Blog: New year, new career? How about some new thinking for your candidate attraction?

There’s a hoary old resourcing cliché that has been largely, but not entirely, put to rest in UK hiring circles – ‘New year, new career’. 

There is no why. There is little to appeal to an individual’s professional ambitions or motivations. There’s absolutely no sense of differentiation from competitor messages and organisations. 

It is the polar opposite of an EVP – it does not reach out to the employee, there is little value communicated and there is no proposition being offered.

And yet, there was a time when such a message did carry some form of weight and logic. Employees often had long breaks over the Christmas period. They had time to think and time to ponder some of their dissatisfaction with their current employer. All of a sudden, a new career did hold some appeal. 

Clearly, not a lot of thought and consideration went into a message such as ‘New year, new career’. And I wonder whether there is a temptation for some hiring organisations to think that recruiting in early 2021 will be straightforward and require a similar dearth of thought and consideration. After all, economic activity has been impacted severely throughout Europe and further afield, unemployment is rising in most labour markets, the vaccine is more a medium-term fix rather than an overnight panacea and Brexit, at best, is unlikely to provide an immediate and clear-cut solution which suits all parties. 

The result? Talent should be desperate to join a hiring organisation.

I fear that is the conclusion many business owners and leaders will draw from the employment landscape in early 2021. That the pendulum has swung from being a candidate driven market to one where the employer holds the power. 

I think this would be a mistake. 

KPMG ran a pulse survey in August this year amongst global CEOs. They ranked the biggest threat to growth over the next three years as being talent risk. The risk of not being able to hire sufficient talent, the risk of existing talent leaving and the risk of the emotional and mental damage done to such talent as a result of the pandemic. When KPMG ran a similar survey back in pre-Covid January, talent risk was the least important worry for CEOs.

The most recent Report on Jobs from November indicated another decline in the number of permanent placements being made across the UK economy, after two months of growth. The sectors which were exceptions to this? IT, digital and engineering. 

According to the Scale Up Institute, 93% of scale up businesses suggest that recruiting is their biggest challenge and think that access to talent is vital for business growth. 

However, are such organisations likely to face both a systemic and a topical challenge in the new year?

In contrast to a start-up, scale-ups do not provide the same sense of excitement, the involvement, the sensation of being there at the start of something new. Neither, clearly, do they offer the comfort, brand and infrastructure of an enterprise organisation. 

And in the current climate, persuading talent that they should leave their existing employer amongst the doubt and uncertainty of Covid, economic clouds and Brexit for a scale up is likely to be more challenging than ever. There must be a huge temptation for such people to keep their candidate heads down and ride out the present storm with their current employer. 

A survey from September of this year by Universum underlines this point – 57% of global Talent Acquisition leaders feel that hiring will become harder to achieve over the next 12 months.

And we need to make a clear differentiation between hiring and hiring successfully. According to McKinsey, high performing employees are 400% more productive than the average employee. And that already striking figure increases to 800% when employee tasks become more complex.

This is about hiring great people not hiring a great number of people.

This is about constructing a message or an Employee Value Proposition which reflects the real lived employment experience of your organisation, which shines a light on how you will grow both your business and your people over the next two years and how you go about things differently from your competitors. 

In the new year, you will undoubtedly be offering new careers to people. Just do it with more authenticity, more imagination, more differentiation.

And make sure you do it via the stories and experiences of your people. According to LinkedIn, candidates trust a company’s employees three times more than they trust the company itself to deliver an honest opinion of what it’s like to work there. 

We think you’ll have a far happier new year – not to mention the ability to reach 50% deeper into your talent markets armed with an attractive EVP, according to Gartner – if your candidate messaging and experience has a little more personality, a little more life and a little more you, than ‘New year, new career’.

About
Neil Harrison is recognised as a leading employer brand specialist, creating insights and actionable intelligence around key people audiences. Internal employee communities as well as external talent pools. These are insights which will help drive informed EVPs and their associated employer brands. Factors such as Brexit, as well as a tightening labour market, mean that organisations serious about talent acquisition need to act based on knowledge rather than guesswork.