Written by Mikko Taipale
27 August 2020
Who wants to work for a company which has a good reputation, great vision and strategy, clear purpose, sustainable business, and committed employees? We believe the answer is evident: everyone.
Many companies invest enormous amounts of time and effort when defining their talent acquisition and employer branding strategies. These strategies usually include the employer value proposition (or simpler: promise to prospective and current employees) and employer marketing activities. It is common that these projects, in defining these fundamental elements, are time-consuming and engage both internal HR, senior managers and the executive board. The benefits of successful employer branding are hardly contested: lower cost of recruitment through a larger qualified talent pool and lower employee turnover, just to name a few.
The true challenge is not how to define and express ourselves in various marketing tools. The real challenge is rather to demonstrate that we live up to fundamental principles in interactions with our talent, internal and external, and show genuine commitment to company values and employer branding related statements that we make towards our candidates and employees.
We have seen that the recruitment process puts the company branding related statements to the test. We see candidates sharing numerous negative recruitment experiences on social media. This is usually not related to the outcome, but rather the way they were treated during the recruitment process.
Here are our TOP 5 experiences on how to strengthen your employer brand when recruiting:
- Make sure your recruiters, line managers, and external recruitment partners share the same view on expectations and can represent the company brand. Having good teamwork between employer branding specialists, recruiters and line managers will be an essential part of your success.
- Treat the candidates with a great amount of respect and be prepared before interacting with them. A professional and well-structured interview is a must and ensures candidates are correctly assessed. You might have a look at a great article written by Torsten Miland, AIMS Partner Denmark on the recommended interview processes and questions.
- Every candidate you have connected with needs clear feedback during the process and after the recruitment decision has been made. The in-depthness of feedback must relate to how much time the candidate spends on the process. Simply expressed: if you interview and then dismiss the candidate, you need to give detailed reasons for doing that.
- After hiring the candidate make sure your onboarding process is proactive and introduces the new employee into the company, it´s culture and people in a structured way.
- After onboarding, measure if the introduction period has been successful and develop the process based on feedback. This means that you need to set objectives for the onboarding and find ways to measure how well your organisation performed.