Treat candidates like customers to attract top talent

Michael Simonyi Davison

Recruiting to attract top talent puts your brand well and truly on display. In doing so, some businesses enhance that brand and others trash theirs. Be sure to avoid the latter.

Like it or not, it’s a fact of life that you are far more likely have the need to attract top talent, than that top talent needs you.

Quite simply, people who are good at what they do are in demand; not least by their current employers and when they choose to change jobs, they have options.

With that in mind, your “employer brand” – the way your business is perceived as an employer – is very important. Yet you wouldn’t know it from the way many candidates describe the way they are treated when they apply for jobs. In fact, the opposite is often the case and significant brand damage results.

A few examples help explain my point before we go further:

  • not acknowledging receipt of applications
  • not advising candidates their application was unsuccessful
  • being inflexible about interview times (not everyone can get away during business hours to attend interviews)
  • not providing feedback or outcomes after conducting interviews
  • “lowballing” candidates on salary, after they’ve advised what they’re currently being paid.

There are more but you probably get the idea. Seriously, if you treated customers like that, they’d take their business elsewhere, wouldn’t they? And tell their friends. And post it on social media. Well, spurned candidates do exactly the same thing. Oh, and while you consider that, consider that those same people and their broader community are possibly your existing or potential customers, so the brand backlash can be wider than you realise.

Think I’m exaggerating? In one recent Australian survey, a whopping 71% of respondents said they’d shared their negative experiences with family and friends and 8% fessed up that they’d talked about it on social media.

The good news is that this is easily fixable with a little consideration and, yes, a little work. Okay, so you might not love the idea of conducting interviews outside usual business hours (trust me, I feel your pain), but most other remedies are very simple:

  • an auto reply from a dedicated email address, acknowledging receipt of applications, is about as simple as it gets
  • a simple “thank you, but you’ve been unsuccessful” email takes hardly any effort
  • a quick call or email to let someone know they’ve been unsuccessful after interviewing with you is just common courtesy.

It’s also important to keep the process moving and candidates engaged. I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard people say, “If that’s the way they go about recruiting, what must it be like to actually work there?” I don’t think you want people saying that about your business, do you?

Finally – there’s money. I get the need to tighten costs and I get that candidates will sometimes inflate what they tell you they’re currently being paid. The bottom line is that there’s a market level of pay for every position and thinking you can pay below that and still attract top talent is simply misguided; and very few people are going to entertain taking a drop in salary for the privilege of working for you, and those who are prepared to do so are typically not of the calibre you were probably hoping to attract.

Recruiting puts your brand well and truly on display. I see some businesses enhance that brand and I see others trash theirs.

A few simple steps can go a long way towards avoiding the latter. Feel welcome to contact me if you’d like to talk about enhancing your employer brand.

Michael Simonyi, Senior Consultant, Davidson Corporate