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.
There are many natural enemies (or challenges) for an HR marketing team:
The economy, competitors, budgets, the CRM, silverbacks in management, bureaucracy, hiring managers, IT systems, GenZ. You name it.
But sometimes the toughest "opponent" is a well-intended Corporate Comms team that stops you from putting content on your career website with the very tempting reasoning “we already have this on our About page, no need to double it”.
I've heard this many times, especially in companies that just hired their first employer branding team.
It sounds totally logical at first. Let's not double content. But when you think about it from a user perspective, you realize a few problems:
Candidates don’t usually like leaving the Careers section. They rarely click on the corporate About page.
And if they do, or are linked out, they easily feel lost and are bored by the content that is made for shareholders or the press, but not for fast-paced job seekers trying to get a quick impression of the company.
And besides the relevance problem, linking candidates away from the Careers section makes it less likely that they will find back to your jobs and apply.
No one knows if content exists twice if they only see it once.
The candidate advocates
As Potentialpark's surveys show, “Facts and basic information about the company” is among the top 10 criteria that candidates expect to find on a career website. What is meant by that:
A short overview of who the company actually is and what it does, without having to navigate to another part of the corporate site. With content prepared specifically for candidates – short, entertaining, personable, authentic. Not a list of annual reports from Legal.
This little example shows that it’s easy to miss an opportunity to keep candidates on your career website simply because you listened to the logic of another deparment instead of seeing things from the perspective of your audience, the candidates. You are their advocates.
One of the first challenges an HR team commonly has when they really want to get going with their career website is the clash with other departments.
It’s a clash of worlds: while Comms understandably wants to standardize, reduce risks, and keep websites simple, nice and clear, the HR team has a completely different audience and mission. Career is often the part of the website with the highest traffic, aiming to convert hundreds or thousands of visitors to applicants every month.
A heroic tale from the early years of Facebook
In the early years of Facebook (for younger readers: this was around the time when the Napoleon movie plays...) – in those years it was not uncommon for Corporate Comms to impose a company-wide ban of social media. Meaning you could not open any kind of Facebook page for external communication at all. Too risky!
“That’s a place where anyone can comment on us, can you imagine!”
Surprisingly, the people who often pushed the hardest against this Facebook ban were in HR. They were under the highest pressure to innovate and become more visible in order to get an edge on the talent market. So they insisted the loudest to get an exception. And consequently, some Facebook career pages launched before the corporate Facebook page of the same company. (Often by using social media rankings to prove that competitors are already there.)
HR is easily underestimated, and sometimes underestimates itself
Now if you ask 100 people on the street which department in a company is the most innovative, I doubt more than 2 would name HR. (And those 2 probably because they work in HR.) But actually, more often than not, HR discovers trends earlier than anyone else and applies them first.
(The Bayer recruiting robot from around 2017 comes to mind – the first robot used for marketing in the entire company, and the fact that it had been the Employer Branding team’s idea shocked all the corporate IT experts.)
I’m not writing this as a campaign against Corporate Comms at all, those I've met are incredibly nice people. They just have a different role. And you need them. Hence, I would recommend trying to find a way to collaborate by first realizing that you have a different, but equally important role.
I write this to encourage Employer Branding teams to make your own independent communication strategy and marketing plan, based on an understanding of how your target audience behaves, what they need, how they tick. To collaborate with, but not be intimidated by other departments who may have a totally different perspective.
The key to this is having data that supports your claims, for example surveys to show what candidates need or a benchmark that shows what other employers do better. It's hard to argue with independent research.
As a matter of fact, no one owns the communication with talent, except HR. You know best what they need and how to get there. Don't be discouraged by pushback, experience has shown that constantly advocating for a candidate experience does move mountains. Not always as fast as one would wish, but eventually.
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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