Candidate = Customer - EVP and Employer Branding
This is going to sound like a very strange question, but do you believe in recruitment?
When I say believe, I don’t mean "believe" as in tooth fairies or Santa; I mean does it underline your strategy and the running of your business/team, is it a factor that you build into planning your business strategy, or is it just something you do as and when you have to? After all, your people are your greatest asset, right?
We’ve said previously that the three key ingredients a candidate is going to weigh up when evaluating a potential new employer are:
To reframe this in terms of a value judgement, the candidate needs to see an alignment of values between these three and with their own personal values (and of course, their own capabilities) for them to want to take the job. This extends through the recruitment process and the onward journey, whether it be rejection or onboarding and employment. They want to see a consistency and a synchrony between what employers say their values are and how their behaviours reflect that.
It is the role of HR (and management) to ensure the alignment of these three sets of values with each other (and company vision/purpose etc).
[The way they are reflected in the product or service the company produces - which is a fourth and equally important consideration for candidates, is the role of the marketing department.]
And so these values come together to form an Employer Value Proposition (EVP) and an Employer Brand. Just as managers have the job of communicating company culture and values to employees, and salespeople or marketeers communicate product brand values to customers, HR/recruiters have the job of communicating values to candidates and prospective employees (and to management as well).
And the same principles used by marketers to communicate product values and brand values apply to communicating employer values. The broader the appeal of those values, the more attractive the company is going to be for applicants because more of them will be able to relate to those values. And so begins a virtuous cycle of hiring candidates who reflect the company values and then go on to promote them to others, which makes the company even more appealing to other potential applicants.
So, just as customers are going to want to see that the company values are consistently upheld, so to employees and potential employees are going to want to see the same. The two are both affected in the same way. So when a company gets in the news for all the wrong reasons, sales slump and stock values dip, but so does the number of applicants who would be happy to invest their future in the organisation – and the opposite is true when companies get good PR as well.
领英推荐
To add an extra dimension, for companies operating in the B2C market (and in some cases B2B), candidates are also potential customers in a very real sense. If you’re a restaurant or pub chain for example, a candidate who does well at an interview is more likely to celebrate their success in one of your outlets - and recommend that their friends do the same, if they’ve had a good (ie engaging and responsive) experience of the recruitment process. In fact, in some cases, even if they didn’t get the job, the way in which they were treated could affect their feelings towards the brand.
And so, more and more companies are treating the recruitment journey of an applicant with the same TLC as the purchasing journey of a customer. And so it should be; because the journey a candidate goes through before they accept a job offer is pretty similar to the journey a prospective customer goes through before they make a purchase.
Thanks to social media and employee review websites like Glassdoor, candidates are increasingly sharing their experiences with others - I've had numerous candidates withdraw from an application after hearing bad reports from others who had applied to or worked for the company in question. It's just as easy to get a good or bad reputation online from a candidate who's had a lousy experience of a recruitment process as it is from a dissatisfied customer who's been let down by the product or service, and the affect is often the same.
The argument I’m making is that whilst the decision about whether to recruit, who to recruit, how many to recruit etc will be part of a company's HR strategy, how they recruit has got to align with their marketing strategy.
If marketing can get this right, employees can then become part of the marketing strategy. For example, some companies make a point of having details about their staff (or senior management) displayed on their website. By showing the background of their employees, and painting a vivid picture of the company culture, they help to instil a sense of trust and familiarity with their customers and their applicants. They couldn't do this if they'd simply hired the 'least worst' candidate who applied to the vacancy. Their staff truly are part of their brand.
All of this is not to restrict diversity and inclusivity. There is nothing to say that a workforce that embraces your company values needs to consist of homologous clones. If you see this start to happen it usually means the company/team values are too specific and perhaps may not be relevant to the commercial success of the business.
So, back to my first question: do you believe that by attracting and recruiting the right staff your company or team will run as effectively and profitably as it can?
I genuinely believe that if you hire the right people, who have bought into the values of the company/team/job/product, your business/team will run like clockwork, leaving the managers to... send emails, go to lots of meetings and take all the credit for their team's success. And I also believe that the opposite is also true: companies with a revolving front door will inevitably suffer from low(er) productivity and morale.
OK, so your newbies will need some training and it’ll take them a while to settle in; and they’ll probably ruffle some feather along the way. But if they truly believe in what the company stands for, they’ll push through all that – and so will everyone else they work with. And if you have a team or company full of such people… well, the sky’s the limit.
Surely, that's something to believe in!