Lately, employer branding may have dropped off your radar. It’s understandable, especially if you’ve been struggling with hundreds of competing priorities (maintaining operations, serving clients and stakeholders and retaining people). Things have also shifted to a candidate-rich market, so you may be struggling with more applications than you can handle. But candidates are looking at employer brands more closely now, more so than before, and if you’re receiving huge volumes of applications, it’s important to continue to build a valuable employer brand for sustainable long-term recovery.

One of the ultimate goals of employer branding is to attract the right candidates and allow the wrong candidates to opt-out early in your recruitment process. While we’ve experienced plenty of change in 2020, this will remain fundamentally the same; especially in a candidate-rich market when you’re being overwhelmed with applications. 

How organisations treat their people during the Covid-19 crisis will be the acid test for candidates considering whether to join and will be a major factor in overall employer branding strategy.

 In considering the principles of how to build valuable brands in uncertain times, let’s first consider what’s valuable. Many people have been re-evaluating what is valuable in their lives and what’s not. With talk about recessions, employers need to consider how they’re going to remain valuable to those who are most important in their future (both their people and customers). 

The past offers brands important and timely insights that can help take the edge off of the uncertainty. During the last recession, brands adopted a variety of tactics to respond to changing consumer attitudes and behaviours. A JWT study from 2009 found that most approaches fit into six buckets: optimism, humour, nationalism, nostalgia, empowerment and value/price. Here’s how these approaches can be tailored to apply to employer branding now.

1. Empower people

Making your current team members feel like they have greater control will help strengthen your employer brand in challenging times and throughout recovery. Look to be the leading provider of choice in new initiatives will give them back control and increase your value to them.  

2. Sharpen up your recruitment advertisements

Traditionally, you may have written your job ads to attract as many candidates as possible. Now, you can afford to get more specific to attract people with the skills, experience and behavioural attributes you’re after. Sharpen and focus your recruitment advertisement to attract top talent, and allow unsuitable applicants to opt-out early.

3. Add value

While you can strategically roll out price promotions, savings and discounts for customers, what about candidates? While more great talent is available in a candidate-rich market, A-players can still be hard to find. If you can still provide a great candidate experience and good communications (Candidate Management Systems, branded email templates will most certainly come in handy), you will distinguish yourself and bolster your long-term strategy. 

4. Communicate with optimism 

During times of uncertainty and recovery, people learn to live with losses, making them more sensitive to what really matters. Inspire your current and future talent with optimism. Being a beacon for optimism in a world of dim circumstances can prove a powerful differentiator.

When used appropriately, a touch of humour in your social media posts and employer brand messaging can create a memorable experience for your people and brand. 

4. Reference the bigger picture 

If you are recruiting now, make a point of emphasising the positive impact that joining your organisation will have on Australia’s road to economic and social recovery. Address the new economy in people’s world, and share how people’s work will stimulate it.

On a similar note, reflecting on the past can help in referencing the bigger picture. Anxiety and nostalgia go hand in hand—when times are tough, it’s only natural to seek comfort in memories of what seems like a simpler era. Think about how you can remind your current talent (as well as customers) that you’ve been with them in good times and bad. For future candidates too, give them a lens to the better world you shared together and the bigger future you will create with them.

So what makes your employer brand valuable? Now is a unique opportunity to adjust and bolster your employer brand and reach a wider audience. Empower people, recruit efficiently with the right processes and tools to continue to add value to candidates. Tailor your communication strategy to include optimism, and reference the bigger picture. 

The post Building valuable employer brands through recovery appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

Your weapons to win the war for talent

Organisations need to adopt a holistic approach to employee engagement, just as they do with customer engagement. Employees are customers. And they want to be catered to.

How do you cater?

You first become people-centric. You get a pulse on what today’s employees expect opposed to what they desire and crave. Reminder ― millennials are now 35% of the workforce and will be 75% by 2025.

Best advice: plan tomorrow, today.

Why do we care?

We care because only 34% of the workforce is engaged, while only 13% are highly-engaged. Disengagement stats aside, the bottom line ― employees’ motives have changed. Thus, organisations who want to be top competitors must change too.

