In essence, an employer brand describes an employer’s reputation as a place to work, and their employee value proposition. As an employer, you can create awareness about your employer brand, but it’s not always about what you say, it’s about what you do, how you do it and how it is perceived.
The main issues in recruitment today
Not enough candidate applications for certain positions (IT especially, we know).
You might have an amazing employer brand and it might be known by most potential candidates, but you still have isues recruiting. The culprit here is most likely your application process. Some of the hardest positions to fill are senior IT positions. We see it everywhere.
We’ve done extensive research on this, however, just putting yourself in the shoes of a head-hunted senior IT professional can shed light on the reasons why these jobs are hard to fill.
- As a senior IT professional, you most likely already have a job. That makes you a passive candidate (not currently looking for another job).
- Senior IT professionals are constantly head-hunted. Regardless of your employer brand, you can be sure that they will not spend more than 10 minutes applying to a job.
- If they do end up spending more than 10 minutes applying to a job, having to send in a CV, a cover letter and a reason as to why they want to work for your company, you can be sure they are already dissappointed.
Too many unqualified candidates applying.
For regular jobs, you might have the issue of having too many applicants who are unqualified. That’s understandable. Many active candidates (who are constantly looking for available jobs) try to apply to jobs where they maybe don’t 100% align with the requirements. However, this takes time from recruiters and also burdens them when it comes to giving answers to all the candidates.
From our own research we know that:
Candidates who do not get a reply from an applications are less likely to ever apply to the company again, thus damaging your employer brand.
Can you blame them?
Spending 40 minutes on average filling in a single job application generates enough investment from the candidate’s side that it can negatively impact your employer brand’s perception if they either receive no answer or an automated negative answer with no feedback as to why they were rejected.
Employer branding is about what you do & how you do it.
Yes, your culture, values and overall objective, are all great elements to use when you create awareness about your employer brand. However, it’s not always enough. Here are some insights that we’ve gathered throughout the years:
- Talk about aspects related to certain departments. For example, brand awareness when it comes to the IT department, should be very related to the programming languages used, innovation, openness to change, etc.
This is hard to do and it takes quite some time to make a plan for each department. You would need to create personas, characterize them and identify what would make them apply for a job at your company. A general employer branding message will soon be too little. You need to start planning now.
- Focus on the benefits for the candidates. Try talking about opportunities to develop, about the possibility of travel, work-life balance, freedom to innovate and come up with ideas that will be listened to as well as other perks that will impact their work life & their personal life. Candidates are people and they have certain preferences when choosing an employer.
- Talk to your employees and find out from them what it is that keeps them in their jobs. Internal feedback is always underestimated and rarely used when it comes to employer brand awareness campaigns.
- Change your recruitment process. Make it faster, more efficient and more effective. A recruiter spends less than 3 minutes on one application while a candidate spends 40 minutes on average. The time investment is too much of a discrepancy between recruiter and candidate.
- Make sure you contact your candidates as soon as possible.
What we can do at Zmash
And so we get to Zmash. At Zmash, we put in that flexible & customized work to make sure you have a great recruitment and employer branding plan for the future. We can help with:
- Adding a highly customizable chatbot on your job pages. With an ATS integration you can get all candidates directly in your ATS. We integrate with all leading recruitment systems and are constantly expanding our partnerships.
- Analyzing insights from chatbot conversations. You can choose to either use the chatbot for applications/research/FAQ. It’s your choice!
- Recruitment Marketing with regular ads and messages ads.
- Reporting and future suggestions.
