Marketing VPs and CMOs have not traditionally paid a lot of attention to their firms' recruiting advertising, much less tuned in to the candidate experience that a job-seeker undergoes when he or she applies for a job with their company. That's a mistake. Your business's recruiting process is a huge point of intersection between your brand and the community in which you operate. Many if not most medium-sized and large employers do a terrible job interacting with job-seekers.
From insulting job ads to the final, slap-in-the-face auto-responder "Thanks, but we hired someone else" rejection letter, corporate and institutional hiring processes could hardly be any worse than they are. Every Marketing VP and CMO owes it to him- or herself and everybody who relies on your firm's brand promise to create an account at Glassdoor and read the reviews that job-seekers and former employees have left about your company.
Some of the company reviews are scathing. Bad experiences have a way of sticking with us. No one likes to be ignored, dissed and dismissed in a company recruiting pipeline, but nearly every working person has experienced just that.
If people hate to apply for jobs with your firm and if they hate working there, can you really say that you have a strong, trusted brand? Customers and employees come from the same community. If you're known as a lousy employer or an organization that treats job-seekers badly, don't kid yourself that you can keep the message "This company treats people horribly" from tarnishing your brand.
Who cares about your beautiful and expensive logo if your reputation on the street is terrible? Branding goes all the way down to the ground. It doesn't reside in your marketing materials, but rather in the things people say and think about your firm and every aspect of its business, its leadership, its past and its future.
It is high time for more Marketing chiefs to notice how their dysfunctional recruiting processes are trashing their brands!
Here are three ways your focus on "customer-facing" branding to the exclusion of "talent-community-facing" branding is hurting you.
Word Travels
The first and most obvious way your broken recruiting process hurts your company brand is this: people talk. Anybody who's had a bad experience seeking employment with your company can write a detailed description of the nastiness and/or ineptitude they encountered dealing with your colleagues and the recruiters your firm hired to represent you. They can even more easily tell everyone they know never to buy your products and services again.
There are numerous brands that I avoid because of the stories I've heard about how those organizations treat their employees and prospective employees. They don't deserve my money.
Actions speak louder than words, and there is no way to protect your brand's reputation from the damage that negative buzz will do to it. You wouldn't stand by if your customer service teammates and salespeople abused your customers, so why do you turn a blind eye to the candidate abuse going on inside and outside your organization's walls?
Everybody Hates a Hypocrite
The worst brand you can have is the kind that screams "Listen to what I say about myself, and ignore my actions!" Nobody likes a hypocrite. If your company branding uses words like Real, Natural, Whole, Simple, Human or Sustainable, you'd better be ready to stand behind those adjectives. If your recruiting apparatus treats job-seekers badly, as it very likely does, you are taking a big risk by labeling yourself a Company that Cares.
It's easy to care about customers who pay you. Can you also show your human side to your teammates and the folks who respond to your job ads -- the people who pay you not in dollars but with their ideas, enthusiasm and hard work? If not, there's a big disconnect between your stated company values and your company's real-life words and actions.
Want Followers? Then Lead!
Every Marketing person I meet these days is fanatical about growing his or her company's audience of fans and followers. Social media has got all of us obsessing about our reach and engagement with people who show an interest in our products and services.
Isn't it ironic that your social media team is lightning-quick to respond to queries from random semi-fans on Twitter and Facebook while two floors away, your understaffed HR team studiously ignores the pleas from qualified job-seekers who are just trying to get the courtesy of a simple "Yes" or "No" after a job interview with your company?
It takes a certain kind of tone-deaf chutzpah to answer questions promptly and cheerfully for complete strangers who find their way to a company Facebook pages yet fail to respond to voicemail and email messages from people your managers interviewed in the flesh two weeks ago.
If you share any responsibility for your company's brand or reputation, it is time to put your firm's recruiting process or lack thereof in the center of your radar screen.
The pendulum is swinging in the talent market, and sharp candidates with other options -- the only kind you can afford to hire -- won't stand for the traditional "Grovel, Knave!" school of candidate management. They don't have to. Smarter companies will scoop those talented people up while your company's reputation as a talent-repelling shop spreads far and wide. Can you afford to let that happen?
