Aligning company value propositions with candidate values

- When I worked as a recruiter, candidate evaluation was always the part of the job I enjoyed the most. It was like getting close to completing a 1,000 piece puzzle. It took a lot of time finding the right pieces. You'd try a piece believing it fit, frustrated when it didn't, only to see it was clear that it fit on a completely different part of the puzzle. But before you found its home, you turned that puzzle piece every which way, trying to get that satisfying snap. Candidates are looking for companies that value diversity. They want to work somewhere they can be their authentic selves. They are seeking cultures that are inclusive and workplaces where they belong. They want to know that even though the company is a big picture puzzle, their unique style and experience is noticed and utilized where they can thrive. Your use of listening skills will help you to understand what a candidate is really looking for, and your ability to use marketing skills will help you sell the candidate on the company, but you can only do that when the employer value proposition is high. That requires having a conversation with the hiring manager to ask them for their team values, their department values, and how they solve problems, how they assign projects, what skills they think this person needs to have not just currently, but also to be able to develop in the future, and how is the hiring manager going to support that candidate's development? As candidates make it abundantly clear they value an inclusive workplace culture, your job as a recruiter has to be not only to demonstrate to the candidate that your company is, in fact, a place they can belong, but also to identify the candidates who will contribute to such an environment. Unfortunately, the number of workplaces that can truly be considered inclusive is not as large as we would like. This makes the job of the recruiter somewhat difficult. You may find yourself in the unenviable position of having to sell a candidate on a company that may not be the best place for them. When I'm consulting with a company, recruiters frequently ask me what to do when they are interviewing a woman for a role, but do not have an interview panel that includes a woman. They want to know if they should fight to bring that woman into the company when the hiring manager has already shown signs that they might not have the skills to nurture that professional. If we go back to the example of the woman who was not hired for a job that required a PhD degree, even though she had a PhD and was the only candidate who met all the requirements for the job, the recruiter was not all that upset that the hiring manager selected the man for the role without a degree because he was concerned for how she would've been treated once hired. This is where you have to ask yourself a few tough questions. Are you using inclusive language in your job descriptions to attract a more diverse group of talent to your company? And if so, is that accurately reflective of your current workplace? If not, what can you do to individually change that? As a talent acquisition team member, how can you approach this with your manager? We may be talking about aligning company values to candidate values, but what are your values as a recruiter, and are they in alignment with your current role?