Use your tech-centric employer brand to hire better talent, faster!

Building a tech-centric employment brand

We've all been reading the news (not that we really want to) and it's clear that some tech companies have run into turbulence. Mostly, I would argue that those companies that we see in the headlines today for layoffs or hiring freezes are not the result of a decrease in the need for technologists but the result of poor governance, too much free cash, and a lack of discipline in operating. Outside of SV, tech hiring is still a fiercely competitive market and companies are competing for a limited supply of talent.

And while it's true that almost every business is feeling the pain of the current macroeconomic environment, they still need to hire to push forward on digital transformation, to move infrastructure to the cloud (or maintain their infrastructure in the cloud) to build more connected applications, to find ways to become more data driven in their decision making. This leads to a need for hiring technologists and this need is not going away anytime soon. According to the BLS, "overall employment in computer and information technology occupations is projected to grow 15 percent from 2021 to 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations; this increase is expected to result in about 682,800 new jobs over the decade. In addition to new jobs from growth, opportunities arise from the need to replace workers who leave their occupations permanently. About 418,500 openings each year, on average, are projected to come from growth and replacement needs."

So what are companies to do? One strategy is to focus on not just building an employment brand but building a tech-centric one. While companies for the most part have caught on to the concept of employment brand, like anything else, there are additional layers to how this works.

The first step to building an employment brand begins by understanding your mission, vision, values, and culture, and then building the mechanisms to communicate those to potential applicants. It's also important to put those into the context of the departments where technologists work.

All applicants are important, but some are more important than others.?Today’s organization is increasingly reliant on talent with technical skills in order to succeed and most people believe that this will be the norm into the foreseeable future.

These employees play an oversized role in a company’s ability to execute its strategy.?As companies digitize offerings, as they move more and more to the cloud, as DevOps departments grow, as more and more products become “connected”, larger and larger percentages of payrolls are going to keep these kinds of workers on staff and more and more money will be spent on recruiting talent.?

This means the companies that supply this talent to their clients need to find ways to find more and more talent, keep that talent engaged in meaningful and interesting work, and differentiate their offers from their competition.?

But beyond the salaries that companies pay and the benefits that they provide, companies need to be able to articulate why someone should come and work for them or be placed by them.

Technologists are looking beyond just salary studies by Dice and others have identified top criteria outside of salary that are important to technologists.?Flexible & hybrid working, work/life balance, continuous learning, ethical reputations, wellness programs, diversity, cultural fit, volunteering/impact initiatives, and more. ?

How to build your brand

Understanding how to reformulate your existing brand and then making sure that it speaks directly to technologists and what they are looking for is key to being able to engage with top talent.

The rest of this article will help you take simple (not easy) steps to put you on the path to hiring technical talent that can do the job and aligns with you and your company.

Simple steps you can take to build a tech-centric employment brand.

Vision and Mission

First, make sure that you have both clear mission and vision statements that speak specifically to what the technical teams do to enable the broader mission and vision of the organization.?What do you believe as a technical organization and what people are going to work for every day? ?These are the first steps in bringing people together to achieve goals.

Adam Grant says, "When you do that, and align people toward a common goal, elevating their success also elevates your organization's success.”

Tips:

Avoid vague language, and ambiguous words, and keep the statements simple. No more than two sentences, otherwise, you end up with a word salad, that people can’t remember.

Ask for input from everyone in the department.?It’s tempting as leaders to meet away from everyone else and then announce that you have come up with your vision and mission.?But our organizations are collaborative affairs, they are not vacuums, gather your voices.?Even if you end up going with something that you came up with, if people are not echoing your sentiments, you may be setting yourself up for failure.

Staffing, Recruiting, and Consulting Firms

So, you are a staffing company and you don’t have actual employees? Do you spend most of your time and effort placing people on projects or with other companies? You still have a brand; you still have a culture; you still have values.?It might be that you strive to place people with the world’s most innovative and exciting companies and that your mission is to make sure that the people you work with are constantly improving the results for your customers.?

Your company still exists for reasons that you need to articulate.?If I am an IT professional and I’m being reached out to by 2-3 different companies all offering assignments, pay, etc. I still want to know why I should work with you.

What is your value proposition to the people you are working with? Why should they work with you versus your competition? Highlight recent projects that you have placed people into that are interesting, cutting-edge, and challenging.??Technologists often cite the desire to work on interesting problems, solve challenges, and learn new skills.?

Values

Next, spell out your values and then work every day to hold yourself and your people accountable to those values. ?Values act as a map or guide, and they help people understand how to get things done. ?Having your values detailed not only helps your employees understand what behaviors and norms are acceptable it helps a candidate answer the question, “What will it be like to work at this company and what kind of person do they value?”.?It will also help you stand out from the crowd as many organizations fail to work through this exercise. Be mindful of cherry-picking values that sound good but are not necessarily the reality of working life.?If you struggle with communication at your company, don’t list that as a value.?Candidates are looking to align their personal values with your values.?This doesn’t mean that they must be perfectly in sync but there should be a solid match here.?If your advertised values are not experienced, this is going to lead to turnover. In fact, in a recent study, researchers found that employees who do not believe their employer’s values align with their own are 2.5 times more likely to take negative actions against their employer’s interests.

Let’s review where we are at.?You now have a mission statement, a vision statement, and values that align with reality and that will support the mission and vision.?

