This advent calendar presents 24 practical suggestions on how to learn from candidate behavior to improve your HR marketing, based on early results from Potentialpark's upcoming 2024 Talent Comm study.
Consistently over the past 20 years, this has been one of the career website criteria that candidates rate the highest – and one that has frequently been mishandled by employers:
To offer an email address, and actually make it work. “Give me a chance to contact someone in HR with my questions”, job seekers say.
Not for submitting email applications (even though some will misunderstand and still send you their CV). Not a recruiter contact in the job ads.
But for questions that come up before a candidate has chosen a position about the company, open jobs, timing, programs, processes, and the like.
A fragile moment
This is a crucial yet fragile "go or no-go" moment: visitors who are interested but undecided. Traffic you have invested into with branding campaigns, social media content and SEO / SEM efforts wind up on the shore of your career website but have a question that keeps them from applying.
How can candidates reach someone who is competent to talk to them before the decision to apply? An actual person?
Employers love presenting themselves as kind and personable in their pictures and testimonials. But as often, the proof is in the pudding, not in the photos.
The data
According to Potentialpark, having an email address is rated more important by candidates in the US, Europe and Asia than information about culture and values.
The assessment of how many companies offer it is a bit worrying: less than 50% of top employers in Europe and even under 40% in the US. What’s worse is that not even half of those who offer a contact actually reply!
Why even have an email address or contact form if you won’t manage the inbox?
This points at the practical challenges of things. As usual the reason is not bad intention, but how difficult it is to keep good services up and running over time.
As one friendly manager from a leading automotive company once rejected the idea to me, rolling her eyes: “when I publish an email address, I will get all those stupid questions!”
That's one way to see it.
To make matters worse, as Potentialpark’s surveys unveil, candidates expect quick replies. No one likes to wait for a week.
So behind the email address is an entire process that many employer branding teams would like to avoid. However, this could be a huge missed opportunity:
It’s precisely the things that are costly that signal commitment. And it’s the things your competitors don’t commonly get right that set you apart in the market. And this is one.
Follow the herd and you will rarely impress. Serve candidates water in the desert, and you differentiate yourself and win hearts. And offering email contacts is a very underestimated and undeserved request, a big thank you waiting for you to collect.
And as with any expensive signals, having contacts on your site changes the perception that people have of you even if they don't have a question. Because it can't be faked and it's in the category of "good to know that they offer this service".
It says something about your level of employer branding investment that slogans can't.
By the way, don’t underestimate the information value of stupid questions: even if you don’t answer them, it does not make the questions disappear. But it shows a need you have not been able to address elsewhere. Take it as useful feedback (and possibly upgrade the information on your career website and in your job descriptions).
So having an email address is blockade remover in the stream of candidate traffic and a barometer of the success of your communication. It even indicates how well recruiters stay in touch with their applicants if you get a lot of questions from people that are already in the process.
Here a few more insights from Potentialpark’s research:
The "how" matters: is it an easy-to-find personal contact with a name, or a well-hidden anonymous contact form?
Consider offering different contact points for different purposes or groups to achieve higher response quality. But make sure anyone who talks with candidates knows what they do. They are essentially salespersons in that moment.
Candidates expect replies within a day, ideally. Making someone wait is worse than not having a contact in the first place.
Regularly test the reliability and quality of your responses. You’d be surprised how often these processes stop working without anyone noticing. (By the way, Potentialpark does these tests as part of their audits.)
Evaluate the questions you get to identify possible problems in your other communication.
Open more opportunities for dialog, for example on LinkedIn or via chat bots, to spread request over different channels.
Candidates have questions. Not answering is not a solution. In fact, it's a fantastic way to lose applicants. But do this right and you make a big step towards marketing-driven communication.
Imagine a shop saying, “I don’t want to talk to my customers, I just want them to come in, buy and leave”. Doesn’t sound very competitive, especially in a people business.
BONUS: Would you like to receive the results of the new Talent Comm study when it comes out? Sign up on the Potentialpark website to secure a free research expert talk (no strings attached) and tickets to Potentialpark's events to meet peer HR marketers.
Come back tomorrow for the next Door of this Advent Calendar.
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