How to Turn Your Careers Portal Into a Passion-Fueled Talent Attraction Machine

Here's what my dream careers portal looks like: It's an emotionally compelling magic carpet ride...I want to see community and collaboration. I want to see belonging and evidence of abundance...I want to see positive, optimistic, self-actualized people I know I would love to work with, all pulling together to help each other achieve their meaningful dreams...I want to feel FOMO.

I’m a huge fan of a certain essential oils company. I love it. I recommend it to anyone who would be interested. I would tell you who this company is. But I’m just about to make it look bad.

First of all, here’s what I love about this company: Its products are dependably highest quality available. It works fairly and directly with growers all over the world – to the point where it has had to hire a special ops veteran to protect executives in dangerous parts of the planet, where middlemen take it very personally to be shut out of lucrative transactions. It has a sourcing philosophy that benefits everyone – the growers, the external sales representatives, the corporation and, by extension, its employees, and the planet.

Its non-profit foundation invests major money to relieve suffering among populations not likely to be customers. One of its biggest beneficiaries, for instance, is Operation Underground Railroad Rescue. Sex trafficked children are typically not essential oils buyers. And yet, OUR is a major recipient of the donations from this company’s millions of associates worldwide. At a recent global convention, the audience’s reception of OUR founder, Tim Ballard, was as enthusiastic and emotional as it was soon thereafter when Hugh Jackman took the stage for the swooning portion of the program.

On the strength of my personal recommendations about this company and its products, one friend with four cats has been able to keep her house suitable for human occupation (litter-box-wise). Two friends were able to address their fire ant bites on their flip-flopped feet without having to interrupt their small-town Texas summer evening card game to head for the ER. And another friend – who joined this company as a representative – was able to use her income statements to qualify for a mortgage that enabled her to buy a Florida horse farm. An Austrian hotelier has been able to augment his off-season income by building a business for fellow Alpine health enthusiasts.

As for me, a handful of the oils will be coming along to the Santa Fe hospital in November to keep me from climbing the walls from anxiety (and hunger) as I sit there in that stupid little shower cap waiting to be called for my first-ever surgery. I'm thinking I'll be huffing cheerful clementine – saving the peppermint to stave off whatever post-op well-you-know might be in store for me.

Its products are amazing. Its customer service experience is world-class. Its fulfillment is prompt and accurate. It has been recognized as one of America’s best midsized employers for three years in a row. Customer retention is in the neighborhood of 80%, reportedly the highest in the essential oils category. It’s a good business to be associated with as a representative, as a customer, and as a friend who gives friends the opportunity to give their products a try. It’s just an all-around, 360-degree, feel-good experience to be in a relationship with this company.

But is it a good company to be part of as an employee? It’s impossible to know for sure if you’re an outsider. When you visit its careers portal (assuming that you can find it, which takes a bit of doing), here’s what you get: A whole heckuva lotta nuthin'. Two pictures and one of those form-driven automated list of openings. It’s essentially an automated version of the old classified ads section of any newspaper pulled from 1978 microfiche archives.

The resulting subliminal message is equally dated: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” And the emotional barriers go up. Even for fans like me.

Does your careers portal say, from the heart, “Pick me!”? 

Or does it say, “Yeah, whatever?”

If you want to attract talent who will put their hearts and minds into your company’s mission, you will want to put your company’s heart and mind into all its employment opportunity messages -- starting with the online careers portal. As a tool, it's the front door to your ideal talent's relationship with you. It should be just as welcoming as your message is to your shoppers.

Your careers portal is your first opportunity to emotionally transform individual seekers into members of a community. Those individuals want to know the answer to “will I belong here?” as much as, if not more than, “is there an opening that I can qualify for?”

You’re going to emotionally engage with your first-impression prospects one way or the other. The careers portal is where you have the most control. Why not make that first impression emotionally positive, welcoming and reflective of the great employee experience you stand for?

You’re going to emotionally engage with your first-impression prospects one way or the other. The careers portal is where you have the most control. Why not make that first impression positive, welcoming and reflective of the great employee experience you stand for?

