Improve Hiring Process: Protect Employment Brand

The importance of branding is often overlooked when talking about efficiency and technology in the hiring process. There’s definitely a parallel here with my last blog about comparing apples to apples in the hiring process, where I covered the importance of data in both day-to-day business and in recruiting. The same concept applies to branding. Organizations (both large and small) are very conscious of branding themselves to customers and partners. This same focus should be spent on branding to potential employees, i.e. applicants, as well.

As a quick aside, taking this philosophy to heart is especially critical to organizations whose applicants are (or may be) clients. Retail providers, hospitality, restaurants, financial institutions, etc. are just some of the industries where this applies.

Easy Peasy Employment Branding

There are some very simple steps to take in terms of employment branding. Below are the key ones I stress to our clients:

Make your career site welcoming and informative (maybe go for a different look than this blog’s photo!) — use the same look and feel as the rest of your overall website. Be sure to share information that will help applicants see the benefits of working in your organization. Make it clear how they can find your openings and apply for those positions.
Make it easy for applicants to apply for multiple jobs — either at the same time or over a period of time. Avoid forcing them to start from scratch for each job.
Leverage social media so that applicants can “follow” you and be kept abreast of new jobs as you post them. Statistics overwhelmingly confirm that hoping applicants will return to your site on their own to seek new openings isn’t a great answer.
Take advantage of social media relationships that exist within your current employee ranks. While it’s important to allow applicants to stay connected with you, engaging your current employees’ social contacts can drive more “passive” applicants to your site. In turn, these folks may choose to follow you or share your jobs with others. Either way, you’re improving brand recognition and expanding reach — all at no hard dollar cost to you.
Confirm with applicants that you’ve received their application submission and let them know what to expect from there. If an applicant tracking software tool is in place, this should be very easy to do. If not, develop an email template that may be used for this purpose.
Be timely with feedback to applicants about where they are in your process. Again, if you use an applicant tracking system, this should be pretty easy. In our solution, for instance, you can actually do this for groups of applicants at a time vs. each one individually. If you’re managing candidates in your email folders or in spreadsheets, this may still be done with email templates.
When a position is filled, take the time to reach out personally to those finalists not selected. Ideally, do this by phone. First off, it’s the right thing to do. Just as importantly, leaving these finalists with a positive impression keeps the door open if other opportunities arise down the road.

Be sure to tune in for my next blog in this series about managing your candidate pipeline effectively.

Previous blogs in Improve Your Hiring Process series include:
Improve Your Hiring Process: Thin the Herd
Improve Your Hiring Process: Compare Apples to Apples

Image credit: Welcome by alborzshawn (contact)