This is not to recommend that you create a new resourcing model or revisit your organizational design principles, but to highlight why HR leaders and recruitment professionals should develop a deeper understanding of best-in-class marketing & sales models that exist. If you are missing out on the strategic rigor, market planning and the efforts it takes to build an eco-system to onboard customers, you are likely to be running sub-optimal talent acquisition machinery.
There are frequent parallels drawn between the recruitment and sales functions. However, that’s been limited to the need to ‘sell’ a job or the organization just like you sell a product or service to a consumer. The similarities run deeper than that.
Both the markets, consumer and talent, are driven by market forces and thus in both cases the basic principles of marketing apply. Customers and human resources are both leveraged by an organization to generate economic value and thus have both revenue and cost sides.
What follows are 8 fundamental go-to-market principles that will help you run a more robust talent acquisition function.
- Make great products
The design process can be quite frustrating as getting the product that you will take to the talent market, is difficult to get right. Getting the “combo-pack” of a challenging role, an attractive rewards proposition, future career options and a work culture that appeals to your target segments could be one hell of a job. It’s an inexact science.
Your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) is your product for the talent market. It carries the perceived attributes of the firm and the role, perceived benefits and the brand image.
Just like new products, most employers’ value propositions fail, even if they are built on a great idea, because they miss to segment the market. Deep consumer insights to understand needs of different generations of professionals, in different phases of their career will make your proposition both robust & innovative.
Know precisely who your customer is and aim all your marketing efforts on them. Have your ‘micro-segmented’ your talent market?
- Build a compelling Brand & Segment your market
Though it helps to leverage a strong consumer brand, the best of employer brands are likely to have a strong brand identity while aligned to the corporate or consumer brand. Strengthen the explicit links between your employer brand and the broader strategic goals of the organization.
In a ‘micro-segmented’ market, it’s imperative that brand extensions are designed for different target segments, with customized product features. Your brand can’t make the same proposition as it does to a prospective board member as to a Generation Y talent fresh out of a university (‘generational segmentation’) or to an experienced frontline salesman (‘hierarchical segmentation’).
As yes, your Brand should build on your true strengths – because you don’t want post purchase dissonance!
- Ensure a high quality distribution
What gets seen; gets sold! How close is your product to the source of demand? What’s the ease of access to information on your product?
Teach your senior leaders, your search partners, the media and the market, how to talk about your product. Make your line managers and trade partners an extension of yourself.
As you spread the word about our company and the careers it offers, remember that distribution is not so much about quantity but about quality. You would be present where your talent catchment areas are and say the right things at the right place.
‘Market coverage’ can be quantitatively characterized as the number of hiring channels carrying your product as a percentage of total channels (sometimes called distribution coverage or simply “distribution”) or the percentage of hiring channels carrying a product weighted by each channel’s sales.
Of course, the “quantity” of channels carrying a product is not directly proportional to distribution “quality”, so metrics should be carefully tailored to reflect presence in strategically appropriate hiring channels. In many instances, being in the wrong places may more harmful than being in too few places.
Quantitative measures of product support include the percentage of mandates or jobs, share of ads or promotions, the number of displays/pitch to candidates, placements, and candidate satisfaction indices.
Channel partner (i.e. search partner) engagement and communication including incentivization, both monetary and non-monetary, if done rightly, will positively impact reach & availability of your product.
- Focus on quality of acquisition
Your acquisition team should know what are the capability and skills required for the future success of the organization, and what the core values are. Equally well, they must research were to find the right talent.
The quality of talent you acquire is a factor of the catchment area, the “sales pitch”, the background check of the candidate and the robustness of your selection process.
Sufficient & updated information about the history, size, scale, management team, culture and way of life in your organization, along with the quality of job briefing to the candidate will ensure that your sales pitch does not go wrong. Which of your channels is carrying this information today and is the talent market aware of the channels?
