It’s long been a tenet of every successful business: you’re only as good as the people you employ. With that in mind, it’s imperative that businesses be extremely diligent in vetting who they hire. One of the most important things you can do to ensure that’s successful is take a critical look at the quality of your employment marketing and the types of candidates you’ll be attracting.
AOR has extensive experience in helping companies tell their brand stories in a way that attracts the right candidates to help their teams grow. (It’s kind of what we do.) We’ve found there are a few general rules of thumb to follow when doing employment marketing.
Sometimes companies get so caught up in listing all of the check boxes involved in the roles and responsibilities of any given job, they neglect to sell the company first. You’re in business for a certain reason. Highlight it. Tout it. These authentic moments of reflection and revelation really resonate with job seekers by giving them something real they can plug in to.
We’ve covered “us versus you” language before, but it’s an important reminder. Now, this isn’t to contradict point #1 above—you definitely need to sell the company first. Just do it with an outward focus on your target audience. Crafting all of your marketing with ‘you’ language helps your message connect with impact.
This is less about your marketing and more of a general rule of thumb. But when it comes to finding the right employees, patience is indeed a virtue. Every candidate search takes time, and it’s clearly more important to value quality over quantity in reviewing candidates. Don’t feel rushed.
Here are a couple of recent examples of employment marketing AOR has done for two of our favorite clients, Sage Hospitality and the City and County of Denver. See if you can find how we incorporated the concepts above into the work we produced.
We developed the “Work Where You Belong” concept to capture Sage’s innate entrepreneurial spirit. They loved the idea and used it across their social media channels. They even incorporated the notion on site to remind themselves of the power of their promise to potential employees.
We used both “Do work that matters in the city that you love.” and “You love Denver. We’d love to have you.” to help sell working for the city, to the city. There were natural executions on buses and outdoor billboards in some of the highest traffic areas in Denver.
