Today’s job market is competitive. Like, really competitive. For the hiring company, that is.

With the scales tipped in favour of candidates, employer branding has taken on a new level of importance. There just aren’t enough candidates, and those who are looking to change jobs often have their pick of several competing offers to consider. How can you make your organisation stand out from the crowd?

Make sure your employer brand is top-tier.

The public, potential candidates, and active and passive job seekers pay attention to how your organisation is treating your people. Your organisation’s social media presence, and how you interact with them online, even how you react to criticism from both employees and the public plays a huge role in how your organisation is perceived. Not to mention how it looks as a place to work.

Smart organisations are getting ahead of the game by developing employer branding campaigns and strategies that take this new reality into account. Examples abound, of course, so we’ve narrowed it down to our four favourites. These are companies who understand employer branding and the impact it can have on their candidate pool, evidenced by the lists of people waiting to work for them when they announce a new job opportunity.

Starbucks

The coffee giant gets it right, starting with calling employees “partners.” Starbucks goes the extra mile with industry-leading benefits packages that include things like education stipends, parental leave, and health coverage for even the partest of part-time partners. They foster an environment that encourages creativity, promotes from within, and understands the service part of “service industry.”

They also understand social media, with accounts on Instagram and Twitter that are dedicated to HR and jobs-related posts. They make great use of their existing people, featuring them in testimonials, photos from partner events, and more. These accounts are also run by social media savvy marketers, as evidenced by their friendly, informative interactions with followers and the appropriate use of branded hashtags in nearly every campaign they run.

L’Oreal

The longest standing company on our list (founded in 1909), L’Oreal shows that even the most well-established companies can learn to play by new rules. When they recently hit the milestone of 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, rather than trumpeting their success by bragging, they decided to showcase their people. L’Oreal tapped their massive talent pool and highlighted individuals by asking them to share, in their own words, their stories of life at L’Oreal. In this way, they directly addressed the estimated 70% of their followers who were looking to find a job with the business.

This campaign nailed one of the most difficult and often overlooked aspects of maintaining a corporate social media presence—engagement.

By posting employee stories, told by their employees, the company took the opportunity to engage with their followers, directing them to the individual’s profile when appropriate, or to the corporate careers page to encourage them to look for relevant openings. All of this combined to create more enthusiastic brand ambassadors, both inside the company, and out. Oh yeah, did we mention they featured these same individuals in video testimonials that they then cross-posted to Youtube and Facebook? Like we said, they get it.

Salesforce

Salesforce is another titan of industry that dominates the customer relationship management (CRM) software sector. For such a big player, they’re doing a fantastic job of adapting to the new recruitment reality by making excellent use of even the newest platforms, Instagram and Snapchat.

Professional photos with intelligent captions is just one way that Salesforce is winning recruitment marketing on these platforms. Branded hashtags go a long way toward helping them maintain their already stellar reputation as an employer of choice in this growing segment of the software world. Their use of Snapchat is so good, they’re even beginning to see applications come in based solely on their presence on that channel.

Hubspot

After being voted one of Glassdoor.com’s Best Places to Work in 2018, Hubspot’s social media presence came under intense scrutiny. Do you know what people found? A company that takes the time to listen to their employees, featuring their opinions and stories heavily in posts on almost every channel. They found a company that values company culture, and puts their people’s experience as employees above nearly every other priority. It’s this culture focus that Hubspot works to promote in their employer branding campaigns, and seeing as how they’re an inbound marketing company, they’re doing a pretty stellar job, we have to say.

Among other techniques they’ve pioneered, they use comments and feedback from their followers and the general public alike as launch points for future posts, videos, and even interactive content. This encourages new followers, because we all know how cool it is to see ourselves featured in a company’s content, right?

Employer brand matters. Glassdoor reports that 69% of candidates would refuse a job offer from an organisation with a bad online reputation, even if they were currently unemployed. That speaks volumes of the importance of cultivating and maintaining your employer brand on the various social media outlets as well as watching for and responding to feedback on job boards and review sites. A little effort delivers massive payback in the future. Expect to see increased interest in candidates applying for roles, following your accounts to keep updated on openings, and interacting with your organisation online.

These four companies understand the importance of their online presence and are going the extra mile to ensure they have a solid reputation. They’re using social media to present their employer brand, spotlight current employees, and interact with the public. These efforts are paying off big time, too. With scores of people applying for each opening they have, these organisations are not having any problems with a dearth of qualified applicants, avoiding a major pitfall of the current employment market.

Adrian Cernat is the CEO and founder of SmartDreamers, a platform that helps companies reach more, better candidates in record time by automating recruitment marketing activities to accelerate online talent acquisition. SmartDreamers was founded in 2014 and currently operates in Europe, the US and the APAC region.  

