How to help candidates
Leveraging your perspective to win better talent
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Quick question: How do you choose a job?
I saw a LinkedIn poll (which I can no longer find) that asked, if all other elements were the same, which job do you pick? The one offering:
5% more salary
3 extra PTO days
A clear “work from anywhere” policy
A stronger mission (I am making this one up, because I can’t remember exactly what the fourth option was)
So which company do you pick? Before you answer, what if we add more options:
The opportunity to work with big name clients
The opportunity to work on bleeding edge ideas
The one that impresses your mom
The one that shuts down on weekends
The one where you feel supported, no matter what
The one where you achieve the most
The one where you can give back to the community
The one likely to IPO
The one that’s a family- or employee-owned
The one that’s huge and not likely to go under any time soon (you hope)
This isn’t a complete least. Not by a long shot.
But it does illustrate an interesting issue we’re not really talking about: how do people choose their next job?
Specifically, if you think everyone chooses on $, you’re wrong. Nor do they always pick based on remote work. Or a purpose/mission. Or the chance at an IPO.
Despite all the research and the breathless headlines about how Gen Z wants this and Gen X wants that, no one thing attracts “most” people.
Which is great, because companies don’t all offer the same things. That’s the core of a strong employer brand: uncovering and highlighting how your company is different from other companies so they can choose.
Recruiters (and employer branders) have a valuable resource that candidates don’t: perspective on the talent markets and what other companies offer. If you read most job postings (still 99% “you must haves”) and career sites (99% “shiny happy people.”), you’d be hard pressed to understand that some companies can offer them more time, more flexibility, more status, more autonomy, more skin in the game, more support, etc.
Without that information, they just pick the one offering the most money. And few companies can win if the game is all about money.
What if instead of feeding candidates a steady stream of “we’re great!” we helped them understand what their options were?
What if we helped them see and make sense of their options?
I’m not being naive. I know the goal of the recruiter is to get the candidate to pick that company. When I say, “help them make sense of their options” I mean make it clear how the status and performance (insert your brand differentials here) you offer isn’t the same as the “we’ve got a great culture” stuff that other company offers.
Think back to the Netflix “culture deck.” Yes, it did a great job providing context and detail around what Netflix offered, a feat few companies seem to even attempt, even fifteen(!) years later. But what it also did was show how they were different. For example, that Netflix was a place that was very comfortable letting people go if the manager thought they could upgrade the person in that role. It was just the way Netflix did things. And that deck helped people make sense of what Netflix was offering along with a nice juicy salary.
If you are hiring for a company that doesn’t pay at the top of the scale (and that’s probably all of you), helping candidates understand what they can get if they don’t optimize on cash is the path to winning the hire.
Isn’t that the core of what good employer branding and recruiting should do?
☀️ “Carewashing [is] a misalignment between what leaders portray as cultures of care and employees’ actual daily experiences at work.” HBR calls out businesses and actually assigns blame to leadership? Weird. »
☀️ ICYMI: Reinventing The Employer Value Proposition: An Analysis and Practical Model »
☀️ Perceived gains from RTO mandates aren’t worth the lost talent (with data!) »
☀️ Getting co-workers on board with your ideas »
☀️ What’s good for HR is good for TA, too. “One Piece of Career Advice for Human Resources Professionals“ »
☀️ “Brand” has a branding problem »
☀️ Yes, blue collar jobs can be cool »
☀️ All candidates want is a response, like… now. »
☀️ Have we reached (and passed) “peak collaboration?” »
☀️ What are you serious about? »
☀️ Culture isn’t talk. It’s behavior »
🏛️ All 2,400+ (five years worth!) articles from this newsletter are in a searchable archive. Go get ‘em!
Businesses don’t respect process. Businesses only respect outcomes.
This might explain the friction when a hiring manager is desperate to fill a business-critical role, but the recruiter puts it through “the standard process.” (As an aside, this is when EB can and should parachute in like some kind of SWAT team to resolve frictions and think through the challenges.)
So here’s something you should consider to ensure that the business sees you as someone who cares about the outcomes rather than just managing the process.
When someone leaves within 90 or 180 days, call a meeting of everyone in the interview loop. Bring all feedback from the screening and interviews (and the interview questions you planned on asking) and that from all other final round candidates. The goal is to answer the following questions:
Without blame, why didn’t our selected candidate pan out?
What should we have seen in them that we didn’t see?
Did we ask the right questions to gather enough information?
What question would have likely revealed that information?
Was that a question we planned to ask and didn’t? Or never thought to ask?
Based on what we know now, who was the “right choice” and how could we have learned that within the interview cycle instead of after the fact?
Asking questions is only step one. This is when you get all the interviewers to see the value in interview planning and proper feedback (what?! Only half of the people actually left any useful feedback???) as the means to improve hiring. Because once you ask these questions, you need to make changes based on what you learned.
Bluntly, the data around hiring success is not good. When Lazlo Block said that most companies have a 50 percent chance of making a successful hiring decision, he wasn’t letting you off the hook. He was establishing a baseline on which to build. The rates of hires leaving within 180 days is something nuts, yet recruiting acts like “this is the only way.”
Businesses only respects outcomes, so you need to invest time in postmortem to find what you can change the very next search to increase your effectiveness.
One: Understand the financial impact having a strong employer brand. Nine questions to get your custom report. It’s free! I’ll be shutting this down in two weeks. So if you want your report, act now! »
Two: Compare 25 employer brand building companies side-by-side. It’s how you make a better decision about who will help you best in your EB journey. It’s free! »
Three: Three case studies that prove how an employer brand can be built in just three weeks. A 250-person manufacturer, a 300-person construction company, and an 800-person video game company. Just reply to this email.
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
-W. Edwards Deming
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