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Richard Williams
July 13, 2018
It’s safe to say that Employer Brand sits front and centre as one of the trending ‘buzz terms’ within the HR function in recent years.
When looking to energise their own Employer Brand, I often experience companies focusing on areas such as look/feel, values or tone of voice.
However, there’s another vital aspect that contributes to the attraction of relevant and quality candidates: Content.
Looking and feeling good as an organisation is highly important. But that hard work and creativity can often be negated if you lack the vocal outreach to draw people towards you like the proverbial magnet.
So where do you start when planning a content strategy to get noticed?
The Two Ps - Profile and Personalise
We live in a world so saturated with content that we’ve learned to skip things in seconds because the title didn’t quite float our boat, let alone the substance within the article.
With that in mind, if you create generic content on the benefits of working for your organisation and throw it into the ether, don’t expect to get much back.
There are two stages to begin with.
- The first is to create user personas aligned to the people whom you frequently hire into the organisation.
- The second involves taking that persona and creating a personalised content cycle. Use your persona to create content that resonates with your target candidates’ challenges, motivations and aspirations.
A user persona is an all-encompassing description of a group of people you wish to target. Personas normally consist of the needs, motivations, challenges goals, likely-used channels and observed behaviour patterns of your customers or candidates. An example can be found below (I’ve also thrown in a template to save you the hassle of creating your own):
Having a persona allows you to better understand who you’re communicating with and what they’re likely to respond to.
In turn, this increases the possibility of a positive engagement. You don’t have to create personas for every person you ever engage with, but the general rule of thumb here is that if they are important, they get a persona.
Task – Create a strong candidate persona
Look inward!
To write the best candidate personas you first need to research the people who work (or have left) your organisation. Typical questions to ask people are included in the template that you can download below:
The basic details
Giving your persona a name and gender is important. It allows for a sense of realism and helps you get under the skin of the type of candidate you are trying to attract.
PLEASE NOTE - Just because you call him Steve doesn’t mean you are looking purely for men... a persona is generic. Use a nice mix. Have a think about where that person might live, do they have children? Are they married?
Personality
At BPS World we use Thomas International and their Personality Profile Assessment to better understand the work-based personality and motivations people who join the organisation.
Understanding how they operate helps us to evaluate whether they’re aligned to the role. It also shows us trends aligned with roles.
For example, our best recruiters tend to be more outgoing and in touch with their feelings (they’re sales people so that’s fairly obvious!).
Map out the desired personality traits you think you’d need for a particular role and it will help you to identify them during an interview process.
Traits
Give your persona some traits you’re most likely to expect from them. An example may be words like ‘analytical’, ‘careful’, ‘patient’ and ‘detailed’ if you’re looking to hire accountants into the business. Use these words to outline what motivates them, what their top priorities are, their personality and their work ethic. These adjectives should help differentiate this specific candidate from others.
Goals
Knowing where your candidate wants to be will help you reach out to them and deliver the message that you’re the company to take them there. Do they want to management position and team of 20 people? Do they want to travel the world with work? Do they want a learning culture?
Roles & Experience
Be as detailed as you can. Name competitors, list specific qualifications, put a time scale on her experience.
Skills
This goes without saying, but is important if you’re crafting content. Knowing that your developers all code in a certain language will help you to make the decision to produce content around that subject and partner with influencers in that space.
Consumed Media
Knowing where they reside on/offline helps you understand the type of content that resonates and also gives you an indication of where you need to be published.
Objections/Challenges
What do you need to overcome? Do they hate long interviews? Outline how revolutionary your efficient interview process is. Do they prefer home-based working? A video on your agile approach to work and work from home scheme will do the job.
The personal touch
This leads us nicely onto the second stage: a personalised content approach. The very reason we create personas is to use them as guidance when crafting content.
Which one attracts the apprentice?
“Craft a killer C.V. to land that first job - A practical guide”
Or
“How our company values keep you happy”
Let’s start by addressing the fact that they’re both good themes. But the first is the one aligned with the person you wish to attract.
It’s relevant and addresses one of the pain points they are currently feeling. The goal here is to ensure you have well thought out pain points and motivations, then create content to address them and add some value. That way you spark the engagement and draw them to you.
Have they learned something? Will they pass it on?
My experience here is that the most engaging content is that which truly adds value to the person’s day.
It seems like an obvious thing to say, but so many companies talk at their users without really thinking about how they can help them.
Think about what they can learn from the content you are producing, or why they might pass it on amongst their peers.
Task - Find out what they want
Make a list of 20 content ideas for each persona. If you don’t know, ask your employees. Ask yourself the following questions to get there:
Persona based
- What are their goals? How can we get them there?
- Where are they currently experiencing challenges and how can we solve them?
- What are their interests?
Further questions
- How can I help them do their current job?
- What can we offer them to get them ahead in their career?
- What new trends can we educate them on?
- What can we show them we do, that their current employer doesn't?
- How can we show them we’re unique?
- Can we provide them with valuable industry updates?
A good example of a successful candidate attraction campaign is when O2 UK were hiring for in-store Gurus. This is a very popular and much sought-after role with high-calibre individuals required.
O2’s challenge was that they wanted more quality applicants but didn’t have the internal resource to handle the thousands of requests from people who weren’t a good fit. What they decided to do, was to play millennials at their own game and build an online, interactive game.
They developed an online world that users had to virtually walk through, learning more about the requirements of the role and answering competency-based questions.
Introducing gamification into an otherwise mundane process made it fun, social shares went through the roof and the end goal was that it served to weed out those who weren’t a good fit and didn’t score well enough.
Those that did, were invited to upload their CV and book an initial call to discuss the first stage of the process. Genius, on-brand, efficient and fun. It doesn’t get much better.
Whether you have the resource to build a game or not doesn’t mean you can’t put yourself into the shoes of the person you wish to attract and give them the value that truly makes a difference.
Engaging infographics on your company, tips for passing an interview, videos to help people research you are all a good place to start.
Ultimately, introducing strong candidate personas and the creation of effective content around them will help your team to drive wholesale engagement for your Employer Brand and start to attract targeted candidates to the organisation.
I head up Brand Performance Studio, the team within BPS responsible for crafting cut through Employer Brands for our clients. For more information on how we can drive you results feel free to reach out:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rich_Williams10
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard14williams/
Email: richard.williams@bps-world.com
