How To Improve Brand Reputation Through Recruiting Best Practices
A positive brand reputation is one of the most potent recruiting tools. It’s infinitely easier to build goodwill with candidates when they already have a good impression of your organization. Otherwise, you are left trying to reverse an opinion that’s already been formed, which is not only difficult it’s expensive. In fact, LinkedIn estimates that companies with negative reputations end up paying 10% more in salaries to their employees.
Talent acquisition teams know this, but the whole concept of brand reputation management can feel nebulous and overwhelming. With so many stakeholders, internal and external, it’s hard to know where to begin. All the factors at play are enough to make anyone want to push the whole can of worms to the back of the shelf.
We’re here to say that building your brand reputation as part of your recruiting strategy can be a targeted and (relatively) simple effort if you focus on the fundamentals of recruiting best practices, rather than the frills of employer branding (all that can come later).
So before you worry about career videos or onboarding baskets—let’s take some time to understand the core deliverables that will boost your recruiting strategy starting with a fundamental understanding of brand reputation.
What is brand reputation?
Brand reputation in its simplest terms is the impression people have of your organization. There are many influences on how people feel about a brand including the product, marketing, customer service, and recruiting experience. Of course, as a talent acquisition team, you have the most influence over this last point.
You can make the most of brand in your recruiting strategy when you stop thinking of brand as things like ‘sleek social media posts’ and start putting it in terms of ‘reputation.’ You know how a person builds a good reputation, and it isn’t through having the best website or cute pictures, it’s about the basics of being dependable, honest, and able to execute tasks. These are the same tenets of recruiting best-practice that will build a strong recruiting brand.
What are recruiting best-practices?
Recruiting best-practices are the talent acquisition processes recognized as the industry standard. These methods will power the rest of your efforts and ensure a positive experience for your candidates and your team.
It’s important to take recruiting best-practices into consideration as they will set you up for long-term success. Overall, best-practices in any industry tend to reflect larger economic and talent trends which will keep your brand relevant to top talent and prepared to take on changing market conditions.
4 brand reputation management strategies to implement during recruiting/hiring
Recruiting best-practices are not a fixed set of rules. It’s more nuanced than that. We find best-practices in larger industry trends by looking to established brands and industry analysts. You may have certain talent acquisition brands you look up to or influencers you follow for the latest news. These are great sources to keep on top of what’s around the corner. For our purposes today we identified four relevant best-practices that speak to this moment and will be important in promoting a positive brand reputation for your recruiting strategy.
1. Increase transparency between the hiring team and candidates.
The biggest roadblock on the journey to transparency is not defining critical information with the team beforehand. Info could include role criteria, adjudication criteria, and timelines. If the team doesn’t have this information, then they can’t share it with the candidate.
Beyond candidate communication, this increased transparency will also help make your hiring practice fairer as your decisions will be more consistent and easier for your candidates to understand. This will leave applicants with the knowledge that they were considered on equal footing, thus boosting your reputation as an equitable recruiting function.
2. Make your candidate updates more frequent.
Alongside transparency and a defined process, comes consistent updates. These updates demonstrate an organized and capable recruiting function and remove anxiety for candidates through what can be a stressful process.
Some talent acquisition functions choose to implement candidate portals as part of their recruiting strategy so candidates have access to their application status along the way. This saves time for recruiters as well. With Checkr ETA, we provide candidates with the ability to view their background check status and alert them of any action needed on their part.
This type of tech is not only convenient it also demonstrates to your candidates that your organization is willing to implement smart tech solutions for manual tasks.
3. Boost data security for your organization and candidates.
Data security is one of the most important recruiting best practices as your organization could be liable if your company experiences a breach. We’ve all seen the brand damage that can result from mishandling data, and since talent acquisition is usually one of the biggest data handlers, our actions are especially important and compliance should be part of how we implement every part of our recruiting strategy.
Of course, when we talk about data security and handling we’re referring to things like getting candidate consent for using their information in certain ways like talent pools or background checks, but we’re also talking about the data we don’t see. When evaluating candidates you want to make sure you aren’t considering non-relevant records. That’s why Checkr offers compliance tools to help bolster appropriate data usage and fair hiring decisions.
4. Carry on recruiting best-practices through the employee experience.
Recruiting experience is closely related to employee experience when it comes to brand reputation. Your candidates will be more excited to apply if they have the impression that your organization’s standards and vetting carry through, past the recruiting process.
To do this many recruiters make it a point to check in with candidates and hiring managers a couple of months into the employment process to gauge the success of the placement. For certain roles that require upkeep of licenses or record statuses, talent acquisition teams will implement tools like Checkr’s continuous check to ensure employees are still eligible to perform their duties. This type of due diligence will help establish your reputation as a responsible and safety-oriented employer.
Closing thoughts: How can brand reputation be impacted by recruiting
In today’s recruiting world candidates should be treated with the same care and deference as customers, as they often are one-in-the-same. You don’t want to lose a customer or possibly multiple (if a candidate shares their experience with others) because of sloppy recruiting processes that leave candidates confused or frustrated.
When we look at these recruiting best practices in aggregate, the essence boils down to consistency. From equity to data security, it’s all about creating good processes and using them as our guiding light. Fortunately there a lot of tech tools that can make being consistent easy so your talent acquisition team can focus on creating meaningful candidate relationships.
