Last week we had a situation where a candidate went along for an interview with an organisation and during the de-brief he announced that regardless of what they thought of him he wouldn’t be joining them. They just hadn’t sold the opportunity or the organisation to him at interview.
Now I’d like to think that pretty much everybody will know that interviews are a two-way process and that the best candidates are vetting organisations as much as being vetted by them. So it is really important that employers recognise the need to sell their own organisations if they are to attract the best talent, especially in the current market where good skills are hard to find and there is so much competition for the talent that is out there.
In an ever increasingly competitive job search market place, companies must surely learn to focus as much on their employer branding as they would the branding of their organisation’s products and services. Selling your job opportunities, team and organisation is really about selling your brand promise – the functional (we pay well and we look after our people) as well as the intangible (we’re genuinely passionate about our work) dimensions.
Do you really know your customer and do they know your brand?
As in any selling process, it is essential to gain a clear understanding of your customers’ needs, whether they be clients or potential employees, and also importantly to build a clear picture of what the competition is offering. Without this information it is extremely difficult to know how best to position your organisation and its attributes.
I always ask candidates where else they are currently interviewing and at which stage so that I can build that information into the process. There is no point in anyone investing time if a candidate has an offer and is 99% certain they are going to accept. So it not only provides you with an idea of the timescale within which to act in order to capture the best talent, but perhaps more importantly it also provides an insight into how the candidate is being regarded within the marketplace.
Understanding where your organisation ranks against the competition is therefore equally important. We now live in an increasingly brand conscious world, and therefore the strongest candidates are now more likely than ever to base their career decision on the kudos of the brand they have before them. So making a good play of your brand is key to winning the best talent.
If you know that your brand is not as strong as the competition, and this can be down to different factors such as your location, salary, training, hours of work and benefits for example, then you have to be more imaginative in the way you sell your organisation. Pay more attention to the nature of the role, the dynamism of the team, the strength of leadership or the clear career path offered. This was where the organisation fell down yesterday as I know they have a dynamic team, strong leadership and great career paths for their employees. They just didn’t communicate it and then reinforce it.
Selling your job opportunities
The aim of any organisation that wants to grow is to position itself as an employer of choice. An organisation where the cream of the candidate pools gravitate to naturally. You could call it a self-fulfilling promise – the best talent always goes there, because that’s where the best talent is. Achieving that employer of choice status starts with getting the right people in the first place, and that is achieved by understanding what the people you want, desire, and then matching it.
I read an article in the week that talked about the influence of the millennial generation (those who graduated around the time of the millennium) and how they are more assertive than their counterparts from yesteryear and are not shy about asking in interviews ‘what can you do for me?’ The onus being on the interviewer to sell the organisation has never been so strong. It really is time to sell.
As a hiring manager do you sell your organisation and opportunities to candidates at interview?
February 25, 2014 by storm recruitment blog