Recruiting hearts, not minds

// November 26th, 2009 // Employment Branding

What used to be called “the war for talent” isn’t far from starting up again. The terminology is misleading, because wars have an end, and this is now a permanent market condition. There’s no war to be won – talent is scarce. Whether it’s graduates or experienced hires, your skills pool is shrinking, and you’re going to have to be more flexible, proactive and attractive to snare the people who’ll deliver your future.

Traditional sourcing methods are still delivering good candidates, everyone’s talking about social media and its “potential” as a sourcing tool, newspaper ads (like the newspapers themselves) are dwindling, and more and more people are looking at referrals, alumni programs and human-contact sourcing as viable, cost effective alternatives.

As the talent pool shrinks, there are seemingly two schools of thought about how to tackle the market: (a) talent as an acquired commercial asset and (b) talent as an investment in human potential. Each has its strengths and ROI, and each is viable as a resourcing business model. One recognises contribution to the bottom line, and one is more about contribution to the business culture.

There’s something we tend to forget about people when we look at them as resources, or candidates, or applicants, or generations. They’re people. They’re individuals in possession of souls and dreams and passions, fears, doubts and their own little peccadilloes. And if we did more to understand those passions and motivations, we’d make better hiring decisions, find better mentors and build better careers for our people. We’d also build an employer brand that doesn’t just focus on people, but maximises their potential and their humanity at the same time.

A lot of people talk about social media as a way to get candidates, but very few people (by comparison to the average) talk about using online social tools to build communities. Some of this is fear – fear of empowering employees to speak for the company, fear of backlash, fear of negative commentary. Some of it is a resourcing issue – monitoring and continuously engaging with a talent community is not free; it takes time, knowledge and skills that are still pretty scarce in the recruiting world. And some of it is ignorance – ignorance of why people like communities, of how communities can help the bottom line, of how a community transforms an individual’s passion and interest into something approaching a cause.

Your community is a massive part of your brand, because it’s the organically grown experience of all your people. That community has a massive influence, and tremendous power to motivate, inspire, revive and foster its members. It’s your culture that lives your values and promotes additional work from the right people. It’s your culture that makes the people who don’t fit in, stand out, and eventually self-select to go elsewhere.  Go inside any company and you’ll find acolytes of the corporate culture who seem overly passionate about the culture by any scale. Those people define the culture, and are advocates for you beyond all expectation. So why not let them interface with the people who want to work for you?

It ties back into building a one-to-one relationship between the business and every employee (or potential employee). The business isn’t bigger than the sum of the people who make up the staff. Your people are literally the company, and from an employment standpoint, are the biggest part of being an employee. The company is a smaller part of the equation than the culture. People rarely love companies because of the task – they love companies because of the team. And that’s fundamental to attracting, and retaining, the best people for you.

Plenty of companies built pretty employer brands – slick ads, nice careers pages, a nice tagline and a level of consistency and visual compliance only dreamed of by dictators around the world. For many, it was an attraction strategy – better ads get better candidates, right? Well, no. Honest ads get better candidates, because the people you want might not care about the design, or read all the beautifully phrased copy, or be inspired by your imagery. That might not be what your people want, whatever your agency says. In the war for share of mind with time-poor talent, meaningful trumps pretty, every day.

Your brand isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s your soul, the distillation of the experience of all your people. It’s the emotional experience you want like-minded people in the market to catch, and hunger for. It isn’t the marketing – it’s the attitude. The execution is your branding, but not your brand. And all the marketing in the world won’t help you create an experience as powerful as one human connecting with another about a passion or a belief. Let your people communicate to the market, and the talent, the people who fit what you’re about – they’ll find you. And when they do, and they’re welcomed in with open arms, they’ll start to love you. And isn’t that what you want?