4 Ways to Attract the Best Candidates
If you’ve been sniffing around our yard for awhile, you may have heard us mention the HR Path. The first step along the HR path is Recruitment. You can’t hope to hire the best folks for your system if you don’t attract an ample pool of high-caliber candidates for every open job. From teachers to bus drivers, maintenance staff to administrators, you should to be driven to create a list of superb candidates from which to select. Each hire presents an opportunity for your system to improve and to run your day-to-day operations in a way that will bolster your success! Read on for some tips to get started.
1. Create a brand for your system - Brand identity is built based on the culture at your organization, your mission and values, and the way you communicate those things to those inside and outside your organization. A person’s perception of your system is based on the various cues that you are sending. We encourage all our clients to not only think about their brand as a system, but also to brand their benefits program as well. (Check out the video at the end of this blog for an example!)
2. Properly utilize your website - Oftentimes the first place people will go when they want to know more about any organization is the website. Many of today’s job seekers are technology-savvy and are put off by potential employers with a difficult to use, cluttered-looking website or arduous application process. The best websites will reflect a system’s brand identity, be easy to navigate and look professional. Think about the type of information a candidate might want to see, and make sure it’s obvious where they should click to find it.
3. Use benefits as a recruitment tool - People are motivated by pay at all career levels. And, they tend to look only at base pay or cash compensation as opposed to total compensation. Those of you in Georgia know how much you spend on State Health, TRS, Paid Time Off and other benefits. Can you instantly articulate how much value these benefits add to basic pay and how much you’re saving for your average employee? If you can’t, it’s a sure bet your prospective candidates can’t either.
4. Reinforce your image with current employees - You should take every opportunity to re-enforce your brand identity as you deal with current employees and design processes in your system. How easy is it for your employees to complete Open Enrollment? How arduous is the process of onboarding for new hires? Happy employees are much more likely to sing your praises to their friends on social media, or in general conversation.
Check out the end result of a benefits branding exercise we led for Clarke County School District in Athens, GA: