Gone are the days when a job advertisement in even an obscure newspaper would result in lines of job seekers. Recruiters of 78% of the companies now believe that it is the job seeker who has the advantage of choosing a job as compared to employers. This clearly shows that the market is no more an employer’s market, but clearly that of a job seeker. This shift is demanding a change in the mindset of employers from ‘ I am giving you the job’ to ‘We need you’. Already companies are brushing off their image and reworking their websites to showcase how employee-friendly they are and how much they care for their people. This is certainly a piece of good news for job seekers and in my opinion, even a better thing for employers.
Employers generally invest all their marketing money on advertising about their products and services to win new customers. They believe that once we have the work, getting employees to fulfil that would be easy; but this is no more the reality. Mainly in the IT/ Technology industry, an increasing number of failed projects and piling lawsuits all indicate the problem of talent that companies ignored just because they thought that branding for their customers and employees all amounted to the same. This is now making everyone realise that marketing must extend to uncharted territories of a function like recruitment. Employee branding is not just about recruitment, it covers the whole lifecycle of an employee, but the most important and critical part of this piece is recruitment.
The public image of companies in most cases is limited just to a website or social media. Increasingly, sites like Glassdoor provide another glimpse of the company that may have questionable inputs but nevertheless assists job seekers in making up their mind. The issue is that if companies leave their image and branding to an outsider like Glassdoor, one cannot expect to put the correct image of itself. Therefore, it becomes essential to create the right impression during the process of recruitment.
More than 80% of companies admit that they do not have any recruitment strategy and they remain mostly traditional in their hiring approach. Being traditional refers to the old mindset of “I am giving you the job” whereas, the need is to change the thinking into “We need you”. SCIKEY survey revealed that recruiters spend less than 5% of their time in engaging with candidates post the offer. The study also found that engagement between recruiter and candidates during the selection process is largely limited to interviews, skill testing and negotiations. More than 80% of recruiters admitted to not engaging the candidates beyond the essential hiring needs. This is the reason that joining ratios are dropping with every passing day and recruiters remain clueless in managing dropouts.
A few of the new age companies where joining ratios have been high demonstrate their abilities to engage with candidates the way they would have marketed and sold like a salesperson. It was however found that recruitment organizations in almost all companies studied had no idea of how to shift from pure recruitment to a talent attraction team by playing with the rules of marketing. Those who have embarked on this journey are already seeing the benefits.
