With more opportunities available to job seekers than ever, it has become increasingly important to entice prospective candidates early. In our modern media landscape, your employer brand extends beyond your job listings. Now, prospective employees can engage with your brand through your social media platforms, your website, and additional online networks before even submitting an application. In order to attract the best candidates in your market, it is essential to ensure your employer brand is consistent with your company culture and complements your recruitment strategy.
Check out three ways your business brand is impacting recruitment and how you can make improvements starting today!
1. Your Website’s Mobile Compatibility
While platforms like Indeed remain the most popular way for candidates to search and apply for positions, your website is the digital front of your business. Suitable candidates will do a little research before applying, and more often than not this involves a quick internet search via their mobile device. As a result, having a website that is compatible with mobile devices and offers a convenient user experience can often be the difference between a candidate deciding to apply with your company and a competitor.
A quick way to check how user-friendly your website may be is to search on your own mobile device and navigate through each page, submitting a test application through your website’s online application if available. We recommend doing this monthly to ensure the user experience is consistently as seamless as possible.
2. Your Employees’ Social Media
Depending on your business, your audience will interact with your social media platforms in a variety of ways. This extends as well to employees: whether it’s tagging their employer on LinkedIn for a work anniversary or posting a recent social gathering between coworkers on Facebook, your employees are offering a glimpse into your company culture through their social media activity. While you cannot control how much your employees are on social media in their free time, encouraging team members who are more active on social media to share content about your company when relevant in a quick and easy way to grow your social media presence and develop your employer brand is a positive way.
This can also work inversely as well: next time you celebrate a work anniversary or important professional milestone, ask the employee if you can tag them in a social media post. This way, prospective candidates interacting with your brand can see your current team and have a better idea if your company may be the right fit for them!
3. Your Interview Process
While every employer’s interview process should be tailored to their business and the specific roles they are looking to fill, there are some best practices that can reinforce your employer brand and keep your top prospects engaged as you move through the steps of interviewing. While you are likely to interview a variety of candidates, keep in mind that the best candidates are going to be doing the same with different prospective employers and roles as they actively search for their next opportunity. An easy way to keep prospects engaged is consistent communication.
Whether it’s updating a candidate on the timeline for when you anticipate a decision to be made on a given role or simply extending a note of gratitude for their time throughout the interview process, any form of communication helps keep your company top of mind as they make their own decisions on what is the right next step for their career. Email is typically the best method for this as it can be unobtrusive and low-pressure, but depending on the level of seniority a quick phone call check-in can also be beneficial.
To find out more recruitment best practices and how to develop your company culture, make sure you subscribe to the Zimmer Communications blog!
