With new communication channels emerging every day, today’s talent is being bombarded by messages from prospective employers. This is making it increasingly difficult for companies to stand out – but also giving them more opportunities than ever before to tell their story effectively.
These changes mean the importance of an authentic and distinctive employer brand proposition cannot be understated. Even more critically, employers need to think creatively about how they take this message to market and use it to source and recruit the talent they need.
The fragmented media landscape
Advances in technology mean the media landscape has become increasingly fragmented. With so many ways to inform prospective candidates about job openings, building a robust talent pipeline has become an increasingly complex task.
Faced with intense competition for in-demand talent, candidate attraction efforts need to be more targeted, more proactive, and more relevant if an organisation is going to stand out from the crowd. It’s clear that the lines between HR and marketing teams are now blurred, and organisations that want to succeed need to embrace this.
A robust candidate attraction strategy starts with understanding the audience. To do this, it’s important for organisations to know their ideal candidates inside-out – what drives and motivates them; the best way to inform them about job opportunities; and, of course, the skills and experience they need to possess. From here, a strong attraction strategy can be formed, with candidates truly at its core.
With so many attraction channels now accessible by employers and jobseekers alike, it’s important for organisations to utilise a blend of communication channels, with tracking and analytics embedded deep within each. Doing so allows employers to communicate with prospective employees through multiple touch points, while maintaining clear visibility of channel effectiveness.
Viewing talent through the marketing lens
Understanding how to reach out to your ideal candidates is one thing – what you reach out to them with from a messaging perspective is quite another.
Today, branding is one of the most important aspects of any candidate attraction strategy. Put simply – all companies must have a proactive employer brand strategy that positions your organisation as an employer of choice.
To build healthy talent pipelines, HR professionals need to build and reinforce a compelling, candidate-centric dialogue with employees and potential employees. They need to tell their story of what it’s really like to work there, and share this across relevant communication channels.
For those companies who have not looked at their brand through a talent recruitment and retention lens, this requires new strategies and practices to deliberately enhance the brand promise and its potential to inspire talent to engage with the organisation.
At ManpowerGroup, we’re increasingly combining recruitment workforce solutions with employer branding and talent attraction. Our capability spans every touch point: media channels specific to a company’s target audience; attention-grabbing creative adverts; compelling messages that encapsulate a company’s offering; and an engaging, seamless web experience with relevant, inspiring content.
To find out more about our extensive media planning and candidate attraction capabilities, contact [email protected].
This article first appeared in the sixth edition of The Human Age newspaper.
