Successful recruitment continues to be challenging, and employers need to utilise everything in their armoury to raise their profile in the market generally, and specifically with the types of people, skills and experience they need to attract.
We call this ‘background noise’ and employers who do this well ensure their employment proposition is out there; well publicised, clear, articulate and differentiating…even when they’re not recruiting.
The golden thread that runs through this is the Employer Brand. A combination of your business strategy, culture, values and how they all relate to the people who work for you, and those who may do so in the future.
But having a well-developed employer brand is one thing; how you publicise it is where you reap the real benefits as an employer. Creating ‘always on’ wide-ranging external communications that consistently sell this opportunity means your target audience become much more aware of you and more likely to engage when you do go out to market.
The list of opportunities is long and includes your careers website or pages on the corporate site, your LinkedIn company page, your social media feeds (don’t just use them for selling your products and services), your job advertisements, your job descriptions, your Glassdoor page, other company pages on job boards, your office facilities, your interview process, the offer letter, the onboarding and induction communications, all reinforced by your existing employees who experienced the consistent brand message when they joined, and should now be real advocates of the company.
Candidates who are thinking of applying, or doing their homework ahead of an interview will seek out all available ‘background noise’ on you as a potential employer and let’s face it, we want them to be as prepared as possible. So if you give them as much content as you can, they can decide if the opportunity is right for them – and it won’t be right for everybody – and progress their application.
We’ve got a case study on our website for the work we’ve done with Liberty Global the multi-national telecoms and media company. But to give a little more detail and context, we not only raised the profile of their job opportunities but marketed the employer brand as a whole across many touch points. Raising the generic brand awareness in this way and then segmenting this to a female audience as an example, we saw a 193% increase in applications to their LinkedIn job listings and a 45% uplift in female applications.
Away from the success of direct applications, and the best measure of success in creating this ‘background noise’ we saw an increase of over 600% in organic applications from those who were already aware of the brand and sought out our job opportunities to apply. Overall, from all routes to application, we also doubled the percentage of applicants who passed the initial screening, thereby providing much better quality of talent that had had a more rounded view of what was expected.
Get ahead of the competition for the same talent as you by maximising your background noise as an employer. Contact us today or fill in this form for a FREE recruitment marketing audit.
