World-Class Recruitment Experience: Creating a culture talent can't resist

The objective of a company’s hiring process is not to fill job openings with warm bodies. It doesn’t matter if you are a small, medium, or large organization, your number one job is to find a candidate who fits your culture and will enhance it for all concerned, including your current teams. This starts with creating a world-class recruitment experience.

A great leader and a great organization understand that as much as the potential employee needs to be the right fit, the company needs to be the right fit for the potential employee. If not, it is likely that within the next six months, the company and the new hire will be back at the drawing board.

The right talent

Many companies hire poorly because they cast their lines into the wrong ponds and get wrong-fit applicants. Instead, brand your company as the employer of choice to prospective right-fit talent. Project a company culture that appeals to active and passive job seekers.

A great recruiting process saves a company from costly mistakes, such as wasted time, culture setbacks, weakened employee morale, under- or over-training, employee turnover, and a negative impact on the customer experience.

Your brand experience

Everything a brand does must be an experience. The companies that will dominate for the next decade will be the ones obsessed with evolving the experience at every level for employees, customers, vendors, and community members.

I am not just talking about having a good or even great interview process. Who’s to say the people who are applying are truly rockstars? If they are rockstars, who’s to say that they will accept your offer? They have choices.

More than money

The best offer doesn’t always mean the highest compensation. It is a combination of factors, including pay, opportunity for advancement, flexibility, workplace culture, hard and soft benefits, professional development, autonomy, mission, core values, and the meaning and purpose of the job. It’s also about leaders who will impact a person’s development, personally and professionally. Quality candidates need to know that employee satisfaction is integral to your organization.

Must haves

How can you articulate those things in a recruitment experience? A person may think they know what is important to them from their past employment experiences where they were basically trading hours for dollars. They’ve possibly had a poor candidate experience or two.

You want a candidate to interview with your company and then go on interviews with different organizations, and those other businesses should pale in comparison to your recruitment experience. The candidate becomes worried that they might not be selected by your company. That is what a world-class recruitment experience does for your brand.

Before the interview

The branding of your culture needs to be strong and defined, including customer reviews, your website and social media presence, and comments from existing and past employees. Everything they see and hear should make it overwhelmingly obvious what your brand stands for. It needs to be so definitive that they are either turned on or turned off. And their being turned off is a great thing for both the company and the candidate. Neither of you need to find out in three months that it wasn’t a good match.

To increase a talent pipeline and ideal candidates’ interest, educate them on how hard it is to get hired here. The top employee experience brands articulate that they are not for everyone, nor do they want to be. They are for the 2% who want to emerge as the best of the best. They’re not afraid to work hard and challenge themselves to see how much greatness they have inside. Suitable candidates will appreciate knowing that your screening process will protect their workplace culture, ensuring a “jerk-free” environment.

Offer a career 

Make every employee aware of the career development opportunities that can result from their hard work in helping the organization grow. Share examples of your rags-to-riches stories of people who started in lower-level positions, who rose through the ranks and had their efforts and loyalty rewarded. Show the impact those leaders have on the organization’s success and on team members’ lives.

Share your vision

The great resignation taught leaders that human beings need meaning and purpose in their jobs. It shouldn’t be a shock that so many decided they didn’t want to continue with employee experiences that weren’t engaging or inspiring. Most people want to be part of something bigger. Assure them that your company understands.

Narrow the talent pool

If you go to the career page on most company websites, they tend to say the same generic things. Every company has a mission/purpose and service vision statement. Every company has core values. One of Enron’s core values was integrity. However, the company’s actual behavior did not always align with its expressed values as evidenced by the scandals that led to Enron’s 2001 collapse.

The best recruiting and culture companies stand out and articulate their mission, purpose, and values with energy, clarity, and gusto. You clearly know what type of culture they have and whether you would be a fit or not.

John R. DiJulius III, author of The Customer Service Revolution, is president of The DiJulius Group, a customer service consulting firm that works with companies including Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Ritz-Carlton, Nestle, PwC, Lexus, and many more. Contact him at 216-839-1430 or info@thedijuliusgroup.com.