It’s no secret that job vacancies continue to outnumber job seekers. But what many employers focused on volume hiring don’t realise is that they already have one of the most effective tools for out-recruiting their competition at their disposal: their employer brand.
Investing in your employer value proposition (EVP) and employer brand is one of the best ways an organisation can differentiate and attract the volumes of candidates it needs without compromising on quality-of-hire. In this article, we share ways to make your employer brand work harder for your volume hiring needs.
At PeopleScout, we define employer brand and EVP as follows:
Employer brand: Your employer brand is the perception and lived experiences of what it’s like to work for your organisation.
Employer value proposition: Your employer value proposition, or EVP, captures the essence of your uniqueness as an employer and the “give and get” between you and your employees.
When an organisation’s brand is well-known, there is frequently an overlap in sentiment between the consumer and employer brands in the minds of the general public. What candidates expect from you as consumers will be very different from what they’re looking for as potential employees.
Your employer brand should showcase the characteristics that make a company a great place to work, as well as the benefits, career growth opportunities, work-life balance and company culture that help you attract and retain talent.
Understand Your Audience & Tailor Your Content
The key to an effective employer brand is to know your audience. Zero in on who your ideal candidates are by looking at the most successful employees in each role. Are there similarities in their work experience, motivators or personalities? For example, we helped a telecoms client create candidate persona profiles for their contact centre and found that many of their longest tenured employees were previously employed in beauty salons. These employees were applying their previous customer service experience to their phone and online customer interactions.
By shifting the mindset from getting candidates with previous call centre experience to getting applications from candidates with past customer service experience in salons, restaurants and hotels, we were able to help the client increase offer acceptance and reduce attrition.
Similarly broadening your target audience will help you hire at scale in today’s tight market, and understanding who is most successful in a role—what makes them tick, what motivates them—will help you lean into the aspects of your employer brand that will be most meaningful to them. That could mean playing up your flexible work shifts, growth opportunities or your organisational values.
Create a Positive Candidate Experience
Even if you receive an influx of applicants for a role, don’t sacrifice the candidate experience. Word of mouth is still alive and well, and candidates have no problem sharing their experiences (especially negative ones) on social media.
Investing in CRM tools to introduce more personalisation into your candidate communications can boost your candidate experience. Look for tools with texting and SMS capabilities to reach candidates where they already are. Texting is often more accessible for many hourly job seekers who are more likely to rely on their mobile devices for job searches and internet access.
Automating your screening and interview scheduling processes via text helps free up time for your recruiters and hiring managers to connect one-on-one with candidates and hold meaningful conversations that improve the candidate experience.
Your recruitment process should leave every applicant, regardless of whether they get a job with you, with a positive impression of your organisation. Candidates are often your customers, and the last thing you want is for your candidate experience to negatively impact your consumer brand reputation. An exceptional candidate experience is essential not only in engaging the talent you need today, but in establishing a strong employer brand that will serve you well into the future.
With signs pointing toward a global recession, employers are preparing their workforces for what’s to come. This may mean cutting back on their investment in talent acquisition, delaying HR projects or even reducing their workforce.
While economic uncertainty can lead to difficult decisions for employers, it’s also important to recognise the opportunity it provides. This may be the perfect time to assess the resilience of your workforce and invest in workforce planning to make it fare better in the long run.
Is your talent acquisition program resilient enough to weather the storm? Here are four questions to ask to find out where you stand.
1. Is your employer brand and EVP still relevant?
If you haven’t updated your employer value proposition (EVP) in the last 18 months, it’s probably out of sync with the market and what candidates want. Now is the time to sense check if it’s fit for purpose in 2023 and beyond. Does your employer brand work for a remote and hybrid workforce? Is it an authentic reflection of what you have to offer your employees?
Even if you’re not planning to hire actively in the near future, employer branding is also important for retention. Auditing and updating your brand will help you retain your current talent and ensure you’re ready to attract top talent in the future.
2. Is your hiring process working for remote and hybrid employees?
At the start of the pandemic, if you shoehorned your old in-person hiring process into your new hybrid or remote work reality and never looked back, it’s time to assess whether that’s really working for you. Remote work often requires a different set of skills than office-based work. Is your current process helping you assess those skills to achieve the quality-of-hire you need?
Review the competencies and behaviours you need for each role to ensure they’re relevant for hybrid or remote employees. Now is the time to update job adverts and evaluate your assessment process to ensure they are in tune with the success factors that drive your business now—instead of those that drove success pre-pandemic.
3. Are you achieving your DE&I recruitment goals?
While you may not be actively hiring, now is a good time to engage with diverse communities to ensure candidates from underrepresented backgrounds make up a significant portion of your talent pipeline when you’re ready to ramp up hiring again.
Increase your visibility in diverse communities via campaigns or event sponsorships. Look into your diversity analytics to understand what’s working and what’s not when it comes to sourcing and hiring your target audiences.
4. Is it time to consider RPO?
Now is the time to re-evaluate how you’re going to market for talent, whether via an internal talent acquisitions team, staffing agencies, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) or a hybrid model. Work with your procurement partner to scrutinise your spend and evaluate your options to streamline and minimise risk—including standardising with one global RPO partner.
Just because you’re not hiring at the same volume you were before, doesn’t mean outsourcing is out of the question. Project RPO engagements offer flexible solutions for targeted hiring needs. An RPO partner can also offer value-added talent advisory services like market insights, employer branding, assessment services and more. Plus, once engaged, your RPO partner will be on tap to hit the economic recovery running and scale up for your hiring surge.
An economic slowdown is not the time to put your talent acquisition strategy on the back burner. Use this time to take stock and get prepared so you’re ready to bounce back faster. You’ll be able to beat your competition and create a resilient workforce that’s ready for whatever the future has in store.