A combination of candidate briefing & a relevant Job Description, CV screening, reference checks, behavioral assessments, competence-based interviews flowed by requisite background verification of the candidate will increase the predictability of making a good acquisition.
- Invest in Candidate Lifecycle Management
Your candidate goes through very similar cycles of ‘buying process’ as does your consumer.
Actual purchasing (joining an organization in this case) is only one stage of the process. Not all decision processes lead to a ‘purchase’. All decisions do not always include all stages of a cycle, but are determined by the degree of complexity of the decision or ‘purchase’.
As a candidate goes through Recognition (awareness of need for a job change) i.e. difference between the desired state and the actual condition, the situation can be stimulated by the marketer through product information on the desired state. This takes the candidate to an information search, ranging from websites to social media to search firms and even to friends and relatives (word of mouth). Some amount of comparison shopping is bound to happen.
A successful information search leaves a buyer with possible alternatives, the evoked set. Evaluation of alternatives happen i.e. need to establish criteria for evaluation, features the candidate wants or does not want.
How your talented candidate has been impacted by your company information to employer branding to the job description to the interview experience to your rewards offer is critical as s/he reaches the Purchase Decision stage, i.e. choosing/buying alternatives.
The most critical phase for your is the post job offer acceptance stage or what marketers call the Post-Purchase evaluation. Cognitive Dissonance (have I made the right decision?) can be reduced by warranties, after sales communication, etc. For your hiring manager and the talent acquisition team, it’s critical that you be engaged with the candidates. Call him/her to your office and give a facilities tour or email reading material that engages him/her with the business and culture of your company. Have someone from the leadership team give a call or send the family a welcome kit.
Ensure that there are no last minute surprises for your candidates, no consumer likes them. Attractiveness needs to be backed by accuracy, i.e. fulfillment of promises.
Making the candidate feel that he is already part of the organization and a warm community of professionals is fundamental. Keep them posted on changes or new related to the organization, let it not flow to him/her through a newspaper or an internet site.
- Invest in capability building of your workforce & channel partners
All of the above would have made your feel the need to go back and train your recruiters – internal & external. There’s nothing more important than that.
Your external talent market gets to experience the brand and culture of your organization through your recruiters and search partners. An aligned & motivated team can make your employer brand come alive and can ensure that the quality of acquisition is what you always wanted.
While these are inputs, it is equally important to institute incentives or penalty, in the form of special recognition or dis-empanelment, to drive the right behaviors and outcome.
- Ensure you have a governance mechanism
There’s a cost side to acquisition and can make or break your resourcing “bottom-line”.
Most acquisition teams are busy with time and quantity measures, and miss out on parameters that measure consistency, effectiveness and commercials of making an acquisition.
Having the right channel mix ensures that you are exploring & reaching out to a range and variety of talent markets or catchment areas. Doing a regression analysis on your employee attrition and performance data will help you see clear correlation between our talent sources (universities, organizations, search partners, sourcing channels) and success or failure of your new hires.
Sourcing involves purchasing decisions, and it’s extremely important that on both the buy-side (channel partner) and the sell-side (candidate) the purchasing is ethical. Doing the right thing is the base for doing the best.
- Keep revisiting and renewing your go-to-market strategy
Keep talking to your customers and be keen to hear them during interviews, at events, at university campuses… and even more importantly on social media. From Glassdoor & LinkedIn to Facebook, be alert to the chatter and the tweets – not only they are a great source of feedback and can highlight gaps in your executive of the EVP and the Brand in the market place.
Unique employer brand are few and far between. So, if you are building one, keep the foundation strong and keep refreshing it in tune with the changing aspirations of your consumers.
I have always wondered why there are always 3, 5, 7 or 10 things to do or not to do; here are my 8. What are your thoughts and would you like to add on?
These are my thoughts, written in my personal capacity and are neither related nor attributable, in whole or in parts, to my past or current employers.
These are my thoughts, written in my personal capacity and are neither related nor attributable, in whole or in parts, to my past or current employers.
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