Leftovers: stale engagement today’s employees already expect

Doughnut and dress-down Fridays are like leftovers; they’ve already been chewed on and they won’t attract and retain top talent today.

Check out the list of run-of-the-mill engagement leftovers:

• competitive compensation and benefits, and workplace apps for benefit enrolment
• work/life integration, flexible work hours and work-from-home benefits
• proactive, participative, transparent, and democratic leadership
• autonomy in how work is performed
• input and involvement in decision making
• clear expectations and goals, delivering feedback about progress and improvement
• acknowledgement, recognition, gratitude and encouragement
• employee-hosted lunch and learns
• healthy onsite food and access to fitness equipment
• standards for digital communication with managers (call, text, or email).

The essential but bland list continues. But the millennial entrepreneur mindset hungers for more. They desire a forward-thinking organisation with a buffet of employee experiences (EX). And if you don’t serve such a menu these connoisseurs will leave for an organisation that will fill their hunger pangs.

I won’t batter you with vanilla details about EX. Just check out this list of hors d’oeuvres that will whet their appetites:  

Appetisers: attractive engagement today’s employees desire:

• personalised and meaningful work
• participants of corporate social responsibility, an active role in a cause and a purpose
• frequent, proactive, ongoing snap-feedback and conversations
• strengths based personal and professional growth and development opportunities
• employee journey mapping designed around employees’ drivers and desires from hire to retire
• mapping how the work in the weeds impacts the final product or service
• open collaboration and brainstorming in unique social spaces
• mentoring; cross-training; business exposure and projects with high visibility
• in-the-moment-managers who are empathic, caring, trusting and accept smartphone use at work (without snarky looks).

Dessert: salivating engagement today’s employees crave:

• To fully engage millennials, organisations need to disrupt inertia. They need to add sugar and spice to employee value propositions. And offer dessert to complete the full-course meal, such as epic onboarding, orientations and original ongoing experiences to keep them coming back for more.  

What does that dessert taste like?

Interactive encounters, connectedness and defining moments ― the kind that creates over-the-top stories, the kind that are social media worthy and inspires stars, likes and shares.

A kind called Immersive EX, a savoury flavour that will revolutionise your culture with a zest that will get people to talk, tweet and Snapchat about your brand.

Escape rooms (e-rooms) are more than just fun recreational adventure games for friends and family. They are now immersive experiences for professionals that:

• attract top talent
• elicit teambuilding
• teach new skills
• market new products.  

E-rooms allow employees to bond as they work together to solve problems. Organisations such as Boeing, Nestle-Purina, and Proctor & Gamble have all taken advantage of e-rooms to provide EX and increase employee engagement. In fact, “experiential organisations had more than four times the average profit and more than two times the average revenue.”

Google France has created its own escape game called Première Pièce. Using Google tools, products and apps, participants must solve a series of puzzles together in order to escape.

What sets escape rooms apart from typical training or alternative events where people work together to solve problems is that each individual has the chance to feel like a hero when they find a clue.  

Escape Hunt is a leading global provider of escape room experiences, including six locations in Australia (Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, etc.). They are redefining escape rooms, shifting from a family and friends fun fad to a teamwork and training tool.

Escape Hunt offers customised corporate friendly game themes. However, unlike the average escape room, they provide a teamwork debriefing after the challenge is complete, where participants explore their behaviour and what they learned about their leadership skills. According to an interview with Rebecca Assice, director and master franchisor at Escape Hunt, “Teamwork is critical here so participants will have to display many competencies that are necessary for a productive workplace environment including communication, leadership, stress management, problem solving and lateral thinking.”

Teams not only take these key learnings back to the workplace to share with their colleagues, they also build trust and forge new relationships with peers that they may have never interacted with in the past. One Trip Advisor leader said, “the entire group got engaged and participated 100%. It got everyone working together from young to old.”  

Escape rooms provide employees with the opportunity to learn about their strengths. Another Trip Advisor leader mentioned that it spurred “thought-provoking discussion” about how people interacted with one another.

Top businesses such as Google Sydney, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia have given positive feedback about their employee experience with Escape Hunt. A few of their sentiments included that it was a “fantastic experience” from an organisational aspect, “encouraged every member to contribute and work together,” is “perfect for team building, “and it’s a “super fun activity for a team building activity that isn’t cheesy.”