Targeted Recruitment Marketing Campaign Delivers Talent for Global Theme Park Brand
During a unique time in the market with remote and flexible work options becoming the norm, this multinational chain of family theme parks required help hiring for critical in-person roles including customer service, performers and lifeguards across two of its major U.S. theme parks. PeopleScout helped hire over 1,500 workers using recruitment marketing campaigns and our talent advisory expertise.
1,500++hires made in just six months across two locations
reduced drop-off by streamlining the application process
30,000clicks from recruitment marketing ads across social media and online display networks
Situation
This multinational chain of family theme parks required help hiring a variety of roles across its California and New York resorts including customer service roles, performers and lifeguards.
Solution
PeopleScout conducted in-depth market research to determine the biggest challenges the client faced when recruiting for their theme parks and resorts. We identified remote work, “candidate is king” and higher pay as the three main challenges facing the client. Here’s how we solved each:
Challenge #1 — Remote Work:
More people want flexibility. Front-line and hourly positions are less attractive to candidates after the growth in remote work during the pandemic.
Our Solution: We leveraged the client’s “play” branding to emphasise the fun and rewarding aspects of working on-site at one of the theme parks. This was fed through into recruitment marketing creative and copy.
Challenge #2 — “Candidate is King”:
With open positions outnumbering candidates for much of recent memory, today’s candidates know their worth, and the Great Resignation is proof that people are less willing than ever to settle.
Our Solution: By testing alternative job titles, improving job copy, and reaching out on different channels, we were able to widen our reach and pool of candidates. We strategically targeted candidates most likely to apply for the roles, such as those looking for seasonal or part-time jobs.
Challenge #3 — Higher Pay:
When faced with increased living costs, candidates are demanding higher pay.
Our Solution: The client was not in a position to raise wages for these roles. So, we got creative by restructuring job copy to better position the client’s competitive benefits. By quantifying these benefits and putting them front and centre on job postings and recruitment marketing materials, we were able to generate interest without raising wages.
Results
In the first six months, we were able to fulfil our goal of 1,336 hires in California & 190 in New York.
The client’s previous application had up to 22 sections where the candidate had to input information. PeopleScout optimised and shortened this candidate journey by employing a variety of channels including Indeed One-Click, Indeed Hiring Events and Talent.com. This reduced the application abandonment rate.
PeopleScout restructured job descriptions to create job advertisements. In other words, we rewrote the copy to focus on the value the client and the role have to offer their employees rather than what the client wanted from candidates.
PeopleScout performed A/B tests to determine which job titles would help reach a wider pool of candidates. For example, we found that “Waterpark Attendant” received almost 300 applications in the first week, while “Lifeguard” received only 15.
Social outreach using Facebook, Instagram and Google Display Network resulted in 4.1 million impressions and 30,000 clicks across the California and New York audiences.
By Joe Mongon, Head of Recruitment Delivery, PeopleScout EMEA
From Twitter going hardcore, to protests at Apple , returning to the office is the working culture story that won’t go away.
The BBC reported on the potential disparities between employer and employee expectations on this topic as far back as June 2021. Right now, there is evidence that the expectation gap may be growing, with the supply of remote work options shrinking while demand increases. U.S. job market data from LinkedIn shows remote job listings have decreased to 14% of available opportunities, but they still attract 52% of all applications.
In this context, it’s surprising that so many blunders continue to be made. Plus, there is little reporting of companies getting this process right and virtually no discussion on how to achieve a win-win position. Instead, we hear about the clumsy tactics some organisations are using, like pointing to ‘job requirements’ as the primary reason employees must return to the office or trying to limit fully remote work to what employers perceive as ‘must-have’ talent.
How can talent leaders move forward and break the deadlock?
Introducing the OVP
TALiNT Partners and PeopleScout recently hosted and published a strategic discussion among TA leaders and introduced me to a new concept—the Office Value Proposition (OVP).
This term immediately resonated with me. The journey my own teams have been through over the last 12 months, from simply trying to make the office a safe place (think sitting at opposite ends of big meeting rooms, obeying one-way systems, putting up dividers) to considering ways in which we optimise team days shows the value of making an effort.
Making OVP Part of Your EVP
My broader experience in RPO has shown me that an effective Employer Value Proposition (EVP) can do much of the heavy lifting in candidate engagement and experience. Employers with poorly defined and managed EVPs are left behind in the competition for talent with candidates drawn to organisations with EVPs that align clearly with their own personal values.
Post-pandemic, your EVP is almost certainly out of date. It must incorporate a clear OVP that lays out the benefits of a higher degree of proximity to your office spaces.
There are two things employers must get right when it comes OVP:
Identify and communicate all the things your physical workplace offers that enhance the employee experience
Consciously create time on-site for teams to interact, socialise and learn together.
Some time ago, Gallup identified the ‘four Cs’ for shaping a compelling workplace value proposition: connection, collaboration, creativity, culture. Use your office space to maximise the personal, professional and competitive advantages office time provides them at every opportunity.
The value of office working is no longer a given—it must be defined and re-defined. In the recruitment space, the OVP (just like your EVP) provides clarity to potential employees on organisational expectations and demonstrates the extra effort needed to engage talent. When it comes to bridging the office vs remote work expectations gap, it’s employers who should make the first step.
By Andrew Weston, RPO Solution Director, PeopleScout EMEA
In our world of e-commerce and online banking, consumers want slick digital experiences. But they still want the human touch when they run into a problem. Despite the growth of digital channels, excellent customer service is still a must-have in a business landscape where companies compete on customer experience. High-volume hiring in the contact centre has never been more important or more challenging.