Steal These Marketing Secrets

Who is the expert in crafting the emotional journey narrative of the company experience that is specifically designed to transition the prospect from outsider to insider? Why. Marketing, of course. The analogy is an obvious one: Both marketing and talent acquisition functions are about establishing the earliest relationship with their prospects. They are tasked with conveying the messages: “Here’s why you should choose us over the other guy.” And, “This is why it will feel good to be a member of our tribe.”

The marketer’s job is to elevate the product or service offering from being a commodity to a must-have over all other options. That’s also the recruiter’s job.

Imagine this ideal scenario: 

As the owner of your company’s talent acquisition function, you have at your immediate leisure a vast selection of qualified candidates who have already pre-qualified themselves. They have invested their own time deeply researching what it means to be associated with your company – and aligned with its mission. (There are also thousands of would-have-been candidates whom you don’t see because they’ve already disqualified themselves after they’ve identified a culture or values mismatch. This desirable loss saves everyone tremendous time, money and frustration.)

Your ideal candidates have done the initial qualifying research for you, and they’ve identified your organization as a place where they are confident that

• They will belong in terms of culture fit
• They can do their best work with people they will enjoy being with
• They will be proud to be associated with your brand
• They will grow and develop in ways they want to grow and develop
• They will be both immediately and ultimately glad to have chosen your product (the employment opportunity) over your competitor’s product

Here’s what’s in it for you:

• You will have more productive (and interesting and inspiring) interviews focused primarily on the emotionally rewarding upper levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• You will have more successful selection experiences
• You will have reduced rates of “ghosting” and undesirable turnover
• You will discover that “probation period” is a thing of the past
• You will discover that orientation is more positive and possibility-oriented
• You will personally enjoy a more motivating and inspiring career yourself

This is what your marketing department does for the customer acquisition side of your business. Its function is not to land a sale, just as the function of your earliest employment messaging is not to offer someone a job. Its function is to start an emotionally resonant conversation with likely prospects.

Don’t you deserve the same experience in talent acquisition?

So how would Marketing advise you?

Know who your ICA is and what that person wants out of his/her relationship with you.

In the marketing world, ICA stands for Ideal Client (or Customer) Avatar. In your world as the talent acquisitions chief, the C stands for Candidate. Who is your ideal candidate beyond simply meeting the skills and experience requirements? What are their personal drives and desires? What dreams of relevance, growth, community, purpose do they hold that your company is ideally suited to help them realize? If you already have a well-developed values set and employee value proposition, how would those elements be expressed from the standpoint of your ICAs’ personal ambitions? Imagine what it’s like to be “behind the eyes” of your ICA, and write all your messaging to that perspective of your target’s personal interests – not just what you’re looking for from your ideal applicants.

Appeal to emotions.

Marketing professionals know that once a prospect is emotionally engaged in the product offering, it’s just a matter of helping that person intellectually rationalize the purchase decision. It becomes a relatively easy sell after that. Bear in mind that your ICA recognizes that by saying “yes” to your opportunity, that means “no” to all the other competing choices out there. Help your ICA feel the benefits of your potential “yes” more vividly than your competitors’.

Show don’t tell. Help them imagine themselves enjoying day-to-day joyful success with your company.

If you watch HGTV, you already know this piece of advice from the real estate world. It applies equally in the recruitment world. And it’s such an easy (and inexpensive) thing to do. Images in the Careers tab of teams working happily together will take you far. Team celebrations; volunteer activities; incentive trips; people laughing together in the employee gym or cafeteria. You don’t need a professional photographer for this. Assuming your day-to-day culture is an authentic one, those pictures can be grabbed with anyone’s smart phone. Stay away from stock photography. The more real the better. (Likewise, assuming your commitment to a culture of diversity and inclusion is equally authentic, real photography from real moments in your workplace community will reflect all the diversity you could desire. You can spot a token diversity stock pic a mile away. So can your prospects.)

Build credibility through case studies and testimonials.

Marketing professionals will tell you that there is nothing more compelling – or converting – than social proof. Your leaders should be able to identify the great, positive, storytellers inside their departments. (If they can’t, well, that’s another leadership training opportunity right there.) Grab these people’s insights, endorsements, perspectives, their own personal stories of how their individual passion/purpose pursuits are served. For more insights into this approach of linking company mission with personal purpose (along with a moving video example of what I’m talking about here), check out this article. 

