Taking Candidates on Your Brand Journey
While demonstrating your brand values is essential in everything your brand does, it holds particular importance when dealing with your potential new employees. In a world of counter-offers, multi-offers and candidate vanishing acts having a well-defined brand will help you build a strong connection between candidates and your open roles. This will help you achieve your hiring goals and secure quality candidates when they are faced with multiple options on the table.
What is a brand journey?
Your brand journey is your way of delivering an experience to your clients and customers. A well-defined brand will mean your online presence, your leadership, your PR, and your products, all align with the values that you lay out in your brand journey. Ideally, you will convey these values through all points of contact with the public, and potential candidates: on your website, in job listings, in advertisements, and also internally, in the way you communicate with current employees.
Championing your values throughout the interview process.
The interview process should run promptly with thorough feedback at every stage, regardless of whether a candidate is progressing or being declined. This demonstrates to candidates that your business is efficient and punctual, but more importantly, it shows that you value candidates and their time and energy which promotes a positive image of your company.
Everything should align throughout all stages of the hiring process from your frontline team to your operations/hiring manager. This should be clearly defined prior to going to market; consider how your website highlights your brand and values; does your advertising and social media presence align with these values; do your hiring managers portray the same message and ensure communication is consistent with each candidate whether it be a positive outcome or not? Your recruitment process should also include a carefully curated induction and onboarding plan that replicates your values and invests in your new starter giving them time to learn and understand their new role. People work for people - share your own career journey with the candidate, share stories of succession planning and growth within the brand and build a meaningful connection!
Being transparent about your values and making sure that you choose candidates who align with your values, ensures that candidates feel included from the very beginning of their journey. Maintaining these values and making sure that every stage of the interview process syncs, is an important demonstration of your consistency, and your commitment to this. It may be really important to your candidate that they feel attached to your brand values and understand your leadership's direction. Communicating these values and directions consistently and early on ensures that there are no unwelcome surprises for the candidate at a later stage. Interviews and hiring processes are not just for skill-checking, it is also a beneficial opportunity for both the candidate and the hiring manager to review whether the candidate and the company are a good match, and whether or not the company can support their career goals.
Onboarding - How aligned values retain great employees.
To successfully onboard a new employee, your company must ensure that the leadership, values, and ethos, of your company, are cohesive. If you can do this it's a great start! It means that your candidate will feel comfortable in their role, and feel like your company is a place where they can grow, and most importantly, stay.
By focusing on genuinely selling your brand's ethos and your company values throughout the recruitment process, you will attract top talent who want to work and grow within your company, and will actively tell others about what a great place your company is to work. Recruiting authentically may feel like turning away candidates who are great on paper, but in reality, it allows you to hire the right kind of talent who want to promote your brand image, and who want to stay.