Customer queries are more complex and high-value, and contact centre agents are now expected to not only answer calls, but interact with customers through chats, emails and social media. Contact centres need highly-skilled talent who are comfortable working in a myriad of technology platforms. Customer service representatives (CSRs) must also exhibit strong soft skills like listening and empathy—especially as consumers are experiencing more financial hardships and mental health struggles post-pandemic.
Indeed, 84% of contact centre leaders—whether part of a BPO or an internal contact centre—believe the pandemic permanently elevated the importance of the contact centre for their business. But, it’s hard to deliver against your service levels when you’re struggling to hire or when you’re losing staff amidst the Great Resignation. Since 2019, the number of vacancies has increased, while the number of applicants per opening has dropped by 50%.
(Source: Indeed)
So, how can a contact centre director and talent acquisition leader team up to tackle today’s tough landscape? Here are three top recruitment challenges in the contact centre and tips for overcoming them.
1. Use Your Employer Brand to Attract the Right Kind of Talent
ContactBabel’s UK Contact Centre Decision Maker’s Guide states that contact centre attrition reached 23% in 2022, with 1 in 6 operations experiencing annual attrition of over 30%. This results in UK contact centres making over 212,000 hires annually. With turnover like this, how to make high-volume hiring more effective is always on the minds of contact centre directors.
As consumer behaviour has changed, a different set of skills is needed in customer service. Contact centre agents need to exercise problem solving and analytical skills while also displaying empathy to customers who may be upset or emotional. Agents who lack these skills are more likely to struggle to resolve customer issues and to suffer from increased stress levels.
By honing your employer value proposition and attraction messaging, you can stand out amongst your competition but also zero in the characteristics you need for your contact centre. By shifting your mindset from focusing on getting the most applications, or even those with customer service experience, to getting applications with the right profile, you can reduce attrition by increase the likelihood of your new hires being successful.
Case Study: Finding Candidates with Problem Solving Skills
We helped Direct Line, a British insurance provider, improve their recruitment outcomes in the contact centre through employer branding and recruitment marketing. We found their ideal candidate profile was someone with strong analytical skills and who could proactively problem solve—rather than those with past experience in customer service.
We then expanded our search efforts, looking for candidates who would have honed these skills in non-customer service roles who would be interested in making a career change. Not only did this open the doors for Direct Line to access a new pool of talent, but it also helped to increase the quality of their hires and reduce attrition.
2. Rethink Your Assessment Centre to Reduce Drop-Off Rate
With growing complexity in customer service, organisations need contact centre agents with strong listening skills and written communication skills (for chat, email and social media enquiries) as well as the ability to self-manage and multitask. Leveraging candidate assessment tools to find candidates with the right combination of skills and behaviours is imperative to the success of your contact centre.
One of our longest standing clients, tasked us with high-volume recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) for their financial services customer contact centres. The bank needed to recruit more staff to meet their service levels and create a great experience for their customers. We designed the customer contact recruitment process from scratch, including a recruitment marketing campaign.
As part of this new process, we advised the bank to introduce an online test immediately after the candidate applied using an automated email. This caught them while the application was still front of mind and also ensured that only best-fit candidates progressed. This meant that hiring managers were committing their time to top talent and helped to reduce the overall time to hire. As a result of identifying high quality candidates sooner, we were able to reduce the attrition rate to just 11%, well below the industry average.
More Assessment Centre Tips to Reduce Drop-Off
Here are some more assessment centre tips:
Try introducing assessment tasks earlier in the process or combining assessment stages. This helps increase hiring speed and keep candidates engaged.
Rather than traditional multiple-choice tests, try a role play scenario or an interactive experience that gives the candidates a real-life feel of what their day-to-day job will look like. The benefits are two-fold—you get a better idea of how candidates will perform in the role, and they get a better idea of what to expect before they accept the offer.
Ensure candidates are prepared for the assessment centre by offering webinars, instruction videos and even practices tests. This helps to eliminate nervousness and boost confidence amongst candidates—reducing candidate drop-off before the assessment centre phase.
Following the tips above on finding the ideal candidate profile and assessing for the right skills to start with, will help reduce ghosting on day one. In addition, you can also work to speed up the recruitment process and improve communications to keep candidates engaged after offer acceptance.
Speeding Up the Recruitment Process
With so many contact centres vying for customer service talent, employer response time is crucial as you want to beat the by being the first to move the candidate through the recruitment process. About a quarter of candidates state the reason for their ghosting was because the hiring process was too long or too slow. So, take a look at your recruitment process. Are there any steps you could eliminate or combine? Are there ways you could reduce the time between steps?
If it’s feasible for your organisation, you might consider moving to same-day offers, even if they’re contingent upon reference verification, background checks or drug testing. Also, moving the start date up will reduce the likelihood of a competing offer turning your candidate’s head. Waiting for your next training class could be risky, so think about running smaller training classes more frequently to accelerate hiring.
Staying Connected with Regular Communication
Communication is also a key part of combatting ghosting during the crucial period offer and onboarding. Staying in touch with candidates is imperative to keep them interested. If you ghost your brand-new hire by forgetting to check in, they’re more likely to ghost you in turn. The same Indeed study found that 77% of jobseekers saying they’ve been ghosted by an employer.
Assessing the touchpoints between your organisation and the offer holder is an important way for employers to ensure they keep the lines of communication open and increase engagement with candidates. Are you using your CRM to the fullest? Investing in creating content that showcases your employer value proposition (EVP) and sending it out regularly to your candidates via engaging emails will ensure they are reminded regularly of the value you offer—whether through benefits, flexibility, growth opportunities, diversity and inclusion initiatives and more.
Personal touchpoints are another way to stay connected. Check-in emails from the recruiter or even messages of congratulations from the hiring manager will help candidates feel valued and special. You might consider asking existing employees to act as an ambassador and share some onboarding materials with more information about your organisation, your culture and values or your employee resource groups (ERGs) so they start feeling like a part of the team.
