How do candidates view your company? If you don’t know, you risk losing out on your industry’s top candidates — and may be putting your chances of retaining key staff members at risk.
Several factors determine your company’s reputation — essentially, its brand in the talent marketplace — including what you pay employees and how you treat them.
A company’s reputation can have a huge influence on whether candidates accept or even consider a position at an organization. Research from networking site LinkedIn found a company’s employment brand was actually twice as likely to drive job consideration as a company’s overall brand. Gauging how candidates feel about your employee value proposition, however, can be difficult — for a few reasons:
Salary
Compensation plays a big part in a company’s employer branding strategy; and it can directly affect recruitment and retention. Thirty-four percent of HR professionals say their organization has experienced recruiting difficulty because it didn’t offer salaries that were competitive with the going market rate, according to a Society for Human Resource Management survey.
Similarly, an exit interview study found 38 percent of employees said they were leaving their company because of their salary, according to SHRM.
Companies can get some data through salary surveys; more than 80 percent of business managers and HR professionals say their companies either participate in or purchase one at least once a year, according to Salary.com.
The information can help an organization determine what the current rates for certain positions are. But the information comes at a cost — potentially $15,000 or more.
Market Perception
Companies with a poor reputation may need to pay 10 percent more to attract candidates, according to the Harvard Business Review.
Finding out exactly how candidates view your company, though, and why, to correct the issue and bring salary offers down to a reasonable level can be challenging.
Online ratings sites can provide some input. Seventy-two percent of job seekers who had bad applicant experiences share their frustrations, according to a recent study from Future Workplace and CareerArc.
However, only a percentage do so online. It’s almost impossible to estimate how many colleagues and other individuals the applicants have spoken negatively about a company to in person. In addition, many dissatisfied candidates and former employees who may have other, totally separate complaints don’t express their frustration at all.
Other Elements
Eight percent of companies have experienced recruiting difficulty due to a non-competitive relocation package, according to SHRM’s survey.
Benefits can be another concern. Forty percent of companies used benefits to lure hard-to-recruit employees in 2014-2015, according to an SHRM survey — a 10 percent increase from 2013. More than a third of respondents said their company had leveraged benefits to recruit workers at all levels.
There are several things you can do internally to try to find a larger amount of qualified candidates, including identifying the skills your competitors are looking for and incorporating additional passive recruiting techniques.
Locating potential hires and getting them in the door, however, are two separate things.
Effectively assessing whether or not you are providing a competitive salary and benefits package; are regarded positively in the industry and will, as a result, be able to make an offer candidates will find compelling can be a time-intensive task.
In some cases, the breadth of work that’s required may be beyond the scope of an HR department’s current resources.
Mid-sized businesses, in particular, can have a hard time. Writing effective job descriptions, maintaining consistent messaging across all recruitment levels and accurately representing their employment brand are three of the top recruitment challenges they face, according to a survey from marketing company Red Branch Media and career network site Beyond.
Companies that don’t currently possess the manpower to take on the additional duties enacting an employer branding strategy requires may benefit from outsourcing the work to an experienced service provider.
By enlisting a service provider — such as Talent Intelligence, which recently debuted its proprietary insight-based Employer Brand Intelligence program — to conduct research, companies are able to find out if their compensation, career development and other offerings measure up in the marketplace.
Once an organization knows where it stands, it can make any necessary adjustments to boost the company’s reputation — and amplify retention and recruitment efforts.
For more information about Talent Intelligence’s Employer Brand Intelligence program, contact Talent Intelligence today.