Recruiters: Steps You Can Take to Protect Your Corporate Reputation
December 18, 2012
Do you care about your corporate reputation when it comes to customers? Of course you do.
Do you care about your corporate reputation when it comes to the job market? You should, because to build a great company, you need top talent.
According to a recent Fast Company article, three dimensions that drive reputation are:
- Vision and leadership
- Financial performance
- Perceptions of the workplace
Lets focus on that last one: perceptions of the workplace.
Perception, or how the market views your company, directly correlates to your employment brand. Your company can take steps to build this reputation in a variety of ways (marketing, education, etc). Internal employees, however, are vital to branding your organization.
Internal employees are the face of your company to the market. Internal recruiters take this up a level because of the volume of people they actively engage with — think of how sales is the face of your company to your customers.
In recruiting, reputations in the market are important. Recruiters often keep their ears to the ground to know what companies have good — or not so good– reputations for talent. The more information we have, the better we can tailor recruiting strategies when targeting talent. As the saying goes, great people know great people, and that’s who I want working with me.
Candidates are frequenting company review sites and checking with people both in and outside their network to get a sense of what it’s like to work at any particular company.
The way recruiters help maintain and build your company’s reputation is via the candidate experience. It’s important to keep this positive for all candidates. If a candidate has a negative experience, they are likely to talk about it, if not on sites such as Glassdoor, then at least with their network.
The fact is it’s likely to get around, and in expansion stage hiring it’s a small world. Marketers talk to marketers, engineers talk to engineers, sales talk to sales, etc.
A bad reputation will no doubt increase recruiting costs. And if your company has a bad reputation externally in the job market, it’s possible it could be an internal issue, as well. That’s potentially bad news for your employee retention.
Now, recruiters may be the gatekeepers and point of contact when recruiting talent, but they are not the only ones. All stakeholders involved in a search need to know that they are the face of the company, and that their actions matter.
Here are the three most common ways to lose a candidate:
- Missed/constant rescheduling of interviews
- Negative and/or indifferent attitudes of the interviewer
- Sparse communication and follow up
What’s the take away? Make time to hire.
Train those involved in the interview process so they know what they can and can’t ask.
Enforce accountability. Take steps to prevent these three things to avoid damaging your company’s reputation and losing highly qualified candidates to competitors.