These small gestures can help your candidate feel connected to the organisation before they start—and could end up being what keeps them from changing their mind when they receive a competing offer.
RPO for the Contact Centre
Facing a recruitment landscape in which you need high-volume hiring to support your contact centre operations? Check out our latest webinar in conjunction with Personnel Today, featuring CCMA, in which we discussed how to maintain speed and agility in high-volume hiring whilst keeping the quality of hire. Watch it on-demand!
WEBINAR ON-Demand: Hire quality vs speed: Finding the perfect balance
The job market and the world of work have changed drastically in the last few years, leaving employers to deal with the new challenges. For example, in the U.S., there are currently more than 11 million job openings, and year-over-year wage growth was at 5.2% in May. On top of that, the Great Resignation has record numbers of workers leaving their jobs: In the last six months in the U.S., more than 4 million people left their jobs each month. And, it’s spreading across the globe; CNN reports that resignations have also jumped in countries like the United Kingdom, Australia and France.
But, employers are dealing with more than just a tight talent market, increased turnover and rising wages; the world of work has changed permanently—and so have candidate expectations. For instance, nearly two-thirds of the workforce wants some form of remote work option and nearly one-third wants hybrid work. As such, employers can’t simply plan to return to the pre-pandemic ways of doing business; instead, they must adapt.
More precisely, to succeed in this job market, you need to both hire the best talent and retain the workers you already have—and that requires multifaceted solutions that address the specific issues within your organisation. In this article, we’ll cover the potential sources of your talent challenges, some signs that they may be negatively affecting your organisation and strategies you can use to get ahead.
Is Your Employer Brand on Life Support?
Throughout the pandemic and initial recovery, many organisations didn’t have the resources to invest in their employer brands. Unfortunately, if this was the case for your organisation, it may be affecting your ability to recruit top talent. That’s because, if your employer brand is weak, qualified candidates won’t apply because they simply have other options.
So, how can you tell if your employer brand is holding your organisation back? Watch for these warning signs:
Solution: Rebuild Your Employer Brand
If any of these signs look familiar, it’s time to focus on your employer brand. Luckily, there are a few things you can do. The first is to build out a strong employer value proposition (EVP) as the foundation of an employer branding campaign.
It’s important to note that building a strong EVP to drive your employer brand requires research into the short- and long-term goals of your organisation; the reality of what it’s like to work for you right now; and the outside perception of your organisation. That information is distilled into an EVP that’s unique, aspirational, authentic and dynamic. From there, you can communicate your message through an employer branding campaign via your careers site, social media campaigns, hiring events and more.
At PeopleScout, we supported work on the employer brand at Vodafone, a telecommunications company in the UK. In this case, consumers knew the brand well as a mobile phone retailer, but didn’t see it as a multifaceted tech innovator. So, to help Vodafone hire more young workers, we worked to create an employer brand campaign that captured the spirit of change and possibility that’s part of their EVP. At the end of the project, PeopleScout had generated more than 16,000 applications and increased the number of female candidates by 23%.
Does Your Candidate Experience Leave Much to be Desired?
If your employer brand is in good shape, but you’re still struggling to hire qualified candidates, the next area to evaluate is your candidate experience. Candidate experience has always been important, but it’s even more critical in today’s job market. Nowadays, people have plenty of other options, so they won’t take the time to complete a long application or wait weeks for a call back.
How can you tell if your candidate experience is the cause of your hiring woes? Look for these signs:
Solution: Update Your Talent Tech Stack
The right technology can have a significant influence on your candidate experience. Candidates want the recruitment experience to be fast and easy and allow them to feel in control. For this reason, evaluate every step of the candidate journey to identify where you can make improvements with technology.
Your first step is to look at your application. Have you tried filling out your own application recently? How long does it take to complete? Is it simple or does it feel drawn out and tedious? Can you complete the application on a mobile device? If the process takes a long time or requires a desktop computer, it’s time to update your application.
Then, look for other points in the process where you might make things easier for candidates. Do candidates have to wait weeks to schedule a screening or interview? If so, consider adding a self-scheduling interview tool or virtual interview solution, like text interviews or on-demand interviews. Furthermore, adding something as simple as a status bar that shows candidates where they are in the process can help them stay engaged.
At PeopleScout, we work with a large retailer that had a strong consumer brand, but still struggled to recruit candidates. Their application required a computer and took more than 30 minutes to fill out. As an alternative, we developed a mobile-first application with just 11 questions that took less than eight minutes to complete. Now, half the candidates apply on mobile devices and the application conversion rate rose to 85%. For comparison, employers using a traditional application have an average applicant conversion rate of just 35%.
Are Your Offers Competitive Enough in the Job Market?
Salary and benefits are the elephants in the room in any discussion about hiring challenges. Wages are rising significantly. While the average year-over-year salary growth in the U.S. is at 5.2%, some industries are experiencing even steeper wage growth. For example, in the leisure and hospitality sector, wages are up more than 11% in the last year. In fact, the World Economic Forum reports that wages are rising in every region of the world. Therefore, in the current job market, your offer needs to be competitive.
Here are some signs that your offers may not be competitive enough:
Solution: Adjust Your Compensation to Current Job Market Rates
If you’re experiencing any of these warning signs, evaluate your compensation against the market and adjust where necessary. Due to remote work, the job market has changed. Now, you’re not just competing against employers in your area for talent; you’re competing for talent across the country and, in some cases, the entire world.
To that end, an RPO or MSP provider can help advise you on market rates and what types of adjustments are needed to make your offers more competitive. Plus, increasing your wages could even save you money in the long run.
