Do you find it increasingly difficult to recruit the best available talent for open positions? It´s important that you work on your employer brand. Your communication with potential candidates need to be optimised for a world that expects more transparency every day. They should be able to understand their role, know their mission and really get what it is like to work for you.
Although significant efforts have been made in recent years to improve the transparency of communication with potential candidates, there is a lot to be done. “In a candidate driven market like here in Sweden, candidates can choose where they want to work,” says Richard Wilke, Executive Manager with Michael Page Sweden. “That´s why as an employer you need be very clear on what you can offer them in terms of career development, training, flexibility and work-life-balance.”
Job postings are the first line of promotion for a position and content is key for potential applicants. Together with hiring managers and recruiters, this is where you pre-select through your choices – of wording, skills requirements, company information, and unconscious bias (in terms of experience and skills). “A good job advert should be short and make crystal clear what will be the responsibilities of the person that is hired for the role,” says Richard Wilke. “What job adverts often miss is which extra benefits a company can offer candidates, and some flavor of the culture of the company. If candidates are triggered by what they read, they´ll google your company to find out more.”
“It´s important that you reflect the reality of your company in your communication with candidates,” adds Ashley Stephenson, Director of Michael Page Sweden. “Be 100 percent honest. It will save you time and attract the right candidates.”
How can employers create a brand that reflects their reality?
Key Insight: Job adverts that reflect the reality of a company prompt potential applicants to discover more about your company, helping to reduce time to hire and improving the ability to attract latent candidates through third parties.
Be contextual in reflecting reality
In your communication to potential candidates, you must provide information on the working environment, conditions, collaboration, available technologies, management style and team. In short, every message you send out should open a window into your company. Now, more than ever, candidates expect this and have become more pointed in their questions if this meaningful information does not appear.
In your recruitment process, you must arouse candidates’ interest and, to do this, they need to see differentiation in the offer, environment and team. You need to identify the nature of the working environment, while being as transparent as possible, so the potential candidate can project themselves into your company.
Michael Page can help you get to the purpose of working in your company to appeal to your ideal candidates. In each job advert there are sections that are often left blank. They must be completed, to help you attract the best available candidates.
Key Insight: The candidate’s need for contextual information to gain a clearer and more realistic view of your proposal overrides almost everything else.
Technology is the supporting act, not the headliner
Future recruitment will see more automation and machine learning in all processes. However, the aim is not to replace the human in the value chain, it is to support and expand their capabilities. Technology will help to augment people’s skills by speeding up selection processes, or by helping to remove bias in the wording of employer branding or job posts and much more.
The key here is that all parties must work together to improve current processes so they reflect the future of hiring that technology can provide. If the human input is not improved, the machine output will not reach our collective goals for it.
Key Insight: Hiring managers and recruiters need to work in partnership to collectively improve the information provided in CVs and job posts to help tech solutions provide accurate results.
How can you help recruiters deliver improved candidate lists?
Having a purpose is not the catchall answer, but the insights you can provide into the team, function or division are definitely fit for purpose. Your insider knowledge will help to sell the role, and help your recruitment partner understand more so they can better inform candidates when appropriate.
Purpose is important in the hiring process, as it gives a potential applicant a deeper understanding of the company and why it does what it does. Purpose also helps hiring managers put a role in a wider company context, which helps recruiters sell the role to a wider audience. But purpose does not need to be captured in a formal document like a company mission statement.
When the recruiting parties are aligned, and if current and future skills sets are visible and understood, then psychometric testing can be introduced to assess behavioural skills. Through this type of testing, you can move beyond the static, backwards looking CV as the document indicating potential candidate suitability.
It favors wider pre-selection and allows for better prequalification, and more equal and inclusive recruitment. The candidate responds to personality and motivation questionnaires developed by researchers, while you define the criteria for success, as well as the technical and behavioral skills needed to successfully fulfill the role.
Key Insight: Psychometric testing in recruitment favors wider pre-selection and allows for better prequalification, and allows for more equitable, inclusive recruitment thanks to a proper assessment of employer-employee compatibility.
