Recruiters as brand ambassadors
If you are an employer using an outsourced recruiting model, consider how that partnership could hurt or enhance your company’s brand and impact your ability to hire and retain top talent now and in the future.
While performing candidate searches on your behalf, recruiters connect with possible future employees of your firm, even with possible future customers in some cases. Do your recruiting partners know that? And, when they do, are they approaching their search efforts as they should, considering the potent implications?
Are they behaving as the brand ambassadors that they are for your company? In other words, are they aligned with and promoting your company’s mission and values? Are they turning the candidates they approach into future promoters or detractors of your firm and its products and services? They must, and companies must ensure so.
A lasting experience
Just as with any shopping adventures, candidates with poor recruiting experiences will discuss those with friends, colleagues, and family members, who will also discuss them with their networks. How your recruiting partners describe your company, how they present your values, mission, and the job opportunity, will stay with candidates for a long time and be part of their memory of that experience with your company. Whether they ultimately get the job or not.
And, whether they qualify for the opportunity or not, whether they are selected or not, a company should want candidates to wish that they could work there. It builds a virtuous ecosystem for that brand, an ecosystem where future recruiting becomes easier.
As an extra benefit, when strong, very solicited candidates have the option to choose one opportunity over another, a strong, positive recruiting experience with your firm might be the positive differentiator that will allow your company to secure the desired hire.
Information sharing for recruiting success
The effectiveness of recruiting services is apparent. However, by inserting recruiters between themselves and candidates, companies are making those recruiters part of their prospective employees’ experience.
As such, a company must provide their recruiting partners with both the hard information that is expected, including position description, compensation, benefits, etc., but also with soft information about their firm, its mission, objectives, values, team dynamics, management philosophy, etc.
Recruiters must know and understand both types of information and how they fit together. To properly represent your company, they must paint complete and authentic pictures to candidates to whom they present your opportunities.
Employers should routinely survey candidates introduced by outside recruiting firms and ensure that the position but also the company and its values were adequately described to the applicants. And, recruiters informed about this process are more likely to communicate the desired company brand values to candidates where needed.
This whole, brand-focused approach to recruiting will organically build your company’s brand and enhance your ability to recruit in the future. As for the candidates that you do hire, it will improve their fit probability and optimize their employment longevity with your company.