There is still not enough transparency in recruitment branding and marketing.

Originally posted on the Intelligent Talent Acquisition Advisor Blog

People have asked me recently, that I don’t post any articles about recruitment marketing and branding.

Well, I am posting one now.

I am a big fan of radical transparency, particularly when it comes to recruitment marketing and branding. Most people are not stupid and can see through the glossy recruitment marketing brochures and video’s. People want the inside scoop on what its like to work at a company, so they can see if their interests align to the company’s.

I think if you asked a real honest question though of a candidate and got an honest answer, while aligned culture and corporate values are important, what candidates really want to know, is the people, particularly their boss, they could be working with, going to be an asshole or not.

Now, while everyone is one their best behavior during the interview process, getting the answer to this big question is like going on the quest for the holy grail.

What’s the middle ground here, because while candidates can peak into a company and find out what it’s like to work there (Glassdoor), you are never going to find a marketing department sign off on content that shows off total transparency. Ever seen traditional product brooches put together by the marketing function that highlights where the product is lacking? Nah, I think not.

When it comes to employment branding, we have a quandary as TA leaders. We know people can look company reviews. We know that they see through the glossy marketing video’s.

If you are like me, in the past I have had to push HR Leadership and Marketing executives out of their traditional ‘product marketing’ comfort zone thinking. I like breaking shit. I like pushing through the old conventional thinking boundaries. If I am going to be real honest here (hey, it’s an article about transparency), I think I like it for the challenge associated with getting people to see a new way of thinking, sometime more than the actual outcome itself.

If you have read me in the past, you know I like to tell stories to help drive home the lesson of the day. Let me tell you three stories related to recruitment marketing and branding, that will hopefully get your own juices flowing around how you might be able to break some conventional thinking.

Between two ferns (Not really)

Not many people know this (because people think I’m all about the metrics), but I was doing ‘A day in the life of’ videos of employees on our careers website, tied into the job families that candidates were looking at, back in the year 2000.

When I first suggested this approach to HR/Marketing leadership, they were concerned that we could not have our best employees talking publicly, because then they would get head hunted away.

When we started to do the videos, the marketing function wanted to control the message and stage the videos in sterile rooms with plastic plants as backdrop (No, not like between two ferns). I said no. I told them candidates want to hear from real people, telling their story, and not have the message pushed through a HR/Marketing filter.

In the end, the final product was well received by candidates and the HR/Marketing leadership were happy. I did make a compromise though. I wanted full transparency on the employee’s full name and job title when we were doing the videos. We settled with just first name and job title. There was no LinkedIn back then, so it would have been harder to head hunt these employees away.

Funny though today, if we did this approach, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel for a good recruiter/sourcer to identify these employees in the videos pretty quickly, even with no last name present in the videos. My logic from the get go to leadership was, if the employees we are picking were happy with their role and the company, then we have nothing to worry about. I got a sort of nervous smile as a response to that level of transparency.

The Assessment Emperor has no clothes

I would put this story in my top 5 in my career. While it’s not the most impactful thing I have ever done, to me it was one of the simplest ideas I have come up with, as it had benefits for both the candidate experience and helping identify better quality candidates for the company.

I am a big fan of structured interviews that assess the evidenced by behaviors against the key competencies of a role during the interview process. I won’t get into a long explanation of this specific part, but if you are interested in the framework I am referring too, then you can read an earlier post I did on the subject: A better way to assess exceptional vs average performance in an interview

It occurred to me one day when thinking about improving the candidate experience, why can’t we be totally transparent about our company’s competency framework. Why can’t we publish those competencies on our job descriptions with links to detailed descriptions of what each of these critical competencies were? Why can’t we be more transparent, and tell candidates that they are part of the Avanade application and interview process.

As you can see, the end product is, we could and we did.

But, let me tell you the first initial reaction from some leaders (and recruiters) when I first presented this idea.

‘Oh, we can’t publish our internal competency model. It would be like sharing some of our secret sauce’.

‘No, we can’t publish those. That would be like prepping the candidate’.

My reaction to both comments was a pretty unwavering response.

If we were trying to hire a better-quality candidate, and the foundation of higher performing employees is they consistently show evidenced by behaviors against our competencies, then why would we not let candidates know this. My final argument was, that this is not like giving candidates answers to the SAT. When you assess competencies and behaviors correctly, you are asking candidates to give specific examples on how they have demonstrated these behaviors in their previous roles and projects. You can’t fake experience and the competencies and behaviors you did (or did not) demonstrate in your career.

My logic was. Interviewing for a job is stressful enough. Why not be transparent with candidates, tell them that these competencies are foundational to success at Avanade, and give them an opportunity to think about their own experience related to these competencies prior to being interviewed. Just made common sense to me.

So, if your reading this as the head of TA for a company that has a competency framework, and you get the correlation and importance of assessing candidates evidenced by behaviors against your competencies, then if you have not posted them on your careers pages and job descriptions, I would love to hear from you on why not?

How Transparent are you willing to be?

I think we all agree in this day and age, a candidate can easily check out what it’s like to work for your company well before they even apply.

So why not own this reality and post your Glassdoor ratings or link to them on your careers pages?

Hmmm, you are probably thinking. Our Glassdoor ratings are not that great. Why would I want to shine a light and lead people to a problem unnecessarily? Well, guess what. They are going to find out anyway.

I had this very internal debate in my first few months at McKesson. I am glad to see that they are still very transparent today on their careers website

But, lets take this conversation a little deeper. I am not going to publicly shame companies who have one or two-star ratings here. I get that if I was the head of TA and was working at that company, I am going to be pushing a very large rock up that hill, trying to convince anyone (probably including myself if I was in that position), to publicly link to Glassdoor or any other sites that show how much we suck.

So, what can you do?

I am not in a corporate TA leadership role today, but my advice is free (and yes, paid for as well :-)), if I was in your shoes, then this is what I would try at least.

Clearly you and your company are not in a good place to start with. We could argue, what do you have to lose trying to move the needle in a more positive direction? Why not have a really frank discussion with executive leadership and think about trying to turn the negative into something more positive. Why not state on your careers page what your Glassdoor rating is, but most importantly, what you are doing to fix and improve the issue.

Maybe, just maybe, you might be thinking that Rob has finally gone too far and lost his marbles. Maybe so, maybe not.

If you are really going to embrace transparency, then rather than putting a band aid on this, why not just jump in the deep end of the pool and go all in? I think most candidates know that there are no perfect companies. I also think that human nature is to give people second chances. If you’re willing to be transparent about the issues, take ownership for them, but most importantly be transparent about what you are doing to fix them, then maybe, just maybe, while you might not fix them overnight, I think you will win more people over, than the ones that are shying away from you today.

Final Thoughts

If you have not read the book ‘The Purple Cow’ by Seth Godin, go read it. It’s less than $10 and I think a must read for anyone interested in branding differentiation.

While I am advocating more transparency in employment branding and marketing, if you connect the dots in my three stories, I am also a raving fan of doing things that most of mainstream thinking does not like to do. Why?

Because, if I have learn’t one think in my last 20 years about what we all do for a living, even more so today with the mass of media flying at us where there is so much noise around employment branding and marketing, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd.

Why not swim in the opposite direction of conventional thinking? You might not always be right, but you will have the potential to be memorable, and in this era of so much unmemorable content, standing out from the crowd can have some serious branding rewards.