This happened for one PeopleScout client, a major rural healthcare system. Hit hard by the ongoing nursing shortage, the healthcare organisation was relying on expensive travel nurses and struggling to bring in enough candidates. PeopleScout advised the provider to implement a $10,000 hiring bonus. This resulted in a cost savings as the client was able to reduce its nursing recruitment spend by 77%, totalling more than $4 million. The client was also able to reduce its use of travelling nurses by 68% and experienced its lowest-ever nursing vacancy rate—just 1.3%.
Does Your Company Culture Send People Running?
Perhaps the best way to avoid staffing shortages is to ensure that you don’t have to backfill large numbers of roles due to turnover. The Great Resignation is in full swing, but employers shouldn’t just throw their hands in the air as employees leave for new jobs.
The good news is that employee turnover isn’t just about money. Talent leaders are finding that a major driving factor is employee disengagement. Throughout the last few years, many employees have experienced negative effects on their mental health, causing burnout and driving a reevaluation of work/life balance. Conversely, company culture can play a huge role in keeping employees happy, healthy and engaged.
Is your company culture a problem? Watch for these warning signs:
Solution: Determine What Employees Want in the Job Market & Meet Their Needs
To improve your company culture, you must first determine what employees feel they’re lacking from your organization. You can gather this information in two ways—and both are valuable. First, you should be conducting exit interviews with employees who have resigned. Try to get an idea of why they decided to take a new role. Is it simply increased pay? Did they feel they lacked a clear career path at your organisation? Did they not feel appreciated by managers and colleagues?
Next, try to identify problems before they drive employees to leave. You can accomplish this through anonymous pulse surveys; there are a number of tools you can use to track employee engagement and look for areas of improvement. Do employees want more opportunities for training? Do they want to feel as though they’re part of something bigger? Do they feel as though company leadership is not addressing their concerns?
Then, once you determine the biggest pain points for employees, make targeted improvements to your company culture. You can demonstrate appreciation for your workers in tangible ways: Communicate actively and often. Define paths for advancement and look at learning and development programs. Offer more flexibility. Provide training for managers. Not only will these kinds of investments keep tenured employees from leaving, but they can also improve your employer brand and make your employment offers more competitive.
There’s no doubt that the current talent market is difficult for employers, but the sources of the struggle are multifaceted and complex. There isn’t an easy, one-size-fits-all solution. Employers need to evaluate both the candidate and employee experience and alter their processes where inadequacies reveal themselves. You can’t keep waiting for “things to return to normal.” We’re in the new normal, and we have to adapt. To learn more, check out our ebook, “Employer Brand: Helping the Right Talent Choose You.”
Maersk: Making Waves with a New Global Employer Brand
Maersk, a global shipping company, came to PeopleScout for a talent advisory solution that would deliver on a diverse and digital-forward new global employer brand.
Situation
Think Maersk and you think container ships. Steel giants criss-crossing the oceans. You probably think dependable and trustworthy, but slow moving. What you don’t think of is digital trailblazer. But, when they came to us, that was precisely their goal.
Already leaders in global shipping, the Maersk group was about to undertake a huge transformation to take them to the next level of their business strategy. Their vision was to become a global integrator of container logistics and digitalisation of the business was at the core of this big move. Maersk no longer wanted to be seen as a shipping company; they wanted to be seen as a leader in technology.
The issue was that they didn’t have the world-class capabilities in the business to fuel this tech revolution.
The brief: create an employer brand that:
Made transportation and logistics attractive to global talent in a way it hadn’t been before – competing with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon.
Attract diverse candidates (especially STEM and digital) with the innovative mindset to bring radical change.
Change perceptions of the Maersk Group away from solid, slow and paternalistic to dynamic and pioneering.
Solution
RESEARCH
The insight phase was intensive.
Understanding the organisation, the many and varied brands, the core business areas, its people and the nuances across the globe was highly complex. It was also the key to creating an employer value proposition (EVP) that would turn heads among non-traditional candidates.
We ran a very diverse, in-depth and international series of focus groups and one-on-one interviews across the group and externally.
This allowed us to:
Understand the views and vision of senior leaders within the business.
Gain deep insights into the lived experience of professionals at various managerial, technical and operation levels.
Map the competitor talent market to identify specific territories that Maersk could own with regards to its proposition and messaging.
Develop a set of core messaging pillars that we validated with senior stakeholders across the globe before developing our EVP and recruitment communications campaigns.
THE CORE MESSAGE
Our EVP message aimed to inspire, motivate and challenge employees and candidates to be part of a career-defi ning, once-in-a-generation transformation. The result is an invitation and a two-way commitment striking the kind of pioneering, adventurous and fast-moving note that you simply wouldn’t expect from a business like Maersk. It also gave us a platform to tell stories that capture hearts as well as minds.
EVP message: Let’s go into the amazing
INTERNATIONAL RESONANCE
Because our audiences were very diverse and located all over the world, we created a series of five messaging pillars. Drawn from the key insights gained at the research stage, these pillars allowed our brand messaging to be flexed in order to speak to the motivations of individuals and talent groups all across the globe.
THE PILLARS
Pioneering Candidate offer: Seize every new opportunity, pursue every experience and never be afraid to be the first.
Belonging Candidate offer: Be open, be curious and bring your whole self to work.
Societal impact Candidate offer: This isn’t just about the part you play in our business, it’s about the change you can make in our world.
Unfolding potential Candidate offer: Jump in wholeheartedly and we’ll support and invest in you to be your very best.
Global citizens Candidate offer: Broaden your horizons and make the world your workplace.
KEEPING IT ROBUST
Inspiring EVPs need strong foundations to stay inspiring. This is how the architecture of the Maersk employer brand all fits together.
MAKING IT REAL
This is how we took each of the pillars and turned it into a candidate-facing advertisement.
