Recruitment Equity and your EVP
Find a recruiting partner that understands this and helps you build your own.
Let's get started with Recruitment Equity and what the term means, and I’m not talking about fairness or equality here.
This is real equity, it starts to accumulate or even decrease to the negative from the moment you interact with anyone or anything from a recruiting perspective. And guess what you are always recruiting whether you know it or not.
As its value becomes cognizant to others you will never truly know what that value is. You should though at the very least be able to judge if it's positive or negative at any given time.
Getting Started
To start garnering positive recruitment equity for your company you need to focus on 3 core activities.
Show your best to the World, create a compelling EVP from your USP’s
Own your mistakes and be honest, upfront and public
Treat people as you would expect to be treated yourself
These require;
a thorough understanding of your company’s USP’s
A review of your existing recruitment landscape
a continuous improvement mindset
a focus on robust and friendly recruitment processes, as perceived by the people that go through that process.
To work they require regular 360 feedback, positive action (from everyone but especially someone that owns this space) and an appropriate budget.
What’s an EVP (Employee Value Proposition)?
Company EVP’s can be literally anything defined as positive. What is the value to an employee in joining your company. Simply put, why would someone want to join your company, moreover why would they leave “respected well thought of company X” to join your company.
Players that have recruitment equity in abundance don’t have the same constraints or rules. I’m talking about companies whose EVP’s have inherited the company’s Brand Equity. Well known, lots of data, big opportunities for people and a low risk of employment failure. We don’t need to mention them, we all know who they are.
In a startup (or an SME) context you literally have no Brand Equity or at least not initially so what do most do.
They assume everyone wants to join their mission because they will be rich if it succeeds
They tie themselves to companies with lots of Equity, ex-ABCD, funded by EFG, educated at HIJ University, etc etc
They jump on what’s trendy in the benfits space, free eggs at breakfast, deionised water on tap, etc
They expect churn and put up with the ebbs and flows of hiring not believing they can influence the outcomes
The list could go on but hopefully you get the point and ironically most of these things miss the point. Why? Because everyone does them.
It’s happening;
There are some huge synergies between recruiting and marketing, however some companies just don’t see it. They see talent as a function within HR. They outsource it to people with a vested interest in immediate success but no long term ownership.
Growth people understand that their behavior drives customer engagement which in turn drives revenues. So let’s start treating job applicants as customers. It’s that simple.
So.
“ Why would someone want to join your company, moreover why would they leave “respected well thought of company X” to join your company”.
This is the part that I love because if you have generated enough positive recruitment equity people make the decision for you for these reasons.
They feel like this is the right job for them
They live locally
They liked the people they met
They resonate with your company mission
They just need a job
They’ve heard good things about people in your business
They understand they way you work and have really relevant skills
They like your approach to benefits
They enjoyed the recruitment process
You’re going to pay them more than someone else
Not an exhaustive list because I’m sure other reasons exist. What about when people don’t accept an offer or worse don’t even apply, largely because you have negative recruitment equity;
They don’t feel it's the right job for them
They didn’t like the people they met
They didn’t like the process
The pay is too low
Company reviews are bad
Someone told them it was a rubbish place to work, second or third hand
Nothing stood out and there was loads of choice for them
They didn’t want to talk to a bot
Your Recruitment Partner let you down and because you don’t own your own process end to end you didn’t even realise
Putting time and budget into the recruiting process to develop and understand your core EVP will help with everything, more offers accepted, more referrals and ultimately less churn of staff.
To truly benefit though you need to own your own process, everything, end to end. Agencies, RPO’s and embedded talent solutions will only get you so far unless they are continually transferring the equity to you and meeting your high standards (they won’t and don’t).
Delivering the highest level of focus, attention-to-detail, customer experience, research and training for a recruitment equity program that delivers long term results requires more than just expecting your people team to do the job on the side. (Best practice in recruiting is not a well defined area).
If your recruitment department is a bolt on full of relatively junior low paid recruiters then don’t expect high levels of return. The bar is set pretty low in most internal recruiting functions so anything positive is better than most companies.
How do we know this, easy, look around at the competitors for the talent you need. What you’ll find is pretty much the same approach from almost all the companies you look at. Same eggs at Breakfast, same choice of laptop.
Companies not hitting their hiring goals need to stop thinking technology will solve all their recruiting woes. Talent Acquisition is a customer service industry. Of course we only realise this when it becomes a problem. Remember there are only 2 reasons people don’t apply for your jobs;
You are asking for something that doesn’t exist
Your company does not look attractive to anyone
A good starting place when investing in a recruitment equity program that builds a long term organic pipeline is measuring the status quo.
One tactic you can try as a hiring manager is change your name on your resume and apply for one of your own jobs. If you are happy with the results, you are doing better than 99% of other companies.
How can we measure our Recruitment Equity and more importantly how can we change things for the positive?
That’s where TalentBroker comes in, why not get in touch!