Building a Strategic Employment Brand for Talent Acquisition

According to the latest research on human capital trends, 83 percent of executives say that talent acquisition is very important for the success of their business.

The struggle for many companies is determining how many resources to put behind talent acquisition. To help answer this question, this article will examine why building a strategic and digital employment brand is so critical in today’s talent marketplace.

Why Do You Need to Build a Brand Around Talent Acquisition?

Consider what a brand is. It’s a promise; it’s a way of communicating to your audience what they can expect from your company during every touchpoint.

Now apply this to recruiting and hiring. You should shift your mindset from your company being the focal point of talent acquisition to the candidate being the focal point.

Why shift to a customer service mindset? The talent marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive, and focusing on a talent recruitment strategy gives an employer a real competitive advantage.

If you think about it, a lot of companies in the same space as your company offer similar products and services, but their people are the real competitive advantage in terms of innovation, creativity, leadership skills, and the ability to grow and develop people for the future.

5 Steps to Building A Strategic Employment Brand

The premiere employers who attract and hire the top employees spend a lot of time and resources on building and maintaining a great candidate experience. This starts at the very beginning of the process and carries all the way through to the interview:

1. What is the quality of your job listing? When you post your job listing, you should do everything possible to make a great first impression with candidates. A great first impression includes a well-written job posting, the right amount of information provided, and access to a real person for the candidate to follow up with in regard to the posting.

2. Are you quickly following up? Make sure you have a system in place to quickly reply to each candidate who submits an application for your job opening. Again, thinking like customer service, consider this like a customer submitting a help ticket. You want to be able to provide a quick acknowledgment before a member of your team follows up.

3. Is your candidate experience mobile? Candidates are no longer parking themselves in front of their computers to apply for jobs or complete a pre-employment assessment. If a candidate has a great mobile experience, it will have a positive impact on the overall candidate experience. If the candidate has a bad mobile experience, not only will it leave them frustrated, they will likely tell others about it, tarnishing your brand and shrinking the pool of top talent available to you.

4. Can you paint a picture of the future? When we work with companies on employee engagement and satisfaction, we see a common theme: employees want to know their potential career path.

The recruitment process is a great place to start communicating to prospective employees how your company develops talent and provides different career paths. If candidates cannot see a picture of the future, it makes your company less attractive to top candidates.

5. Are you personalizing communication with candidates? In addition to providing an enhanced mobile experience and a picture of the future, top companies are leveraging technology to automate the “nurturing” process with candidates before and after their interview.

Much like in customer service and marketing, employers are leveraging automation tools or Artificial Intelligence (AI) to send personalized messages throughout the recruitment process. This keeps candidates engaged with your company all the way up to onboarding as new hires.

How to Put Everything Together to Hire Top Talent

Once you have the right mindset and have assigned the proper resources to hiring, you can put everything together to build a highly functional process that supports your hiring needs for years to come.

- Hiring System such as the ZERORISK Hiring System to manage the individual assessment for each employee, produce a custom behavioral interview guide for each candidate, and use benchmarks to compare candidates to the top performers.

- EQ Workshop such as Emotional Intelligence in Leading Workshop, will help you learn the nine emotional intelligence competencies of great leaders, how your individual emotional intelligence compares, and how to use the information to become a great leader.

- Interview Training such as our Behavioral Interview Training course to understand how to conduct an objective interview that unlocks information about each candidate’s past behavior as a predictor of their behavior in your company.

Supporting your talent acquisition process with a strategic and digital approach is doable. You just need to make the commitment and take the first step forward!