Assice adds that many of their corporate clients agree, “It is the best team building experience they have ever done. Part of the reason for this is it’s team building without it feeling like team building. So teams are having loads of fun while they are working together. It’s also very unique so a change from the same old tired experiences people have done for years.”

Anheuser-Busch  brought the escape room experience in-house. They reinvented their hiring process from “beer sampling to career sampling.” Their onboarding e-room is attracting an overwhelming number of quality prospective candidates. Modelled after real employees and real events, candidates get first-hand experience of what it’s like to work at Anheuser prior to applying. Candidates enter a simulated Anheuser-Busch office and are given the challenge to get a new brewery up and running within 15 minutes.

This not only allows Anheuser to bring aboard candidates that desire to be there but also prunes those who don’t fit the Anheuser culture – reducing costly turnover.

The bottom line: organisations can bring aboard the right talent, improve skills, cooperation, engagement, and productivity through teambuilding, and retain talent by making employee experience a priority.

Christine Alexy is a professional writer focused on motivational psychology and leadership development. After 15 years of  IT network engineering, Christine re-invented her career when she graduated with honours from Penn State University with a BS in Business Leadership and IT/Security and Risk Analysis.

Dovetailing her professional leadership experience, she is a ghostwriter and researcher for top business leaders and a popular blogger. Christine has supplied extensive research and writing for Steve Van Valin, CEO of Culturology, helping him author a manuscript on purpose and meaning at work. She also ghostwrites high-level content for the HR industry related to ethics and organisational culture. A staunch proponent for meaningful and innovative leadership for today’s multi-generational workforce, Christine regularly shares her insights through her Thought Leadership Thursday blog posts on LinkedIn, @Serve2LeadLyceum on Twitter, and Leadership Lyceum on Google+.

The post Immersive employee experience: the new battlefield appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

In addition to an attractive careers page, Lion showcases lots of informative and engaging videos that guide candidates through their hiring process. The videos are informative and helpful to candidates, while at the same time giving Lion the opportunity to showcase their culture and values too.

The three-part video series, featured on their “How we hire” page, serves a different purpose to their careers video. The series is designed to develop candidate expectations around the hiring process – not only in what Lion expects from them, but what they can expect from Lion.

Their first video in the series, entitled “How we hire: Application”, introduces candidates to Lion’s work, culture, and values, and shapes their expectations. They use great local shots instead of stock footage, which gives their videos an authentic feel.

“At Lion, we’ve built a talent acquisition process that balances you, the candidate, and Lions interests at heart equally. Our purpose in the talent acquisition team is to create an experience that is insightful and gives everyone the information they need to make the right choice for them and their hiring leaders.”

The video showcases the company’s four guiding principles:

1. Keep our promises and act fast
2. Help you shine
3. Providing timely feedback that will help you along the way
4. Create a space where you can share your passion and have fun.

“We genuinely want you to feel well-prepared, and give you the best opportunity to show how you are the right person for the role in a fair an unbiased environment.”

“Every process will differ slightly, but we really want to be transparent and embody the Lion culture throughout the process. We’ve created an environment where you can really be yourself, because we really want to hear about your different experiences, backgrounds, and what’s important to you.”

This strategy is particularly effective in talent attraction, as it speaks directly to candidates.  

The video concludes by giving candidates useful advice about preparing to apply, encouraging candidates to learn about the role, the business, and Lion’s values, and to keep their application relevant and concise.

Keeping candidates at the forefront of your mind when designing your recruitment strategy is the best way to attract top talent. Lion’s video series is an effective, replicable strategy which your organisation can use to help guide candidates through your application process.

How does your organisation incorporate video into your recruitment process? Let us know in the comments!

Source

How we hire, part 1 of 3: Application

Lion Careers

The post This branded video series guides the candidate experience appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

We know the job search can be an emotional rollercoaster for candidates. They spend time and effort on their applications. And if they don’t hear anything back, it can be unsettling and upsetting.

But we know it’s not easy on the other side of the fence either. You want to do the right thing by your candidates, but there’s only so many hours in the day.

