How to design a candidate experience that communicates your employer brand

 
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Note: this blog is a recap from our sold-out HRPA webinar delivered on Tuesday, May 5, 2020. If you’d like, you can download the full slides from the session here.

If you work in HR or TA, you know that the recruiting landscape has changed significantly over the last two months. Some organizations are now recruiting at hyper speed, while others have grinded to a halt.

However, one thing that has not changed is the importance of employer branding and the candidate experience.

Why does employer branding and candidate experience matter right now?

Employer branding and candidate experience still matter for a number of reasons, many of which have already been covered at length in other pieces on The Employer Brand Shop blog. In short, some of these factors include:

Your employer brand is more visible now than ever before — a company’s overall reputation is being defined by the way they’re treating their employees during this crisis. This will also have major implications for business performance. Read the full blog on this for more.

Attracting quality candidates will remain a priority — while applicant volumes may increase during the coming months due to high unemployment, that doesn’t mean applicant quality will increase as well. We’ll still need to use our employer brands and build stand-out candidate experiences in order to attract, engage, and retain the most in-demand, niche talent, along with “A players.” Read the full blog on this for more.

A distributed world means more hiring competitors this public health crisis has also been an eye-opener for many organizations when it comes to the benefits and feasibility of remote work arrangements. As a result, many organizations may move towards more remote work arrangements in future. This means that you are no longer competing against just the hiring competitors in a local talent market, but potentially against hiring competitors from around the world — and your employer brand and candidate experience will go a long way to help here.

So how do we use our employer brands to develop a better candidate experience?

If you’re now convinced that you need to focus some time on employer branding and candidate experience to help your organization adjust to the new world of work, then here are the steps you can take to do so.

1) Define (or refine) your employer brand

You can’t infuse your employer brand across the candidate experience if you haven’t taken the time to uncover what your employer brand is all about.

The best place to start when it comes to defining your employer brand, is to uncover your organization’s employee value proposition (EVP). Your EVP is the “what’s in it for me?” factor that dictates why an employee should want to work for your organization. You can learn about all the steps involved in an EVP project in our blog, How to uncover your organization’s EVP: a 7-step process.

Even if you already have an EVP, now is a good time to revisit it to make sure that it still holds true. After all, a lot is changing right now and some of the components of your EVP may no longer apply, either temporarily or long term. 

For example, if you typically emphasize your inspirational workspace as one of the factors in your messaging, that won’t be something that applies to your recruiting efforts over the next few months. 

Additionally, this crisis has put a lot of EVPs to the test. Do you think your organization has communicated and behaved in a way that reinforces your EVP positioning? Or are there elements of dissonance, where you have behaved counter to your EVP? If so, you may need to adjust your EVP to ensure that it reflects the reality of your current culture and employee experience.

If you need help with either of these types of projects, please get in touch with our team, as we specialize in this type of work and would be happy to assist.

2) Map out your candidate journey

From there, it’s a helpful exercise to actually map out all of the touchpoints that exist along your candidate journey. What are all the interactions a candidate is likely to have with your organization as they move through your recruiting funnel?

You can brainstorm this with your team, and fill out a simple table (like the below) that maps out your candidate journey:

From there, visit each of the spots on your candidate journey and audit the overall experience. Is your employer brand clearly being communicated via the messages, visuals, communication frequency, and technology that you’re using at each touchpoint? 

Further, think about the candidate mindset at each of these stages. What types of questions, anxieties, fears, hopes, etc., are they likely to have at each stage of your recruiting process? You can create a second column in your table to map out these sorts of questions:

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3) Infuse your employer brand across the candidate journey

Once you have a clear idea of what your employer brand is, and where it needs to be communicated across the candidate experience, you can begin to think about ways to do so.

This will look a little different depending on the channel, but typically you’ll want to check off the following:

  • Are the core parts of our EVP easy to understand and identify across all the primary spots a candidate might visit?

  • Is our EVP being communicated consistently — in terms of messaging and visuals — across all these spots?

  • Is our employer brand reflected in the technology we’re using? If you’re marketing yourself as an innovative tech company, but using an application portal that feels like it was created in 2005, then you’re sending candidates mixed messages.

  • Is your employer brand reflected in your communications approach? If you’re marketing yourself as a company that truly cares about and values its people, but then are providing candidates with a “black hole” experience then you also have a disconnect.

  • Are your hiring managers and recruiting team armed with the right speaking points and assets to be able to tell your employer brand story in a consistent light with other candidate touchpoints? Have you created training materials for these groups?

You’ll also want to think about how you can infuse your employer brand across the entire employee experience too, to ensure the promises you’re making are being reinforced from the ground up. This will involve partnering with HR to infuse your EVP In your programs and policies, and partnering with internal comms to disseminate your EVP across internal employee touchpoints. But, that’s a big topic — and likely a blog post for another day!

4) Measure the results

Lastly you’ll also want to ensure that the work you’re doing here is actually making an impact for you.

The types of things you can track to measure success here includes:

  • Conversion rate - how many people are actually taking action after engaging with one of your touchpoints? This is calculated by dividing the number of potential actions by the number of actions actually taken (for example, the number of applicants divided by careers site visitors). As you make changes to your touchpoints, is your conversion rate increasing or decreasing? In some cases you’ll want it to increase and in others you may want it to decrease depending on your exact situation and goals.

  • Quality of applicant/quality of hire - are you attracting people who are actually qualified for the roles you’re looking to fill? This can be measured at each stage of the funnel in different ways. Early on, how many applicants are qualified enough to actually receive interviews? Later, how many interviewees received offers? And finally, how many new hires actually thrive in your org (stick around long term, receive good performance reviews, etc.)?

  • Quantitative candidate feedback - if you’re not already doing so, consider implementing a candidate survey at a few different places throughout your process to get input on what candidates think of the touchpoints they’re interacting with throughout your process. A big bonus here is that the very act of just administering a survey favourably influences a candidate's perception of the experience by 72%, according to The Talent Board!

We hope this blog is helpful for you as your team considers ways to support your business and continue to attract and engage the best talent. As always, if you have any questions please get in touch and we’ll be happy to share more information with you.

About The Employer Brand Shop

The Employer Brand Shop is a boutique recruitment marketing and employer brand agency located in Kitchener, Canada. Our team helps organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.

 
Kaitlyn Holbein