Blog: Our experiences during Covid and how they are influencing what we want from recruitment post Covid - Part One.
For better or, in all probability, for worse, the time of Covid will have left its mark on many of us. There is likely to be mental health and wellbeing scarring present for years to come. Relationships with partners, offspring and our wider family will not have gone unscathed. It’s likely that our approach to our future will be impacted by our lockdown experiences, from finances, nutrition, fitness, friendships through certainly to careers.
If we’re likely to be looking for something different in terms of careers, how has our time during lockdown influenced our views on recruitment. How do we want to change jobs? What are we looking for from a candidate experience? What elements of the process are we less likely to put up with now that might have seemed acceptable pre-Covid? And how should the resourcing industry react to a changed, potentially more wary candidate?
What about communication? There’s a lot of current focus around the whole subject of candidate experience. And there are some excellent initiatives, such as Circle Back, touching on this subject, with employers signing up to the scheme and making a commitment to provide a response to every applicant.
The last year has seen great employers respond to the challenges of lockdown by amplifying and personalising employee communications. They have gone out of their way to ensure that no one feels left behind and excluded. There is both concern and consideration for the individual. Such consideration matters. There is a resourcing and a business performance implication resting on the speed and sincerity of candidate response. ‘Negative candidate experience will cause 69% of candidates to never work for your company again’, according to Talentboard. As individuals, we have placed huge dependency on communications and responsiveness during lockdown. There will be similar expectations about our next recruitment interaction. Let’s think about how employee communications was so important to us all during lockdown, as we begin to communicate with candidates.
Arguably, the importance of an organisation’s consumer or institutional brand has never been so important. Our means of engaging with a company or a product over the past 11 months has clearly been hugely restricted. We can’t walk into a store or visit an office or pick up a product. In the absence of such physical contact, then intangible assets such as brand and reputation are everything.
There is a similar relationship with an employer brand. Our means of engaging with an employer brand have become restricted during lockdown. We have exposure through websites, online and social media, but we cannot walk into a potential employer’s office, we can’t sit in reception and pick up the cultural signs and indicators. We are unable to catch up with old friends over a coffee or beer to gauge their views about the organisation in question, cajoling them into telling us what they really feel.
As we contemplate a potential job change, an organisation’s employer brand (and its employer branding) assumes ever more significant proportions. Employers and their resourcing partners delivering resourcing messages need to be able to articulate a consistent and compelling employer brand experience. And if such a brand experience seems to relate to a period pre-Covid, we might wonder just how topical their employee experience is too.
Find out more in Part Two - available from 25th February 2021.
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.
