In my previous blog post, I shared 6 Marketing Pain Points for Small Business Owners. The first item on the list was Recruiting. One of the most common pain points that we hear is that it is so difficult to attract and retain reliable employees.
When it comes to hiring, most people think of this as being the job of Human Resources. However, we know that small businesses face massive resourcing constraints. While a large corporation may have a separate department for managing employer brand and talent acquisition, that is likely not the case for you.
There’s a surprising amount of marketing involved in developing a strategy to attract candidates to apply and work for your company. The way you would go about this is similar to how you’d develop a customer strategy, only with a different lens. I’ll walk you through five steps below, and hopefully you’ll see the similarities between attracting customers and employees:
- First, identify your goals for your brand as an employer. Maybe you want to increase the number of applications you receive for each job posting? Or maybe you’d like to increase the number of visitors to your careers page?
Next, define your perfect candidate. What types of soft skills or hard skills do they need to have? Is it important to you that the candidates’ values are aligned to your organizational values?
Once you have defined your employer brand goals, and identified who your perfect candidate is, you’re ready to develop an Employee Value Proposition (EVP). An EVP outlines all of the reasons why your ideal candidate would want to work for your company. It would include things that are meaningful to them, such as workplace culture, compensation, and benefits. This is what you promote to prospective candidates to convince them to work for your company.
Finally, identify what channels your ideal candidates are using to search for jobs. Whether this might be your company website, job boards, or external recruiting agencies, you want to ensure that your employer brand message and EVP are accurate and consistent across all channels.
As with any marketing activity, managing an employer brand is something that needs continual measurement and adjustment. Ensure that you are paying attention to feedback, whether that’s from existing employees, exit interviews, or employer review websites. Taking employee feedback to heart and adjusting your work environment as necessary will help to ensure that you’re successful in attracting talent over the long-term.
As you can see, the process for recruiting employees is similar to how you might target your ideal customer. If you’re curious about learning more, check out Employer Branding Strategy in 5 Steps [Infographic], by TalentLyft.