Review Your Candidate Experience

Candidate Experience can be broadly defined as the set of all interactions and activities that take place during the recruiting, selection & hiring, and onboarding processes. Start with empathy.?What is it like for someone to get hired at your company? Since we are speaking about technologists here, you will want to think specifically about what it is like for someone to get hired into your technology roles.??Technical hiring comes with unique challenges, such as vetting someone’s technical ability. How are you doing that? How do you do that objectively? How do you write the job description? Are your hiring managers creating unreasonable expectations? For example, in the early 2010s mobile technology was gaining importance, more and more people were leveraging their mobile phones for browsing the web and interacting with content, through mobile browsers and mobile apps, but the technology and languages that supported this new experience were still young.?Yet, one could routinely find non-sensical statements in job descriptions like 10+ years working on mobile applications for x and y.?Really? 10+ years huh?

Speed and communication are crucial in today’s hiring climate. There is an old adage in business, “Time kills deals”.?This is a widely applicable maxim.?How quickly are you able to respond to a candidate’s application??Do you have more than one way for a candidate to connect with your recruiting team? Are your recruiters texting candidates? How many steps does a candidate need to complete in order to apply? Is it easy to schedule an interview? Are the interviewers prepared and organized? You are trying to hire someone that can have 10X or 20X output and performance, and these individuals are picky.?They will be critical around every step, so you must pay attention to the details here.?

Build Assets to Support Recruiting

The next thing you need to do is to start building the content that supports the communication of your brand (vision + mission + values + candidate experience + employee experience) to all the applicable audiences.?While many companies think that this means candidates, this also includes your current employees.?Turnover is expensive and varies with the position, think 5X to 10X the annual salary as a guideline. Going deeper here is outside the scope of this post but know that you need to constantly monitor the health of your brand standing or brand equity in the minds of your employees.?

The audience that we are most focused on for this article is potential candidates.?The people you want to apply for your jobs.?This means you need the materials to entice them to apply.?First, divide your audience into two segments.?Active and Passive.?

Active Candidates

Individuals in this segment are actively looking for new roles.?They might be recent grads, they might be mid-career experienced professionals, or they might be in the twilight of their career, regardless, they share one attribute in common and that is that they are ready for a new job.?They are actively networking, they are updating social media profiles, they are updating their resumes, and applying to job listings.?They are doing research.?

You want to make sure at a minimum you have some general facts available for people about working at your company. ?

Images that depict offices and office life (or the WFM lives of other current technologists) Beyond images are videos.?Day in the life, company profiles, these mini commercials help prospective candidates learn more about what to expect when they come to work for you or go to work with one of your clients. ?Even some homemade videos using your iPhone or Android can work well and often it’s the authenticity that candidates care about more than the production value.?

Passive Candidates

These candidates are happy where they are at.?They are not necessarily looking for another job but if they happen to be presented with the right opportunity, they will take your call.?

The key is to do your research before reaching out.?There are a number of tools available to find these candidates, but you have to understand that they don’t need your job and that you need to approach them with smart content.?

Just blasting out emails and InMails will not get you very far.?Get to know the term hyper-personalization.??If you want one of these technologists to respond you need to do your research, craft a good opening introduction, and keep your message simple and clear.?Also, let them know it’s ok if they don’t want your job, but to let you know if they are interested or not.?Keep it professional, and remember that a no today, doesn’t mean no forever, so try to leave with the door ajar.?

Review the Reviews and Social Media

As we have stated before, your employment brand is not one thing.?At a very high level, a brand, be it a consumer brand, a business-to-business brand, or an employment brand, is conceptual.?It’s an idea. This means that people’s conception of what it is like to work at your company or for your company or to be placed by your company is subject to change based on the available information and any experience.?It can be very subjective.?

Let us say that there is a job seeker that is thinking about a new job, there are lots of things that they need to consider. ?But let’s say that they have found a good-looking job description for a job that checks most of the boxes that they set up to help them decide (in this example our job seeker is a very rational, cautious, and organized decision-maker) and the next thing that they are going to do is research. ?Job seekers may spend between 10 and 30 minutes researching your company.?They will look on review sites like Glassdoor, they will visit social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram) to see what companies are saying, but also what employees or other applicants are saying.?They will go to your website, they will google you, and they will look for information.?It’s not that much different from you or I making a major purchase like a car, expensive computer, or another electronic device, searching for the right hotel to stay at, or the right restaurant for a big date.??

This is standard candidate behavior, so you better know what they are going to find.?Run your own searches, scan the reviews, and visit your own social media.?What emerges from that research is part of your brand.?But even bad reviews can be an opportunity to engage and respond.?What you can’t do is pretend like this information doesn’t exist.?

Conclusion

There is no substitute for this work.?You can buy the talent you want but in the end, even that talent will leave if you are not offering people an authentic vision for the future, a purpose-driven mission to drive them to give their best, and a set of basic values that help guide them to doing their best work.

Some Sources

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryenglish/2021/06/01/the-tech-talent-war-has-no-end-in-sight-heres-what-you-need-to-know/?sh=22043cc55f2d

https://techhub.dice.com/Workforce-Sentiment-Reports.html

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-things-tech-workers-actually-want-in-a-company/

https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/adam-grant-the-worlds-best-leaders-have-this-1-thi.html

https://www.ere.net/how-most-companies-mess-up-hiring-for-values/

https://sps.columbia.edu/news/great-resignation-perils-misaligned-employeeemployer-values

https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/employee/candidate-experience/

https://hackernoon.com/how-to-be-a-20x-engineer-instead-of-a-10x-975eedd306b2