Why talent marketing matters
We’re at an interesting moment for employer/employee dynamics. The job market is hot, the skills gap is wide, and recruiters have a lot on their plates. You might even go so far as to say most recruiters’ plates look like someone who is really trying to get their money’s worth from the $35 brunch buffet (and surreptitiously stuff a little in their pockets for later). At the same time, CEOs and other executives understand that the people who work at a company are critical to its success. Here are some resources that I referenced to get this general scope of what’s going on.
• The Talent Challenge: Adapting to Growth (PwC)
• Does More Money Change What We Value at Work? (Glassdoor)
Now that we understand a bit more about the talent landscape, let’s look at some talent marketing tactics that can help your company share your culture with prospective candidates.
Talent marketing tactic #1: Sharing your HR/People initiatives
Spotify shares their diversity data to show where they currently are and set goals about where they’d like to be in the future. Check out the Spotify HR blog for this post and many more on Spotify’s unique People policies.
The Buffer “Open” blog provides an FAQ about some of the company’s more unusual policies, like their fully distributed team and their complete salary transparency.
Google “Netflix culture” and you get a Halloween-style grab bag (seriously, Tootsie rolls are still a thing?) of everything from “culture of fear” to “how to copy Netflix’s culture.” Clearly there’s a lot to say about what it’s like to work at Netflix, which is why they’ve decided to confront this head on with the “Debunking Netflix Culture Myths” series on YouTube. Real employees share anecdotes and insights about their experiences, and as a viewer you’re left to form your own opinion about whether Netflix would be the right work environment for you.
Talent marketing tactic #2: Profile employees to highlight career opportunities and cultural values
The Greenhouse Blog, which I regularly contribute to, has a series called “Growing in the Greenhouse” that profiles employees from throughout the company. This is a simple way of sharing employee stories and company culture. For example, LV, who’s featured in the picture above, started out as a sales development representative, and through a ton of hard work and support from his managers, was able to transfer to an engineering role. Read the full story here.
You don’t necessarily need to go long-form when sharing your employees’ stories. You can take your cues from Spotify, who do a simple portrait and a short caption on Instagram. This is a simple but powerful way to celebrate your employees. Check out more examples on Spotify’s Careers Page.
Video is another format that’s worth exploring when looking for ways to share your employees’ stories. You can go crazy and hire a whole production team to create a super polished finished product, but this is by no means necessary. When I worked at AfterCollege, we hired a freelance videographer to take videos around the office. We asked our interns to talk about what they’d been doing over the summer, describe a typical day on the job, and share some highlights from their experience. Here’s an example of one of the videos we created for a Software Developer intern.
Talent marketing tactic #3: Showcase the work your employees are doing
This blog post from Buffer is a great example of how to showcase what your employees are doing. By sharing conferences they’re speaking at or other fun projects they’re involved in, you can demonstrate that growth and professional development are priorities at your organization.
Just in case the YouTube series wasn’t enough (or maybe for those people who prefer to consume their content as audio rather than video), Netflix has created the WeAreNetflix Podcast that dives into very specific aspects of the company’s work, such as how they approach design thinking or post production.
Similarly, Pandora has created the “People of Pandora” podcast that’s dedicated to sharing the stories of their employees. Recent episodes include “From College to Corporate” about summer interns, “Intersectionality” where women discuss their relationship to feminism and intersectionality, and “LatinX Heritage Month” where employees share how their heritage shaped their lives and roles.
My goal in sharing these various tactics and examples is to help you realize how many different approaches there are to talent marketing. If you have budget and resources, you can go all out, but even if you don’t, there are small steps almost anyone can take.
Are there any companies you think are doing something special when it comes to talent marketing? Drop me a line in the comments to let me know!
Top photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash.