Finding candidates is tough. Finding the right candidates can be even tougher. But, recruiting the best candidates is key for growing your business successfully. Getting the best people in the door means using your organization’s external brand to identify the prospects that can best execute that strategy. To find the right employees for your business, take a more brand-aligned approach to recruitment. These five tips can help you attract the best candidates to your organization:
1. Create brand consistency across recruitment outlets
When a candidate searches for a job on your internal recruitment pages, LinkedIn, Career Builder, or Glassdoor, they get an impression of your company and that impression influences whether candidates will apply.
Many websites offer standard templates that make it easy to adopt their format. Be careful – following their templates means you lose an opportunity to create a consistent brand message across all channels. Using your own template gives you better control of the recruitment process to find the best-fit employees for your business. Write your job description headline in the same unique brand voice as all your marketing communications.
2. Differentiate your company from competitors
Your brand is how your customers differentiate your product or service from your competitors. Unfortunately, many companies use boilerplate text in a recruitment ad that’s not appealing to applicants. To get the best candidates for your roles, communicate the key differences of your product or service throughout all parts of the recruitment process. Including, when messaging to internal and external candidates, during the complete interview procedure, and when making final offers to candidates.
3. Use language to entice and engage
To engage applicants, you need to use engaging language. If applicants feel as though you have invested little time in recruiting them, they are likely to be the kind of people who will invest little time in your company. By describing your company’s mission, vision and values so that people know who you are and what you stand for – and by spending time explaining the position in honest terms – applicants gain real insight into the open position. This way, you get applicants who are prepared for what’s the job offer and who are passionate about your brand.
4. Make templates easy to implement by your entire HR team
Needs change, roles change, and so do your HR employees who create the recruitment ads. Using a template that describes the basic recruitment details aligned to your company’s brand ensures uniformity across the recruitment process. As a result, you will receive a consistent caliber of applicants across your organization.
5. After recruiting, drive your brand across your HR practices
Once you have people in the door, it’s easy to think they will settle into your culture because you’ve spent the time to find the right fit. However, if you don’t continue the ‘on brand’ experience, people will quickly feel the recruitment messages they received were misleading and they will not understand how to deliver your brand promise. Drive your brand through onboarding, recognition and reward, and ongoing development to keep employees engaged and aligned to your organizational goals.
