In our previous blog post, we covered four of the top recruiting trends for 2019: recruitment marketing, AI tech, soft skills hiring, and collaborative hiring. It is essential for any company to attract the most talented, skilled, and well-suited people to join your team. These recruiting strategies are just a few of the options at your disposal.
In this article, we explore two more top recruiting trends: employer branding and diversity hiring. Bring your workforce into the future by actively putting your brand out there and cultivating a uniquely diverse team. Here’s how:
Employer Branding
We touched on employer branding in the first blog post in this series, as an element of recruitment marketing.
Whether your company is a multi-national organization or you run a local business with just a few employees, your reputation as an employer feeds into your public image. Especially when it comes to attracting new talent.
That’s exactly what your employer brand is: the sum of qualities, attributes, cultural elements, brand vision, employment benefits, and opportunities for professional growth that make candidates want to work for you. Everything a candidate has ever read, experienced, or heard about you – whether intentional or not – feeds your employer brand and helps future employees determine their level of attraction to your company.
A strong employer brand will set your business apart from the competition and establish you as the number one place for someone to build a career.
Not sure how to get started with your employer branding? Here are a few tips to get you on the right track:
- Know your Employee Value Proposition
Take a close look at what makes your organization unique from an employee perspective. Communicate clearly about your employee value proposition wherever you interact with prospective employees, from job postings to social media content. (Hot tip: it’s becoming more common to include salary and other elements of compensation in job listings, especially in highly competitive fields.) - Be consistent
Corporate brand and employer branding have to be aligned. Even though they are aimed at different audiences, brands use a lot of the same online channels to interact with customers as they do with job candidates. So: be consistent. - Authentic storytelling
People want to see what it’s like to work for your company. Use (live) video, photography, blog posts, social media posts, and employee testimonials to showcase real people and authentic experiences. What better way to make your brand personal? (Pro tip: Textmetrics can help by optimizing any written content with the best keywords for your target audience.) - Share from within
Happy employees are your best brand advocates! Get your team members to share their own employee experiences within their own online networks. - Make room for interaction
Don’t just push information out there, but offer opportunities for interaction. Chatbots, live webinars, and even #AMA Ask Me Anything sessions all allow potential employees to get to know your company culture. - Act on feedback
Use reviews of your company from online platforms like Glassdoor.com, as well as current and former employee experiences, as a source of feedback. Then implement that feedback to make positive changes within your company.
Most importantly, talent recruitment and company culture feed each other — it’s a two-way street. Hiring the right people helps foster the culture within your organization. At the same time, showcasing authentic employee experiences on your available online channels helps attract the most talented, passionate, and highly engaged employees. Having those elements in harmony leads to long-term talent retention.
Diversity Hiring
Just like AI technology in our previous blog post, diversity hiring is one of the recruitment themes that remains relevant in 2019. Encouraging diversity and inclusivity within the workplace means actively recruiting and employing individuals from different age groups, religions, genders, ethnicities, abilities, sexual orientations, economic backgrounds, geographic locations, and more.
Taking an active approach to diversity within your organization isn’t just the right thing to do ethically — it is also an excellent business strategy. Diverse teams bring unique viewpoints and fuel innovation, giving your business an incredible competitive edge. Companies with increased diversity within their employee base actually tend to see increased financial returns. It also makes your company a lot more attractive as a potential employer in the eyes of future talent.
There are so many complex angles and elements to diversity hiring, that it can be hard to know where to begin. Consider these tips as a starting point:
Check your bias
To minimize (unconscious) bias in the hiring process, find out where you could be alienating or ignoring particular groups of people. Are you proactively approaching candidates from diverse backgrounds to apply? If applications are being assessed by just one person, a larger hiring team might help simply by bringing a wider range of opinions to the table. Incorporate AI tech to filter names and other distinctive markers from candidate applications. Your team will never be diverse if you aren’t considering diverse candidates from the start.
Commit to diversity
Diversity can’t just be a token; it needs to be embedded in your company’s identity. At all levels of your organization, make a commitment to diversity and inclusivity, communicate your intention publicly, and integrate it in everything you do. That includes showcasing visual diversity on your website and in your brand marketing as well as using gender-neutral language on your company careers page. Be sure to organize diversity training for existing employees in order to foster an inclusive company culture that embraces uniqueness.
Show your diversity
Let candidates experience that you’re committed to diversity, starting with the hiring committee! A recruiting team that embodies diversity can help prospective talent envision an employer that will make them feel valued for who they are as an individual. This practice should extend beyond just the visual into policies like benefits for same-sex domestic partners, flexible work schedules or remote work options to make childcare more accessible, or access to mental health programs.
For more recruiting trends, take a look back at part 1 of this blog series and keep an eye out for the third and last part, coming soon.
And for content optimization at every level of your recruitment process, contact the Textmetrics team. Textmetrics will assist you with real-time suggestions to write high-quality content for your audience.