Connect with Adrian

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdiCernat

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-daniel-cernat-49b71714/

SmartDreamers: https://www.smartdreamers.com/  

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If you had a crystal ball, and you asked what the future of HR and talent acquisition was going to look like, what do you think you would see? For many of you, the world that’s coming to mind is defined by AI-powered chatbots and advanced algorithms for sorting potential candidates. You might even be picturing a world where job interviews are enhanced with augmented-reality applications and analysed in real time to help optimise hiring decisions.

One day, that might be what the world of hiring looks like—perfect synergy between job seekers, recruiters, hiring managers, and businesses. But in the meantime, there will have to be a number of smaller, more incremental innovations to help solve the immediate challenges that come with the current talent market.

After all, getting the attention of top talent is much harder than it used to be. There are more demands on people’s time than ever before, and an extremely high rate of employment for skilled workers means that there simply aren’t as many people actively searching for jobs as there used to be.

What does this mean for the future of recruitment? What would your crystal ball tell you about the next few years in the world of HR? For starters, it would show you a total revolution in the way that recruiters attract qualified talent.  

Finding the right candidate

Odds are, the perfect candidate for your latest open position is already out there, working for a different organisation. Luckily, there’s a good chance that any given candidate can be convinced to adjust course and switch to a position at your organisation—if you can offer something that her current employer doesn’t. This might be more prestige, better pay, more opportunity for advancement, a better location, or any of the other elements that traditionally make up a strong EVP (employee value proposition). If you really are a good fit for one another, the biggest obstacle standing between you and your ideal hire is awareness. If she doesn’t know you exist, or doesn’t immediately associate your business with your employer brand, then how will she make her way into your applicant funnel?

Since your ideal employee isn’t actively seeking your organisation out, you need to go to them. This means avoiding places like Seek and Indeed that are only frequented by active job seekers. Instead, it’s time to focus your energies on the sites where candidates already spend their time online: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, etc. Again, it’s not enough to have accounts on these platforms that people can seek out (though you probably should have not just corporate accounts but separate career-focused accounts), you have to leverage paid posts and targeted advertisements to make sure that when your ideal job candidates are thinking about seeing what’s out there, they’ve heard of your organisation.. Not just heard of it, but learned to associate it with all of the unique and exciting ways that your organisation provides growth opportunities, learning, and benefits to its employees.

Time waits for no one

The process we described above is what’s known as recruitment marketing. Essentially, HR departments and recruiters take a page out of marketing’s playbook in order to craft and promote a strong brand that will engage, in this case, not customers but applicants. Here, you might be wondering, “if recruitment marketing is so much more effective than job boards and recruiting agencies, why isn’t everyone doing it already? After all, most of these social platforms have been around for many years by now.” It’s a good question. The short answer? Time.

A robust recruitment marketing strategy will usually involve multiple ad campaigns running at once across multiple channels. Rather than simply rolling out a campaign every time a job opening comes up at your organisation, you need to act like a traditional marketer and take pains to bolster your talent pipeline even when you don’t have a seat that needs immediate filling. Unfortunately, this can be a lot of work. Manually scheduling and posting ads across what sometimes amounts to dozens of social media sites and niche web channels—to say nothing of setting budgets, targeting audiences, and tracking your results—can quickly become prohibitively time consuming. Most recruiters I know are already working pretty hard and making the best use of resources that they can. How are they supposed to devote countless hours each week to menial administrative tasks and still perform their regular job duties?  

When the plausible becomes possible

This is where the “automation” part of recruitment marketing automation comes in. We’ve shown why recruitment marketing is the future of recruitment, but this is how we get there. Again, it’s time to take a page out of marketing’s playbook. Just as marketers have been using automation platforms for years that empower them to manage all of their social media activity from one place, recruiters seeking to find top talent need to centralise and automate their targeting, budgeting, and scheduling of employer brand awareness campaigns and job-specific advertisements.

In practice, this could take many different forms, but the key is to invest in something that will save time for recruiters. Ideally, instead of laboriously navigating from one site to another, you’ll be able to generate and push out all of your recruitment marketing campaigns with a few simple clicks from one centralised location. Targeting, budgeting, tracking: all in one spot—meaning that you don’t have to spend inordinate amounts of time performing tedious, repetitive tasks. Thus, you can take a radical new approach to candidate attraction and still have time to focus on the human-centric aspects of the job. This will pave the way for even further improvements to the ways that job candidates and businesses connect with one another.

Think back to that crystal ball for a second: you can see that recruitment can’t stay as it is. Something has to change, and that change is going to start with the way that we attract job candidates and build employer brands. What’s going to make that change possible? Recruitment marketing automation.

Adrian Cernat is the CEO and founder of SmartDreamers (www.smartdreamers.com), a recruitment marketing automation platform that helps organisations engage with candidates across the web, powering up their employer brands and building brand gravity in the process. SmartDreamers was founded in 2014 and currently operates in Europe, the US and the APAC region.  

