21st-Century candidate sourcing is a complex HR process and the subtext of talent acquisition pipelines is tricky to navigate. A potential hire is not invested in how strong your future goals are or how forward-thinking your vision may be; they are primarily concerned with your current brand reputation. Industry ‘carrots’ and promises will not sway a highly qualified candidate who can have their pick of companies or job opportunities. Who you are – as a business – speaks volumes. And in this scenario, it’s not about first impressions, it’s all about your employer brand.
Matching the right hire with the right company is highly nuanced; requiring careful analysis and foresight. This is where a talent acquisition agency proves to be a powerful resource and strategic partner.
Consider the wisdom of two iconic business magnates: “You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.” -Henry Ford.
Warren Buffet weighs in with, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
In today’s competitive job market, building a strong employer brand is crucial for not only attracting top talent but also for retaining skilled employees. That means taking Warren Buffet’s advice and doing things a little differently.
Let’s talk more about ‘employer brand’
At its core, your employer brand describes your company’s reputation and popularity from a potential employee’s perspective; including the value you give to your employees. (It’s no wonder the reality TV series, ‘Undercover Boss,’ so captured the public’s attention).
From the perspective of a talent acquisition agency dipping into aspects of neuroscience, this is a double-edged sword: a positive employer brand not only enhances your company’s reputation but also increases the likelihood of attracting high-quality candidates who align with your organisation’s values and goals. Get this right and it’s a long-term and sustainable win-win scenario.
But the flip side is just as much a reality: a negative reputation is never going to position you as an employer of choice when sourcing passive talent.
Building and maintaining a reputable employer brand is always challenging. This is where our Startcircle approach as a solutions-based talent acquisition partner can play a vital role in improving your company’s reputation. By developing a unified and optimised approach to candidate messaging, you will streamline your candidate journey with greater consistency. (How you deal with candidates says a lot about how you will be viewed in the industry).
Let’s talk more about the talent acquisition stages
Sourcing the right candidate(s) – at the right time – is a time-consuming undertaking. And with recruiter burnout on the rise, the specialised experience and tools of a talent acquisition agency provide invaluable insights and resources to enhance an employer’s hiring process.
With a talent acquisition partner on board, the entire hiring process – from candidate sourcing and discovering hidden talent to optimising your screening and selection journey – becomes a means to positively influence how potential candidates perceive your workplace culture. Treating candidates with respect makes them feel valued and the successful candidate will feel they are top of the pile.
Putting yourself in the shoes of your potential hires and auditing your hiring funnel become key to understanding the candidate journey and effectively ‘tweaking’ each stage:
- Awareness stage: What is a candidate’s first impression of you? Right out of the gates – be it through job ads, online searches or referrals – a candidate becomes aware of your company’s existence and employer brand.
- Consideration stage: Does a candidate really want to work for you? Any potential hire worth their weight will do their own diligence and evaluate your company as a future employer. To assess if you are a good fit with their personal values and career aspirations, they will explore your company’s website, social media presence, employee reviews as well as your diversity and inclusion record. (As we said in the intro: ‘Candidate sourcing is a complex HR beast’). This stage references Henry’s Ford inference that your reputation is not built on what you are going to do, but rather on what you are currently doing and have done.
- Application stage: How efficient and transparent is your application process? A talent sourcing agency becomes a major functional role player in this stage of your candidate sourcing processing audit. As you evaluate the application logistics and requirements – from a potential hire’s point of view – how hassle-free is the process, and what are your response times and comms strategies?
- Selection stage: What are your integrity and competency ratings in your selection process? Quality talent is not a stranger to the screening process. They also hold the winning hand when it comes to assessing your interview blueprint. If you are looking for the best, they are looking to work for the best. Auditing your interview game plan, candidate assessments and reference check protocols will go a long way to you hiring the most qualified candidate who has also rated you as their #1 potential employer.
- Hiring stage: Has your employer brand so impressed a candidate that they accept your job offer? This is where the rubber hits the road. You may have found ‘THE ONE’ and negotiations may ensue, but has your company’s reputation passed muster with the potential candidate of your choice for them to accept your offer? (After all, candidates in the market are often applying for several positions at once).
Let’s talk more about partnering with a talent acquisition agency
To get the best, you have to be the best. This may sound pithy compared to the weighty advice of Ford and Buffet, but it’s the reality in the current climate of trying to source quality passive talent.
Building and sustaining a professional and positive employer brand is an intentional strategy, but it is also fragile; dependent on dynamic industry factors.
Partnering with a talent acquisition agency should never be seen as a ‘grudge spend,’ but rather ‘best practice’ for advancing your company’s reputation and leveraging the resources of a specialist platform that has access to a curated pipeline of passive talent.
From hiring diverse candidates and finding the right people for even the most niche roles to enabling start-ups to scale and multinationals to fill hundreds of roles quickly, Starcircle can create the pipeline needed.
Starcircle’s industry reputation is proven with clients of all sizes – across the world – testifying to how we have helped them overcome hiring friction and talent acquisition challenges.
Our expertise and fully-integrated talent sourcing technology will not only help boost your employer brand but will also help your HR team access quality candidates faster, share info across your team, create a seamless candidate journey and gain valuable insights into data analytics, visualisation and reports.