The difference between average and exceptional recruitment performance comes down to the candidate experience. And for a positive candidate experience, it’s all about the human touch.

So put yourself in their shoes. Make it your mission to create a positive experience at all stages of the hiring process. Here are ten ways to get started.

Stage 1: the application

Your goal should be to create a stand-out experience from the outset. It’s likely the candidate doesn’t know you or your organisation very well, so here’s your chance to make a great first impression.

1. Use your career site, social platforms and employee advocates to connect with job seekers BEFORE they apply

What makes a prospective candidate choose your organisation over the competition? Understanding. Shared values. Passion. And positive reviews from employees go a long way too.

Make it easy for candidates to find this information to foster a connection, and stand out from your talent competitors.

2. Audit your application process to identify areas you can streamline

No one likes endless forms and tedious paperwork. Time to cut the fat. The median time to apply for 250 leading Australian employers is only four minutes. How does your business compare?

3. After a candidate applies, respond promptly to promote connection and camaraderie

Our research shows 77% of job seekers adopt a more negative perception of a company if they don’t hear back after applying. Even a carefully-worded email auto-response can be a reputation saviour.

How can you respond to each and every applicant?

Stage 2: the interview

The aim of this stage is empowerment. The more you empower your candidates before, during and after their interview, the more positive their experience will be.

4. Give your candidates detailed information before (and after) the interview

Don’t just provide candidates with the time and location of their interview.

Send them an agenda. Provide them with details about the interviewer and post-interview feedback. Setting your candidate up for success will reflect positively on their experience, even if they don’t get the job.

5. Use technology to optimise the interview experience

Chatbots, online interviews, mobile apps… organisations are getting creative when it comes to their job interviews. Accenture in India, for example, has created the Accenture Smart Interview app (Itunes and Google Play). This gives candidates the flexibility to interview at a time and place that suits them.

How can your organisation use technology to deliver a stand-out interview experience?

6. Keep your team informed

Once a candidate arrives for their interview, existing employees all have a hand in shaping their experience. On interview day, your people should create a positive, friendly, helpful, and engaged vibe.

Keep staff up-to-date with the interview process. This includes knowing what role is on the table, who is conducting the interviews, and where they will be held. That way, they’ll be on their best behaviour.

7. Keep candidates engaged after the interview

It’s true: most people you interview will not get the job they’re applying for. But don’t miss the opportunity to keep your talent pipeline open.

Our research shows 86% of candidates are never asked for feedback when their hiring journey ends. But by continuing the conversation, they’ll walk away with a more positive impression of your company. And you’ll gain valuable feedback on your hiring process.

Stage 3: onboarding

So you’ve made an offer and it’s handshakes all around. But that doesn’t mean you can put your feet up. The onboarding experience also has a significant impact on employee productivity and retention.

8. Set employee expectations

Employees need clear guidelines about their responsibilities. Without an understanding of what’s expected, they may feel overwhelmed, confused, and possibly be looking for the exits.

Here at Indeed, we set employee expectations for their first day, week, and month. We also welcome new starters with a bag of swag on their desk. Little touches that can make all the difference.

9. Consider a buddy system

A buddy system can help keep new hires engaged and excited; not just on the first day, but the first year and beyond. It can help ease nerves and make the transition easier, and it’s an especially effective tool for onboarding remote employees.

10. Use technology to help get new starters up to speed

Onboarding technology has come along in leaps and bounds, helping new employees get up to speed with their new role, company, culture, benefits and processes. L’Oreal, for example, has developed a Fit Culture App (Itunes and Google Play) to help their new hires settle in.

Is it time for a more positive experience for your candidates? Improve your recruiting process by implementing one, some, or all these 10 tactics—your people will benefit in the long run.

With more than 15 years of experience in the recruitment industry, Jay Munro has worked in a variety of roles in agencies and job boards, from consulting and recruiting, through to leading the product development of new sourcing technologies. As an Employer Insights Strategist with the Indeed Employer Insights Team, Jay pairs platform data with industry trend analysis to share Indeed’s story and bring the value of the company’s programs and solutions to life.

The post The secret to being a better recruiter: improve your candidate experience appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.