waited until the 4th post in a 5-post series on recruiting and culture to talk about Employment Branding.
Building an impactful Employment Brand to signal cultural norms to candidates, encouraging opt-in/opt out in the recruiting process (including your career site,
social, ATS messaging, job postings and more) is an important topic.
But the position of your employment brand is not the most important thing when it comes to linking your recruiting practices with your culture. The posts that came before this one - building your recruiting team and core practices, values/potential factors positioning and use of assessments - are requirements before you turn you attention to brand. You have to know who you are and how to measure that in candidates before you can accurately tell the world that story.
Still, Employment Brand matters - a lot. There's a lot of buzz about Employment Branding these days, and as a result, a lot of smoke and mirrors related to what you need. To put our view in the simplest terms - you don't need a lot of fancy tools to ensure your employment brand supports the culture you're trying to build. That's the good news.
The bad news - or challenge if you will - is that great Employment Brands require an initial and ongoing effort to support from a recruiting ops perspective. At times, you'll wonder whether the work is worth the effort, but our collaboration at Kinetix with many, many clients suggests that companies who follow a specific plan related to Employment Brand always win in the candidate marketplace.
Here's our list of the most important things to remember and work on as you develop a great Employment Brand to match the culture you're building at your company:
1—Revamp your career site with an eye towards authenticity, your biggest recruiting challenges and cultural themes.
Let's start with a basic thought - if you're careers site isn't highly visual, you lose. To build on that thought, your site must include art (images and video) that shows real employees doing work - no stock art. Authenticity is built by weaving these real people into stories (more on that to follow) that precisely provide the narratives you want the world to hear. Limited real estate on any career site means you must be a bit selfish related to the stories you tell - focused on your biggest recruiting job group needs and the behavioral traits/competencies you believe define your culture.
2—Storytelling is king – a great careers/employment brand presence must include deep profiles of people actually doing the work.
In the competitive world for talent, static people sites aren't enough—you've got to show candidates fresh content regularly. A cornerstone of your approach should be storytelling - written articles showcasing your awesome employees and culture. This written content is fundamental to the your employer brand and creates content across multiple specialties and career paths. This storytelling should focus on the work - the good bad and ugly about doing a job at your company, with limited bad and ugly messaging (think 10% of the story) building authenticity and creditability.
While written content is key for SEO, the world expects video to be part of your employment brand. By creating quick-hitting videos showcasing your culture and specific departments/functional areas, candidates feel as if they’ve received an insider’s view to what it’s like to work at your company.
3—Your careers site is the destination, social is a means of distribution (as well as engagement).
Most of your competitors have a weak careers social media strategy, simply posting jobs. To be best-in-class, you'll need to create careers-focused social media channels rich with focused content, curation, responsiveness, and more. There's synergy in the storytelling approach we're recommending for your careers site, since every employee profile you create (written and video) becomes content from which you can create social media posting schedules that support your employment brand beyond simply posting jobs. For best results, create broad schedules of social content across the major social channels (we recommend you start with Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram), focused on your storytelling, as well as curation from other sources at your company and the outside world that support the culture you're trying to communicate and the jobs you're trying to fill.
4—The right employment brand content unlocks candidate engagement strategies most companies can’t consider.
By now, you probably get the strategy of linking candidates to your culture through employment branding efforts. Build a great career site showing real people doing the work, tell the stories of great employees in a way that's linked to your culture and your toughest recruiting challenges, then share those stories through your careers-based social strategy. Rinse and repeat for best results. But ongoing discipline to storytelling unlocks true competitive advantage
Follow our advice related to authentic storytelling, and you'll have the ability to execute on multiple employment branding initiatives in a way your competitors can't touch. Targeted email marketing is a great way to distribute content to talent communities and interested candidates, driving engagement and keeping candidates interested in the opportunities available at your company. At Kinetix, we see a 40-50% open rate across our clients on these types of email campaigns focused on talent pools. As you continue to tell stories about your culture and specific job groups, your career site can build into micro-sites based on cultural competencies or job specialty - which can be used by recruiters in direct communications with prime candidates.
Your competitors will say they're building talent pools. You'll do it and actually have something to say once the talent pool grows. Advantage: You.
Storytelling wins when it comes to building an Employment Brand and linking it to your culture.
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Views expressed are the product of the school of hard knocks, which includes watching my team at Kinetix represent great companies and brands on the RPO recruiting trail. Reach out if you ever need recruiting help while you build something great.