A job is a job is a job. When I search for Director of Content jobs in Denver, I see at least 75 results in the Google Jobs widget alone. The title doesn't pique my interest (I have it currently). The list of responsibilities is a given (I do them now). The bullets of requirements are expected (I've seen them before).
I'm not impressed or intrigued enough to change jobs. All these jobs look exactly the same. What I'd be looking for is to change companies. Industries. Countries. Cities. Brands. Teams. Projects. Growth. Culture. Impact.
I don't have to go too far out on a limb to say that other people in today's workforce, even across generations, feel the same way. Do people still want to know salary information? Yes. Do benefits still drive decisions? Of course. But we're seeing a broader attitudinal shift across the workforce today when it comes to finding, choosing and staying with a career. People are looking to work with a company, not simply for a company.
And it's a little scary for those companies.
It means there isn't a formula for winning top talent. It means companies can't rely on being a household name. t means shedding light on the good and the bad. It means having a plan for growth. It means acquiring new skills and expanding expertise. It means learning what the "right fit" is and screening out the "wrong fit." It means employer brand comes first and jobs come second.
It means we must utterly change the way we've gone about recruiting talent. How? Shifting from selling jobs to marketing your why.
Marketing your brand and your why means ditching the notion that jobs are the sun: not everything revolves around the roles you need to fill. Working in this mindset requires new technology, like a Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) solution or a Recruitment Marketing Platform. Here's a look at how these technologies can help maximize your employer brand by boosting awareness, differentiating your message and nurturing candidates over time.
Career Site: Instead of only paying to attract talent on job boards, invest in a career site that can be your brand hub. Use custom landing pages to speak directly to your target audiences, like veterans, students or female engineers. Create unique talent network forms that encourage people to learn more about your company over time instead of applying when they aren't sure. In addition, use technology like a Recruitment Marketing Platform to ensure your career site is optimized for mobile and search, so more candidates can find you from where they likely start their career search: Google.
Email Marketing: Finding the right person (if you're a recruiter) or the company and role (if you're a job seeker) is all about timing. Great marketers excel at this: understanding how to generate interest and then nurture that interest over time based on the person, what they're looking for, what their challenges are, etc. It's personalized, it's relevant, it's consistent. It's not as simple as sending the same open job in a mass email to every person in your database. A CRM or Recruitment Marketing Platform is built to automate communication and segment messaging based on your talent pipelines. For instance, GE created a targeted email campaign to all of the women who saw the Millie Dresselhaus "Women in Engineering" video; it featured a real, female GE employee in a STEM position talking about her experience and her path. That's powerful branding and helps your candidates align their "why" with yours.
Social Campaigns: The value in using one technology solution to manage and measure all of your recruiting tactics, including social media, is that you're able to see what's working and what's not in one dashboard. Social media can't, and shouldn't, be siloed from your other strategies. Being able to track how certain content is driving clicks back to your content allows you to make better decisions about who to target on social media, what content and messaging to create and when to send that content.
Analytics: Employer brand is a squishy thing to measure. But with the right technology, you can help prove the effectiveness of certain parts of your brand: email newsletters, new career site content, job descriptions and employee videos. When you can tie higher clicks and applicant conversion rates to a better job description template, you have a proof point for continuing to invest in these types of strategies over others.
It's a brave, new world out there when it comes to talent acquisition. And to be brave, you have to be bold, smart and different. The good news? You don't have to be brave alone. Let technology help you.
Photo: Creative Commons