The Outcome
It’s still early days, but in the latest employer brand benchmarking, Maersk was delighted to see the impact the work was already having. A key measure is its ranking in The Most Attractive Employers List produced by Universum.
Maersk has seen its ranking improve. Our goal is to continue this momentum in each of the key markets and among each of the key talent segments.
AT A GLANCE
COMPANY Maersk
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS Talent Advisory
LOCATIONS Global with priority markets in India, the UK and Denmark
ABOUT MAERSK With locations in every port in the world, Maersk is one of the largest container shipping line and vessel operators in the world.
An organisation’s employer brand is often in the hands of its candidates and employees. And, when it comes to employer review sites, the fate of your employer brand is – quite literally – at their fingertips. In fact, according to data from Workplace Trends, 72% of job-seekers share their experience on online employer review sites like Glassdoor. What’s more, recent research from Deloitte found that 80% of candidates who experience an unsatisfactory recruitment process will openly tell people about their experience, and one-third of those candidates will do so proactively.
But, what does this mean for your organisation? Unfortunately, negative reviews from both candidates and employees can have a huge influence on your bottom line. For example, per CareerArc, 62% of consumers have stopped buying from an organisation that treats its employees poorly. Plus, an Indeed survey found that 95% of workers said that if they were considering a new job opportunity, insight into the company’s employer reputation would be somewhat (33%) or extremely (62%) important. As a result, a poor employer brand reputation could cost your organisation millions as productivity decreases due to a reduced candidate pool and consumers stop supporting your business.
So, how can organisations take control of their employer brand and overall online reputation? Well, recent studies from HRO Today and PeopleScout show that organisations globally are planning to invest more heavily in social networking, consistent monitoring of employer review sites, and a greater use of employees as brand advocates.
However, while these steps are important to improve your employer brand, many organisations are unsure of where to start; they may also lack knowledge of best practices for these strategies.
Therefore, in this article, we’ll help you improve your employer brand by outlining how to establish ownership of your organisation’s presence on employer review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed; offer best practices for responding to reviews; share tips on how to effectively leverage employee brand advocates; and highlight some popular employer review sites that organisations should be familiar with.
Establish Ownership & Claim Your Employer Review Site Profiles
The first step in establishing an employer brand plan for review sites is to establish who in your organisation will own the initiative. Specifically, it may make sense to have your HR team manage the employer review site accounts because they are likely familiar with sites like Indeed and Glassdoor that offer job-posting functionality, in addition to candidate and employee reviews.
However, it can also be beneficial to form partnerships across departments to holistically manage your organisation’s employer brand. For example, your communications team can assist HR in crafting responses to reviews that align with your brand standards for tone and voice, as well as provide up-to-date information on awards and accolades. In addition, HR can lean on the marketing team to maintain an active social media presence for your company, as well as work to optimise search results by managing SEO and creating content to combat potentially negative reviews and keywords.
After establishing who will take ownership of the management of employer review sites, claim your profiles. This can be done at no cost by verifying the profile as an employer and creating an employer account to edit and manage the profile.
Plus, with an employer account, you can add valuable information to your profile for candidates to view, such as:
Salary and compensation details
Explanation of benefits offerings
Company mission, vision and values
Overview of company culture
Logistical information (location, total number of employees, revenue, competitors, etc.)
Unique initiatives
Remote and flexible work policies
Diversity, equity and inclusion programmes
Photos of employees, events and offices
Industry awards and accolades
It’s worth noting that, according to Glassdoor, 75% of active job-seekers are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively manages its employer brand. You can do this by responding to reviews, updating your business profile, and sharing updates on the culture and work environment. Furthermore, building a robust profile on the employer review site will allow candidates to gain a better understanding of who your company is, what you stand for and what it would be like to work for you.
Respond to Reviews – Both Positive & Negative
Responding to reviews is perhaps the most important method in creating a strong brand presence on employer review sites. And, while both types of reviews can be easy to view and dismiss, leaving thoughtful replies is a guaranteed way to show candidates and employees that you care – regardless of whether the feedback is positive or negative. In fact, 80% of job-seekers who read reviews on Glassdoor say their perception of a company improves after seeing an employer respond to a review.
Some best practices to keep in mind when responding to reviews:
Address the reviewer by name (for non-anonymous reviews) to establish a personal connection
Thank the reviewer for their feedback
Acknowledge positive feedback
Address any concerns mentioned
Offer advice on any relevant next steps
Here are some examples of how to reply to common types of reviews:
Leverage Employee Brand Advocates
While organisations have little control over who will leave reviews – especially reviews with primarily negative feedback – they can proactively build up a strong body of positive reviews by leveraging employee brand advocates. These are employees who advocate for an organisation and generate a positive image of the brand via online and offline channels. It’s important to note here that, when encouraging employees to leave reviews, you should emphasise the value of honest, candid reviews; employees should not feel pressured to paint a certain image of your organisation.
Consider the following ideas to encourage employees to leave truthful, positive reviews that will help improve your employer brand:
New Hires
New hires are a great place to start when gathering positive reviews. That’s because the application, interviewing, and onboarding process is still fresh in their minds and they recently chose your organisation as their new employer. So, ask new hires to leave a review on their hiring experience when they first start, and encourage them to update it after their first 90 days.
HR, PR & Marketing
Another good place to start is by requesting that members of your HR and marketing teams write reviews. Members of these departments already have a good understanding of the importance of employer review sites and are likely willing to leave honest reviews that highlight your organisation’s strong points.
Promoted & Awarded Employees
If your organisation recognises employees for outstanding work with awards or honors, these workers can also be an excellent source of positive reviews. The same can be said for employees who have recently been promoted. A good practice is to establish a system that reaches out to these employees with a congratulatory message alongside a call to action to post online about their experience working at your company.
