The Smart Thinking On Brand Appeal In Recruitment

Maximising your brand appeal to prospective candidates has to be high on the list when it comes to smart ways to optimise your recruitment and you need to make sure you leverage all of the right tools to make sure you appeal to the best available talent.

When a candidate looks at a company they might want to work for, it’s not always just about the pay packet. Research shows that they look at a much broader picture in terms of what an employer has to offer. Job seekers want to work for companies that they appeal to them in as many ways as possible including; brand, culture, ethos, location – as well as remuneration. The first place most candidates turn to to research a company brand is social media as invariably this offers them huge insight into areas of a business that would have been impossible for them to penetrate 10 years ago. This increased transparency makes it vitally important to make your organisation the type of business that you would want to work for and that you believe would appeal to others.

Technology is also helping candidates become far more adept at interpreting job adverts and identifying the correct type of job that are the right fit for them. Many job seekers aren’t simply looking for a job, as much as a life changing opportunity to make a living working somewhere that they’ll want to go to, to fit in and feel they’re genuinely contributing. This behavioural change makes it important to develop your brand to not only suit your own target market but also to appeal to potential new employers. Thankfully, these go hand in hand and good brand development should positively influence both customer and employees, present and future.

There are lots of ways to help achieve this.

1. At the top of the list are the more obvious things like making sure the key job attributes are made clear, healthcare coverage, pension arrangement, flexible hours (if applicable).

Other ways to promote your brand to maximise candidate appeal include:

2. Publish your companies ethos & mission statement.

3. Create an employee blog where members of your team publish something regularly which may not be specific to your product or service delivery but still reflect positively on your brand.

4. Tweet the good stuff. Make things like staff incentive days, coporate events, team building events, charitable events are all published via social media.

5. Publish your social and environmental responsibility statement, making it clear where you stand on key matters.

5. Create and publlish a ‘What’s It Like To work At [Your Co]’ video onto YouTube. Here’s a great example.

So the smart thinking on brand appeal in recruitment is that is pays to look good. The best talent will migrate to the best brands. If you’re not already doing so, sharpening up your brand so that you appeal to the best candidates can have as big an impact on the people you attract as almost any other aspect of your recruitment strategy.