What attracts potential candidates to an organisation?

In today’s competitive candidate landscape with talent shortages on the increase, we’ve highlighted 3 key areas that impact your appeal to job seekers, to see if there’s anything you could improve.

Strong Employer Brand

Whether you’ve worked towards it or not, all organisations have an employer brand. Previous and current candidates and employees can easily post online and inform others about their experience at your organisation, on social media and sites like Glassdoor - and the majority do, especially when it’s negative. In fact, 72% of job seekers that had a bad experience told others about it, either online or in-person.

Organisations that have a strong, positive employer brand see 50% more qualified applicants for a vacancy, and so are able to hire 1 – 2 times faster than organisations that have a weak or negative employer brand. This provides that vital competitive edge in the current job market as well as helping organisations stand out in the sector they operate in.

There are many ways to improve your employer brand, but it’s best to start with your current employees’ perception of your organisation. Sending out an anonymous employee feedback survey allows your people to put forward truthful comments and suggestions. But don’t stop there. Making sure you follow through on these comments and suggestions is key to building honesty and trust between employees and leaders – and will improve the success of future employee feedback surveys. It also shows employees you are willing to improve their experience within your organisation, which will improve your employer brand and working culture.  

Take it a step further by providing employees with regular check-ins with their managers and leaders to encourage them to talk openly about their employee experience, what they want out of their job, and any problems they are facing. You’ll strengthen the relationship, make the employee feel valued, improve retention rates and your employer brand.

Job Listings

With a vast amount of job boards online it can be a time-consuming and repetitive process to make sure you’re advertising your vacancy on them all. You might cut some job boards out, which isn’t a big deal right? But you could be missing out on the perfect candidate!

Even the biggest job board site, Indeed, is only used by 64% of job seekers meaning you could be missing out on almost a third of your potential candidates. On top of that, if you don’t include the salary and benefits of the job you’re advertising then two in three job seekers are less likely to apply.

Highly sought-after candidates are only in the job market for 10 days, so ensuring you have the greatest exposure on your job adverts is crucial to your success in the attraction and recruitment process.

Automation is key. Advertising your vacancies through an integrated recruitment solution allows you to post your job advert on all available job boards of your choice, all at once, allowing you to advertise to the widest talent pool available for the best opportunity to find the perfect candidate, fast.

Career Webpage Optimisation

Let’s say you’re advertising on the majority of job boards. That’s great, but 59% of potential candidates don’t apply through the advert straight away. Instead, they look up your organisation’s website. There are a number of reasons for this, the main one being that it allows candidates to grasp what working for your organisation is like and if they think it would be a good fit for them.

Ensuring you have the right information easily available on your website’s careers page is essential to encourage candidates to apply. Providing information and photos that promote your organisation’s culture, benefits, mission, and vision as well as any corporate social responsibility you have undertaken could be the tipping point for encouraging someone to apply to an open vacancy.

This type of information is more valuable to candidates than you might think as 66% of job seekers want to know about your organisation’s culture and values, 54% want to know about the perks and benefits, and 50% want to know about your mission and vision.

Streamline and strengthen your recruitment processes by using our recruitment checklist.