Last week, we were thrilled to offer the top takeaways from 4 of our expert presenters at last month’s RallyFwd Virtual Conference.
Following up on that post, today, we’re sharing the top takeaways from RallyFwd’s other 4 expert presenters, Shauna Geraghty, Sumit Gupta, Kandi DeRenzis and Andrew Flowers. Covering EVP and candidate experience revamping, diversity in hiring, managing leaders’ expectations of employer branding, the latest data looking at the current state of the labor market and so much more, their sessions were overflowing with strategies and technologies to help you succeed in attracting talent in today’s competitive talent market.
Check them out below, and be sure to access the full RallyFwd Virtual Conference on demand at your convenience for even more ways to upgrade your Recruitment Marketing and employer branding toolkit.
1. Your talent holds the answers to everything EVP
Shauna Geraghty, SVP, Head of Global Talent, Talkdesk.
Session: Aligning Your Candidate Experience and Employer Value Proposition
Speaker: Shauna Geraghty, SVP, Head of Global Talent, Talkdesk
The past couple of years have seen a drastic change in what people want from their employers. As Shauna Geraghty brought to light in her session, if you haven’t put in the work to stay current with the wants and needs of your specific talent audience, now’s the time to start asking around, as you might be trying to market an outdated employer brand.
Fortunately, the fix to this is simple: listen! Through focus groups, one-on-one interviews, surveys, employer reviews on Glassdoor and any other means you can think of, listen to your employees to learn what they love about working for you. Similarly, survey candidates and research competitors to understand what your talent audience is looking for, what other companies are highlighting in their marketing and other information to inform your own employer brand strategy.
Although don’t focus entirely on the positives. Listen for areas that employees would like improved at your company. While you don’t want to lead your employer brand with less-than-desirable characteristics of your workplace, showing that you’re aware of them is much better than trying to bury them from a candidate’s perspective, especially if you share what you’re doing (or plan to do) to fix them.
Once you’re confident that you’re caught up with your current employee experience, and the priorities of your talent audience, the next step is to apply your learning to revamp every stage of your recruitment funnel. This means everything from your LinkedIn banner to your careers site, to emails sent to your final stage applicants.
Imagine an employee starting their first day, making sure what they’re being told all along is accurate. Any misalignment is a surefire way to lose candidates and wrinkle your employer reputation.
2. Technology is key to more diverse hiring
Sumit Gupta, Chief Technology Officer – U.S. Innovation Lab, PandoLogic.
Speaker: Sumit Gupta, Chief Technology Officer – U.S. Innovation Lab, PandoLogic
Session: The Diversity Demand: How AI Supports Diversity Hiring
The potential for new technology supporting Recruitment Marketing strategies continues to grow, with AI as part of the next chapter. As Sumit Gupta explored in his session, AI is quickly emerging as a competitive edge, especially for high volume employers, for teams looking to reach more applicants, diversify their sourcing and free up time to tackle the mountain of other Recruitment Marketing tasks that always exist.
When advertising manually, it takes time to constantly find new talent sources, monitor how each one is performing and fine-tune your strategy based on what you’re seeing. Programmatic solutions, on the other hand, do this faster, automatically and often more accurately than humans. After inputting some basic campaign information, your role is pretty much done; just hit start, and these platforms will get to work distributing your roles, learning which ones are working and applying this learning to your campaigns in real-time to advertise your jobs as cost-effectively as possible.
Other than helping you fill roles faster and more cost-effectively, programmatic platforms also help you to remove bias. Bias, whether conscious or unconscious, affects even the best recruiters. Without the proper training to identify and address our own biases, they can get in the way of our ability to objectively select the right candidates for the roles you’re hiring for.
Unlike humans, though, software is a blank slate; outside of the information it’s provided, it doesn’t have past experiences, external influences and others whispering in its ear affecting its judgment.
The end result is more roles filled faster, more affordably and with higher-quality, more diverse candidates. Sounds like a competitive edge to us!
3. Expectations related to employer branding need to be managed
Kandi DeRenzis, Talent Brand Manager, Capital One.
Session: Employer Branding for the Long Term
Speaker: Kandi DeRenzis, Talent Brand Manager, Capital One
While there is data to show that employer branding is becoming more of a priority within companies, many leaders are still uninformed, particularly as it relates to what employer branding is, how it’s measured and how long it takes to produce results.
As Kandi DeRenzis covered in her session, this is why it’s so important to set realistic expectations from day one with stakeholders. Two topics need to be covered in this conversation:
- Employer branding is not job advertising: Instead of promoting specific jobs, you’re creating content and sourcing employee stories to show who you are as an employer, which plays an important role when talent is considering a new role. While this may not fill roles immediately, like a job ad, employer branding is effective in establishing you as a go-to employer in the long term.
- Employer branding needs to be measured differently than job advertising: Instead of number of qualified job applicants, cost per application and cost per hire, indicators of success in employer branding are:
- Number of people in your talent audience reached by your employer brand and jobs (i.e. subscribers in your talent network and followers on social media), and number of leads in your talent database
- Engagement rate of the content (i.e. likes, comments and shares) designed to attract and influence candidates
- Employer review ratings (i.e. Glassdoor reviews) and candidate experience scores (i.e. automated survey at the end of an interview)
Tracking, measuring and analyzing how you’re performing in all of these areas, and proving to leaders their role in attracting today’s talent, will help you ground their expectations, get full recognition for your work and earn the resources and support you need to achieve your goals.
You can also turn to benchmark data for help getting your leaders on board and on the same page. For example, Rally’s latest Job and Salary Survey revealed many employers plan to invest in employer brand content in the future. You can explain that, if you don’t want to get left behind as an employer, you need to follow suit with employer brand content of your own.
Rally note: Looking for one tool to track, measure, report on and benchmark data across all of your digital Recruitment Marketing and employer branding channels? Sign up for a free account of Rally Inside.
4. Pay transparency goes a long way in improving your employer brand
Andrew Flowers, Labor Economist, Appcast.
Session: Recruitment Data: Your Advantage in a Competitive Labor Market
Speaker: Andrew Flowers, Labor Economist, Appcast
In his session, Andrew Flowers pulled back the curtain on the latest data looking at the current state of the labor market. With pay on the rise and quit rates at a near all-time high, one of the biggest takeaways was the fact the Great Resignation is almost exclusively about the pursuit of a better paycheck.
To show candidates that you hear and are willing to meet their heightened expectations, be sure to be transparent about pay and other benefits in your job descriptions. Best case scenario, your competitive salary and benefits make you the new destination for top candidates. Worst (but still good!) case scenario, being upfront about not offering the absolute best compensation in your industry attracts candidates who are willing to look past just pay and prioritize other aspects of working for you (i.e. the projects you’re working on or your team culture).
Another benefit of being transparent about pay is that it lowers your cost-per-hire. You’re going to get far fewer candidates that don’t convert to hires, as candidates have the information about pay upfront and can decide before they even apply whether or not they want to work for you.
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If you enjoyed these takeaways, watch the full sessions from RallyFwd On Demand!
Once again, the Rally team would also like to thank our event sponsors, whose support enables us to produce this conference free of charge for all attendees. Thank you to PandoLogic, Appcast, Gem, Jobvite, Skuid and Clinch.