Employee Resource Groups
Employees who voluntarily join employee resource groups in addition to their daily responsibilities are already likely to be highly engaged within your organisation. So, tap into these groups of employees and request that they leave reviews based on your organisation’s culture and commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion – something Glassdoor provides ratings on and many candidates are interested in.
Regular Requests
Finally, managers should be empowered to regularly encourage their team members to leave reviews. This can become a regular practice during performance meetings, as well as after the completion of a big project or when hiring season is afoot. Likewise, if your organisation offers flexible work arrangements or other unique perks, employees should be encouraged to share emotive experiences of how these benefits have affected their lives.
Employer Review Sites to Consider
Because there are a variety of employer review sites out there, it can be hard to keep track of them all. So, we compiled this list of the top 10 you should monitor to improve your employer brand for long-term success.
Glassdoor: Current and former employees can anonymously review companies; submit and view salaries; as well as search and apply for jobs.
Indeed: Candidates can upload a résumé and browse reviews and salaries, while employers can post jobs, search résumés and more.
Comparably: Includes information on employers, brands, salaries and company culture.
FairyGodBoss: Women’s career community for career advice, job openings and company reviews.
Kununu: Employer reviews, salary data and culture reviews from those who know best: employees and applicants.
Google Reviews: Business reviews appear next to your company’s listing in Maps and Search. These can help your business stand out on Google, which is the leading search engine.
InHerSight:Here, candidates can find company reviews and ratings; get matched to jobs; and connect with a community of women navigating the workplace.
Vault: Known for its influential rankings, ratings, and reviews on thousands of top employers and hundreds of internship programmes.
CareerBliss: Candidates can find jobs, research salaries and read reviews with a focus on company culture.
TheJobCrowd: This UK-based employer review site is focused on helping recent graduates in their early careers.
As recruitment processes and the world of work continue to take digital shifts, employer review sites will become increasingly important in making or breaking a candidate’s decision to join your organisation. And, while you certainly can’t control every review, you can be proactive in taking charge of your employer review site presence by regularly responding to reviews, leveraging employee advocates, and monitoring what candidates and employees are saying about your organisation online. In doing so, you’ll improve your employer brand by creating a strong employer brand and a positive presence where it counts – and where it makes a difference.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a bright spotlight on company values and culture, separating employers who truly live up to their promises from those who rarely take action where it matters. And, employees are paying attention – as well as growing more critical of organisations that they’re considering working for.
Meanwhile, according to the latest Engagement and Retention Report from Achievers Workforce Institute, 52% of currently employed respondents said they would hunt for a job in 2021 – up from 35% in 2020. But, why are more than half of employees looking for a new job this year? The short answer: They’re disengaged. Whether from lack of recognition; poor diversity and inclusion practices; remote work burnout; or a feeling of disconnectedness, 71% more employees are disengaged in 2021 than 2020.
In fact, lack of career growth is the number one factor holding employees back from feeling engaged at work – making it a key area of opportunity for employers looking to remain competitive. Plus, as organisations are in the midst of the Great Rehire, talent acquisition teams face the challenge of filling a number of unexpected open roles – and high turnover exacerbates the issue. As such, maintaining a strong retention strategy is essential to avoid overloading these already lean teams.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the benefits of learning and development programmes; explain how to create an effective strategy to promote career growth; and share examples of ways that organisations are investing in their people.
Benefits of a Learning & Development Programme
Launching an effective learning and development programme typically requires investing in resources. However, when done right, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Specifically, not only does a strong learning and development programme help employees in their career growth, but it can also improve the performance of an organisation as a whole. More precisely, some of the key benefits of implementing a learning and development programme are:
Closing Skills Gaps A training and development programme is a great way to address skills gaps within an organisation – especially if your company had to scale down during the pandemic. But, by performing a skills audit, you’ll have a better idea of which gaps exist in your organisation – which can then help you determine the areas that make the most sense for reskilling your workforce. Then, as a result of improved efficiency and more highly skilled employees, you’ll also increase your ability to fill open roles from within.
Increasing Retention & Employee Satisfaction Not only will employee performance improve, but retention and satisfaction will increase, as well. That’s because employees feel genuinely cared for and valued when an employer shows a willingness to invest in employee growth and development. And, with an improved set of skills and knowledge, employees will be more likely to stick around at a company that believes in them and wants to see them succeed. This employer loyalty will then increase retention and decrease turnover rates.
Staying Competitive & Innovative Consistent investment in your employees’ growth and development will also help keep their thinking fresh and future-focused, thereby resulting in an overall culture of innovation at your organisation. Plus, top talent will also be more inclined to join an organisation with the perk of a strong learning and development programme, as well as the opportunity to grow in a new role.
Improving Employer Brand Organisations with effective development programmes can also leverage them as a selling point to attract prospective candidates. Additionally, current employees will be more likely to leave positive reviews on employer review sites and spread the word within their networks that your organisation truly cares about employee career growth.
Saving Money As skills gaps close and retention is improved, your organisation will also save money on sourcing and recruiting external candidates. Plus, a culture of innovation and employee satisfaction will keep your employer brand strong, as well, which has a significant effect on candidate attraction spend.
How to Create an Effective Learning & Development Programme
Before you jump in to implementing a robust learning and development programme, it’s important to start by planning. Below is an overview of the key items to consider:
Establish Goals The first step in planning for a learning and development programme is to establish the goals of the programme. This step is crucial because you’ll refer back to these goals as you make decisions along the way. In particular, ask yourself:
What are the overall business goals that our organisation is trying to achieve?
How will the learning and development programme align with our overall organisational goals?
What are the necessary steps needed to achieve these goals?
