Culture Branding
Employer brand is created by your employees AND your job applicants
Siobhan Hasner
HireHive
Siobhan Hasner
HireHive
Siobhan Hasner
HireHive
Siobhan Hasner
HireHive
Another group that contributes to your employer brand that is often overlooked, is your job applicants.
Candidate experience will contribute significantly to how your brand is portrayed and perceived by that person - 95% of job seekers tell others about a poor interview process. Candidate application experience is something a lot of companies want to get right; after all, each applicant that comes in has spent time and energy creating an application because they want to be part of your company. Large sums of money go on creatives for the website, images of football tables and bean bags.
However, many organisations are not treating applicants as potential brand ambassadors.
Most applicants will understand if they don’t get a role at your company for valid reasons - maybe it’s an issue of experience or cultural fit. This shouldn’t reflect badly on your brand and some of these applicants may even apply again in the future and become valuable members of the company. So how do you ensure that an unsuccessful applicant can remain somewhat of a brand ambassador for your company?
Communication is key. Sending an automatic, but personalised email to confirm you received an application is hugely important. Candidates spend a lot of time preparing applications, so the last thing they want is to feel ignored. There are now many tools, including most applicant tracking software, which will allow you to set up automated personalised emails.
74% of job seekers say that they haven’t received feedback following an interview. If you don't tell the candidate why they are unsuccessful, it can leave a bad taste in the mouth. It’s not easy to reply to all interviewees with detailed feedback, but just a sentence or two explaining the reasons for not progressing can make a big difference.
To do this, you can use HireHive's feedback forms. You can give feedback on any candidate and share this feedback easily with other hiring managers. HireHive also stores these feedback forms, so you can distribute them to particular candidates at any given time.
Platforms like Glassdoor.com allow applicants to review the interview process for your company in great detail. This is user generated content that the company has no control over *. So you need to have a good interview process in place to minimize the risk of bad reviews.
A huge part of getting the interview process right is being as open and transparent with candidates as possible. Sticking to time frames that you have set for your candidates is also hugely important. If you said you would respond within 24 hours, ensure that this is really the case or change the expectation by letting the candidate know. Again, providing feedback on the interview will factor hugely here.
Your employer brand is being created around you, but there are things you can do to influence how this is built - look at your job applicants as potential brand ambassadors and maybe even future employees. Ensure you have a good structure around the interview process, communication with applicants and review feedback and Glassdoor reviews often so you can continue to create a good experience for applicants, which will lead to them contributing to a positive employer brand.
* Where content violates Glassdoor’s terms of use an employer may lodge a complaint and request to have the review removed.
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