» How Employer Brand and Candidate Experience Meld Together

As I read Peter Weddle’s post, You Are What They Remember, I kept nodding to myself. In a few instances I caught myself agreeing verbally. “Yes…yes…yes…” (You can skip any obvious jokes with that last sentence…)

What’s Peter’s point?

It’s simple:

1. Companies need to be memorable to succeed in selling their products and services.
2. The same holds true in recruitment.
3. Positive memories are created and fostered by repetition. That’s why marketers hammer home the same messages over and over.
4. The same holds true in recruitment.
5. Marketing in this fashion is very expensive. Big companies can do it, small ones can’t.
6. The same holds true in recruitment.
7. There are other ways of marketing and becoming memorable for selling products and services.
8. The same holds true in recruitment.

Recruitment - at least the part of it that involves getting top candidates to the door and engaged - is all about sales and marketing. But since there are very few companies outside of the Fortune 500 with significant budgets for big recruitment marketing campaigns, what alternatives exist?

Here’s what Peter writes:

You can create an experience in your recruiting process that is so positively compelling and differentiating that it actually acts as an advertising message. To do that, you must move your entire organization (that means your hiring managers, employees and senior leaders as well as your fellow recruiters) from the transactional, supply chain mentality that dominates recruiting today to a relationship-based community development perspective.

Bingo. And employer brand and candidate experience meld together and will stay forevermore attached at the hip.

Peter goes on to say:

If you then trigger viral behavior on the part of candidates-if you formally and respectfully ask them to pass the memory along to their friends and colleagues-you can probably reach as many prospective candidates as you would with more traditional brand advertising.

This is absolutely true, and where so much of what we know about social media can be leveraged for recruiting. Even when it comes down to rejecting candidates you can create a positive experience and encourage viral spreading of your message.

Peter goes on to explain some ways that small and medium-sized businesses (and large ones) can improve their recruitment process, build up employer brand, and enhance the candidate experience.

In my mind, one of the key issues is your career site (no surprise!) I think of the career site as your recruitment hub. You drive people towards it and hope to convert those people into candidates. Your marketing strategy isn’t the hub, because you could drive hundreds of candidates, but without a good career site, you won’t convert the right ones. Your applicant tracking system isn’t the hub, it’s there to catch applications and move them through the recruitment / hiring process.

It’s the career site that matters most; because if you can’t convert the right candidates it won’t matter what kind of applicant tracking system you’re using, and it won’t matter how much you spend to drive candidates to the front door.

Your career site is one of the first and most prominent branding pieces of the puzzle that people will see. If it’s not up to snuff - if the hub isn’t working - all the other elements, the spokes of the wheel, fall apart.