Shelfie (pondering the future)
If you know me, you may know that I am more of a critical person. (Some say grumpy.) As any market researcher worth his salt, hypes make me cautious. The more experts call for a "revolution" (social, mobile, VR, and now AI...), the more sceptical I get and like to double check.
News and trends tend to get an autodynamic that can be detached from what actually happens. Sex sells, and megatrends are the equivalent of supermodels. Fine, but keep one eye on the road:
The best way to stay grounded in times of change, techplosions and crisis, in my view, is to ask your customer, the one who doesn't lie and doesn't hide the truth:
The candidate.
So that's what we did: after digesting a survey with over 30,000 responses*, here's 10 things I think will help companies stand out and get ahead this year in talent communication.
I guarantee you half of it will turn out different than expected but sadly we don't know which half.
1. Location location location. Or: the end of remote?
I wouldn't go so far and put an exclamation point at the end of that headline. A questionmark. And that's all it takes: doubts.
Candidates are torn: flexibility is nice, but so are offices (or other work places) with real people in them. But not any office! No, please make it nice. I don't want to spend my day in the set of an old movie. And don't expect me to commute at rush hour, please.
We see movement in our data: location and work place seem to become a big factor again, without the wish for remote flexibility disappearing.
As an employer, you may not only need a hybrid work strategy, but also a hybrid communication strategy: showing the perks of both. Especially portraiting your work place. Or you may lose applicants because another employer did it better.
2. Google, TikTok or ChatGPT? The new search
If you belong to the part of the world's population that can be bribed with overpriced aesthetics and owns an iPhone (like me): have you tried asking Siri a question lately? When have you last even checked on her to see if she's ok? I imagine she feels quite sad and useless (even though she is too professional to admit it).
If you meet her, be gentle, she is an old lady now. She doesn't understand your question. And it's not an acustic problem due to high age. It's us: within a little over a year, we have become used to searching and conversing with AI. Siri can't compete.
So my advice: understand how people search to understand how they find you (and your jobs). And right now it seems like there will be a lot less Googling and YouTubing and a lot more TikToking and ChatGPTing. So one goal for 2024 could be to make your career website's navigation and job search interfaces smarter, quicker and more intuitive to use. (Or they will feel like Siri's brothers.)
How? Well candidates are not afraid of using new apps. So neither should you. Choosing the right tech stack and providers will be a competitive advantage. Just as a milestone: here's what Potentialpark's CEO Torgil Lenning wrote about the new ChatGPT store. One thing is sure, new tools will emerge, and searching and information consumption will never be the same.
3. Personalized content
A distant relative of searching is finding. (More distant if you spend your day on service hotlines, arguing with robots about botched online shopping deliveries, but that's a different story.) Back to candidates: talent increasingly expects personalized content and recommendations.
Meaning, not just company information, benefits, testimonials, job lists, contacts and application form... but: my information, my benefits, my testimonials, my jobs, my contact, my application form. Individualized.
Surprisingly, software engineers, chemists and accountants often have very similar questions about jobs. Not surprisingly however, you as an employer have very different answers. And the way the internet works these days (and how we consume content), talent expects targeted content and recommendations from you. The better you manage this (for example with landing pages) the more likely they will advance.
4. Culture
Cynics say: culture is when two employees agree on what they hate about their job. I'm no cynic, I believe culture is when two jobs are seemingly exactly the same (tasks, place, pay), but one will make you happy and one will make you cry. It's a fabric that transcends everything.
What's new here is that in an employee market, culture is often the best differentiator (you can't endlessly outpay your competitors), and with more and more content out there, culture becomes more and more visible. So I would keep an eye on this old evergreen.
It tends to be taken for granted ("sure we talk about culture all the time"). But candidates care a lot for topics such as recognition, diversity, social responsibility, social life or career-building and wherever you touch talent, you can hardly say enough about culture, so it pays off to keep pushing and improving here.
5. Ambassadors: a personal touch
Around 1 in 10 top employers advertise company ambassadors on their career websites. A minimum requirement being: you can actually contact the employee. I suspect the number will be higher in a year from now. Many have this on their 2024 strategy scorecard.
Creating content is like the daily bread-and-butter of employer branding. And ambassadors are one of the best opportunities to create engaging content these days. Because it goes further than showing, it connects.
Coming back to what I wrote earlier about personalization, it hardly gets more personalized than this: dear front-end designer, it's me, Anna, also a front-end designer, currently working on our new digital product. Would you like to ask me a question?
So besides encouraging employees to be advocates on social media, it may be worth considering real ambassador programs where you make employees available for direct engagement with talent. Be it for events, chats, emails, or on LinkedIn. This involves many practical questions, like how to even find the ambassadors, let alone help them manage the requests without causing shitstorms.
But many are doing it very successfully, and I have a hunch that easy solutions are harder to come by these days, so ambassador programs could be part of a strategy to go the extra mile to win talent in 2024.
This post has gotten mighty long. So like a good two-component epoxy cohesive, I'll carefully deliver this in two steps.
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* Potentialpark's Representative Talent Comm survey from August - November 2023 with 35,000 responses from students, graduates and early career professionals in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America with a focus on business and STEM.