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One of the most common questions we’ve heard being asked in HR departments about unfilled positions is: “how many applications did we get?” The assumption here is that the more applications you received, the better. After all, the more candidates you have to choose from, the more likely you are to find someone who will make a great addition to your existing team. At the same time, not all candidates are created equal. It doesn’t matter how many job applications you received if none of the applicants are high-quality.

We probably won’t go so far as to say that your total number of applicants is completely irrelevant—the law of averages does work in your favour if you have a large influx of candidates—but it’s not nearly as important as many people think. Why? Because a job is not a fast-moving consumer good.

Jobs don’t fly off the shelves

Say you’re walking down a street in your city or town’s downtown area. You notice that the grocery store is advertising a sale on your favourite cereal brand. This is a no-brainer: you go in and grab a few boxes, knowing that you’ll save a little bit of money in the long run. Later on in your walk you see a sign for an open house. The place has been on the market for months, so they’ve lowered the house’s asking price by a huge percentage. This is another moment where you could save a lot of money in the long run—but how many of you are going to walk into the open house and put down an offer, just because you notice that it’s a good deal? I’m guessing not very many of you, and with good reason. Buying a house is a huge commitment, and it’s not the kind of decision to take lightly. You need to take a careful look at your finances, your long-term goals, and a host of other factors before making a decision.

When you think about it, it should be pretty obvious that taking a new job at a new organisation is a lot more like buying a house than buying a few boxes of cereal. While it’s true that most passive job seekers (a group that comprises 80% of the talent market at any given time) would be willing to change jobs for a position at the right company, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to do so lightly. Quite the opposite: they’re going to treat the decision to change jobs like the decision to buy a house—because both of them potentially concern huge sums of money and a big change in day-to-day life. Thus, when recruiters expect people to make snap decisions about their place of employment (i.e. when they treat jobs like FMCGs), they’re simply not being realistic.

Attracting the right applicants

Because changing jobs is more like buying a house than a box of cereal, it stands to reason that recruiters should care much more about quality than volume when it comes to applicants. This is one of the reasons (though certainly not the only one) that job boards are becoming less effective for talent acquisition in modern hiring processes. You might catch the attention of a lot of active job seekers, but since they’re not guaranteed to have any familiarity with your brand, there’s reason to believe that many or even most of them would be poor fits. For this reason, I’d rather have 100 applications directly to my careers page than 1,000 applications from a job board or even 500 from a recruitment agency.

This might seem a little extreme, but think about it: a job board or recruitment agency candidate doesn’t have to know or care very much about your business—maybe they’d never even heard of you before they applied. Someone who applies directly on your careers page, on the other hand, has done her research. Taking a new job is a big decision, and odds are that each of the 100 applicants in this pool have undertaken real consideration, have familiarised themselves with your business, and are excited to go through the process and assess a mutual fit. Many of the less qualified or less interested candidates will have weeded themselves out, and the remaining handful will not only be more qualified, but better informed—meaning that you can move through the entire interview process more quickly and easily.

How to build employer brand gravity

Now, some of you might be thinking: “that’s all well and good, but how do I get all of these applicants to come straight to my careers page?” The short answer is this: employer brand gravity.

Employer brand gravity refers to your organisation’s ability to attract candidates to your website, and it’s the natural result of smart, successful employer branding elsewhere on the web. This is partly a matter of crafting a strong visual brand that emphasises your EVP (Employee Value Propositions), but it’s also a matter of what you do with that brand. From our perspective, there are two things you should be doing to build employer brand gravity.

Outbound recruitment marketing: posting on social media channels and other platforms on the web in order to familiarize passive candidates with your employer brand narrative. This has the effect of moving candidates into your sales funnel while you establish yourself as the employer of choice in your field.

Inbound recruitment marketing: publishing value-added content on an organisation’s website, blog or other channel that answers the questions and speaks to the needs of your target candidates. This will help passive job seekers, who are simply doing research on matters related to your organisation, find you. From there, they will develop trust and potentially a real interest in working with your organisation.

By making use of these two strategies, you can begin to rely less on quantity-over-quality approaches like posting on job boards. You can put yourself in a position where high-quality applicants are coming to you, rather than the other way around. Obviously, your applicants will still come from a variety of sources, but the ones generated natively on your career page have the potential to have a disproportionate impact. After all, it’s not about attracting the most candidates—it’s about attracting the right candidates.

Adrian Cernat is the CEO and founder of SmartDreamers (www.smartdreamers.com), a recruitment marketing automation platform that helps companies engage with candidates across the web, powering up their employer brands and building brand gravity in the process. SmartDreamers was founded in 2014 and currently operates in Europe, the US and the APAC region.

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