Anticipate objections and address them through employee storytelling.

You probably know what “yeah buts” are attached to your employee value proposition. You don’t have to articulate them and then take them on directly. Your storytelling employees can handle that for you. For instance, one of my clients was an agricultural chemical company. Chemicals in fields of food has a bad rap in today’s society. “What would my friends say?” might cross the minds of potential candidates. The employees who love their work at this company spoke about how they help put food on the tables of families all over the world. Some spoke of keeping family farms in business. And one group spoke about the company’s ground-breaking research in saving agricultural-critical bees worldwide.

Watch out for stark experience contrasts.

You know that feeling when you’re sitting in a luxurious hotel ballroom enjoying a banquet. And then a service door is held open just long enough for you to glimpse what it looks like behind the scenes. Soft, flattering lighting gives way to blinding fluorescents. Sumptuous brocade-like wallpaper disappears where scuffed cinderblock walls begin. The crash! Bang! of colliding service carts and breaking glass pierce the air because muffling carpeting has ended where the lino begins. The stark contrast is spell-breaking.

There’s no reason why there should be that kind of contrast between your customer-facing messaging and your talent acquisition messaging. Especially online. Your customers are going to want to peek at your careers tab, even if they aren’t looking for a job with you. It’s important to them to see a consistent story of a joyful workplace, an employer who cares, and people who are proud to belong to your company.

Based on what I've observed while studying the careers portals that come my way, it would seem that someone inside the company concluded that the customer-facing portion of the website suffices to send the inspiring message to both sets of prospects. I would put forward the argument that the more sumptuous the customer side is, the more bare-bones the careers tab is, the more damage you're doing to your talent acquisition mission. You're signaling to your prospective employees, “All of this wonderfulness is not for you.”

The more sumptuous the customer side is, the more bare-bones the careers tab is, the more damage you're doing to your talent acquisition mission. You're signaling to your prospective employees, “All of this wonderfulness is not for you.”

Remember, you’re not the only one talking about your offering.

You’ve got evangelists and you’ve got detractors. Those detractors could be current or former employees. They could also be candidates who believed they were treated shabbily during the interview process. On the flip side, your evangelists are telling stories from the heart about why a career with your company is worth the effort to land there.

Get those stories! Fill your outreach bucket with positive messages to displace whatever bummer narratives that might sneak in via the Glassdoor.

Does your careers portal say, from the heart, “Pick me!”? Or does it say, “Yeah, whatever?”

Here's what my dream careers portal looks like: It's an emotionally compelling magic carpet ride. Loads of pictures, videos and stories of employees who love their jobs with your company. I want to hear their voices speak enthusiastically, sincerely, and joyfully about what their relationship with your company means to them beyond just the paycheck. I want to see community and collaboration. I want to see belonging and evidence of abundance (healthy eating at the cafeteria, volunteer events). I want to see interviews with employees who work in the same departments where there are openings. And teetering on the tippy top of Maslow's famous triangle, I want to see evidence of a gathering of positive, optimistic, self-actualized people I know I would love to work with, all pulling together to help each other achieve their meaningful dreams. To be completely honest, I want to feel FOMO.

I want to be shown evidence that if I join a company's employee community, I will have the opportunity to fully realize my own potential in a joyful way. Only then would I scroll through that automated thingie to see if there's an opening that fits my skill set.

About Martha I. Finney: Martha helps companies create and promote cultures of engaged and passionate employees who love to talk about loving their work. She has begun booking Q1 2020 now, so contact her now to see how her work might breathe life into your compelling employee value proposition.

The author or co-author of 27 books on leadership and employee engagement, her original research into joy in the American workplace has been covered by CNN, NPR, Time magazine The Washington Post, The San Jose Mercury News, The New York Times, Miami Herald, among other newspapers.

To see what else she has to say about the voice of the employee in the world of employee engagement, check out these articles:

Your #1 Talent Retention Threat Is Not What You Think It Is

Why Corporate Culture, Values and Vision Will Save Society in 2020

Four Authentic Ways Best Employers Can Create Emotionally Engaged Cultures

Message me via Linked In and let's talk it over.