Maintaining your brand reputation during your recruitment process

Do you handle your own recruitment internally? If so, how are you ensuring you protect your employer and consumer brand throughout the process? 

You’ve no doubt seen the unprecedented number of applications on LinkedIn, with job adverts racking up 150-200+ applicants within the first 24-48 hours of publishing. However, with great numbers of applicants, comes great responsibility! A lot of business leaders are not witness to the effect recruitment can have on their brand's reputation. 

Let’s talk through a very real example; let’s say you’ve received 250 applicants for your VP of marketing role; The chances are that you’ll have half a dozen applicants that could be well suited to the role and, providing you can identify them quickly enough to deliver a positive experience, one of those candidates will likely go on to be offered the position, and accept. 

Great news, but that’s 249 applicants that didn’t get the job. So, when will you tell them you will not be progressing their application? And how? What about other roles that they might be suited for in the future? Do you have the capacity, tools, and processes in place to ensure they have a positive candidate experience, regardless of the outcome of their application? 

Getting this process wrong or leaving candidates hanging can be detrimental and leave candidates with a sour taste in their mouths about your brand or company. If candidates are not managed quickly and professionally, they will talk. So, what can you do to ensure your business delivers a positive candidate experience and continues to attract and retain the best talent on the market? 

Technology – Ask yourself whether the tech you have can handle large numbers of applications. Is it compliant? Does it enable you to respond accordingly to large numbers of applicants? If not, you might want to consider investing in an ATS (applicant tracking system). An ATS is great for automating certain elements of a recruitment process and can pre-screen candidates for you, automate the rejection process and even match them to other vacancies you might have in the business. An ATS can be a useful tool, but it is exactly that, a tool, and you’ll still need a competent team to deliver a personal and positive experience. 

Interview Process – As a candidate, there is nothing more frustrating than an interview process that is long, has several stages and lacks communication/feedback throughout. Now, more than ever, interviews are a two-way street. Not only are you assessing the candidate's experience, skills, and cultural suitability, but the candidate is building an impression on you and your company, based on their experience from the moment they submit their application, right through to offer, placement and start date. Your interview process should be transparent, efficient, and professional, with a clear timeline and communication provided throughout. Have you trained your hiring managers on how they talk about your company? A great manager doesn’t necessarily have the skills to interview effectively. Many great candidates will drop out of the process due to a bad experience during the interview process. It’s very unlikely they would apply again in the future, and they would most certainly tell their friends and family about their negative experience. 

We talk in more detail about the ideal interview process in our blog ‘How to be an Employer of Choice in a Candidate driven-market’ 

Capacity – Take an honest look at your capacity internally. One individual hiring manager, talent manager, or internal recruiter just isn’t going to have the capacity to manage and communicate effectively with substantial numbers of applicants, especially if they’re managing multiple roles and processes. If your department managers are doing their own recruitment, it’s unrealistic to think that they could deliver an excellent candidate experience whilst doing their day job, so bear that in mind.  

If you don’t have the capacity internally, then it may be time to consider looking for an external partner. Whether that is us or someone else, a specialist recruitment partner will not only have the capacity, but the reach, expertise, processes, and ability to ensure a positive candidate experience for every applicant, which in turn, not only protects your employer brand but improves it. 

If you would like to discuss your future recruitment and how we can help you establish a positive and effective recruitment experience for your candidates, then please get in touch to arrange a chat with one of our expert consultants.​