Identify Competencies Competencies are a particular set of abilities, skills, and knowledge that affect an organisation’s success and set it apart from competitors. Some examples of business competencies include:
Business acumen
Strategic agility
Market knowledge
Communication
Decision-making
Change leadership
Driving results
Collaboration and influence
After determining the key competencies your organisation wants to foster in alignment with your goals, you’ll be able to better curate learning tracks to help instill these competencies into your employees.
Determine Strategy There are a variety of types of learning and development programmmes, so choose the one that makes the most sense for your organisation. Your selection will depend on whether you want to teach the same skills to a large group of people at once, help employees improve on-the-job performance, or open training to everyone on their own schedule. Common types include:
Classroom/workshop style
Instructor-led training (ILT)
In-house/outsourced learning sessions
Interactive
On-the-job
Skills-based
Online
Incorporate Mentorship
A formal mentoring and coaching component can also complement your learning and development programme. Specifically, pairing compatible employees with one another encourages teams to build relationships and learn from each other. To that end, it’s important to match mentees with mentors whose areas of expertise match the former’s desired area of growth to ensure that the relationship is mutually beneficial. As a result, less-experienced employees can be challenged and learn, while more seasoned employees can grow from the experience as a leader and mentor.
Encourage Engagement In order to ensure the longevity of your learning and development programme, it’s essential to foster strong engagement. In particular, encourage managers to suggest training for employees and create a recognition system for employees who participate in trainings. Employees can also share completion certificates and comments about different trainings internally on platforms like Slack and Yammer. This strong sense of engagement will then encourage others to participate and, ultimately, lead to long-term success with your programme.
Measure Results Finally, despite the fact that it’s often overlooked, it’s extremely important to establish a way to measure the effectiveness of the learning and development programme once it has gained some traction. First, determine whether those initial goals are being worked toward and met. If they’re not, identify gaps where you may need to adjust strategy by considering the following questions:
Is employee productivity improving?
Are managers noticing improved employee engagement and satisfaction?
Are there any reductions in turnover time?
Are employees feeling more successful?
Has your employer brand presence improved externally?
Are you able to quantify results based on your overall goals?
Real Examples of How to Invest in Your People
The thought of creating a learning and development programme from scratch may seem daunting, but it can be helpful to know that many organisations have found success through unique approaches to investing in their people. Here are some of the organisations leading the way in this important commitment to developing people:
Yelp Yelp’s transparent, supportive culture pushes its people to excel. The user-review company invests in: career development opportunities for its employees; constant constructive feedback; goal-focused, one-on-one sit-downs; team meetings; and thank you shout-outs for a job well done. All of these strategies reinforce each employee’s achievements, ambitions and unique strengths.
Dun & Bradstreet Dun & Bradstreet – a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics – supports top-down learning, in which team members are welcome to jump on their managers’ calls. This enables them to learn about taking on more responsibility and also encourages them to pursue their own learning – whether by attending conferences or taking courses online.
WEX Inc. At WEX, every day is an opportunity for employees to ask if there is a better way – and to act on promising ideas. Through mentorship, conferences and tuition reimbursement, there’s always room to keep climbing the ladder at this financial technology company.
Amazon Amazon committed $700 million to retrain 100,000 workers by 2025, thereby allowing employees of the online retailer and technology giant to move into more highly skilled jobs within the company or find new careers outside of Amazon. In addition, Amazon’s Machine Learning University initiative helps workers who already have a background in technology and coding to gain skills in machine learning.
Verizon Communications Inc. After closing most of its retail stores during the pandemic, Verizon retrained 20,000 employees to handle new jobs, which ranged from sales to customer service. This year, the American multinational telecommunications conglomerate plans to teach 100,000 employees new skills to prepare them for the demands of 5G, the next-generation wireless standard. Additionally, Verizon is partnering with Generation USA to help train 500,000 workers throughout the next decade for jobs of the future in communities across the country.
Levi Strauss & Co. This year, Levi’s launched its Machine Learning Bootcamp, an immersive training in coding, machine learning and agile ways of working that are uniquely designed for employees of the American clothing company. Participants will master an in-demand skillset and focus on learning full-time for two months – all paid for and encouraged by leadership.
Walmart Walmart partners with Guild Education to offer employees a way to earn a high school or college degree for $1 per day. Employees of the American multinational retail corporation also get personalised coaching support from day one all the way through graduation.
PeopleScout At PeopleScout, we invest in our people through two programmes. First, our Global Mentorship Programme supports and enriches the professional development of PeopleScout employees. Similarly, our engagement with LinkedIn Learning also allows employees to explore professional interests and develop skills both professionally and personally. And, finally, our global ideation platform encourages employees to submit their innovative ideas for improving our business – giving them direct opportunities to work with leadership to develop ideas into tangible solutions.
Developing the Next Generation of Talent
As a talent leader, you understand the importance of a total talent mix, which means leveraging both internal and external recruitment strategies. And, with higher turnover forecasted as we move out of the pandemic, there’s no better time than now to start investing in your existing workforce. Plus, by constantly reskilling and upskilling your current team through a strong learning and development programme, you’ll not only attract top talent externally, but you’ll also have loyal and dedicated employees who believe in your business and are prepared for the future of work – whatever challenges it may bring.
Employer Brand – Helping the Right Talent Choose You
Engaging and retaining your best performers has become increasingly difficult due to the normalisation of shorter tenures. Now more than ever, a strong employer brand is critical to attracting top candidates, keeping your employees engaged, and retaining your talent for the long term.
In this ebook, Employer Brand – Helping the Right Talent Choose You, we explore how organisations can build and maintain a strong employer brand to combat talent risk. You’ll learn:
What goes into a cohesive employer brand and how it can help attract top talent
How your organisation should be managing and caring for your employer brand
How your employer brand can impact cost-per-hire, recruiter efficiency, and employee advocacy
How to measure success from your employer brand efforts
