How well known is your internal recruitment team in the market and are they known for the right reasons?
Establishing a positive recruiter brand is essential for your ongoing talent acquisition and your internal recruitment team are your ambassadors for ensuring that your business has the best recruiter brand in the market.
It’s one thing having a refined recruitment and onboarding process for new employees but it is quite another to ensure that any unsuccessful applicant continues to want to work for your business – who knows when you might have the need for their skill set! Negative impressions and bad experiences leave their mark and I’m sure you want every persons experience and every touch point they have with your company to have a positive rather than negative impact.
So, how do we ensure that the Internal Recruitment team within your business are upholding your organisations employer and recruiter brand perception in the right way?
It all comes down to how applicants are treated. Do your applicants get acknowledged for their approach to your business? Are they turned down in the right way if they are not quite what you are looking for on this occasion? Whether an applicant is of interest to you or not they need to hear back from you in a timely fashion. It’s no good having the perfect candidate sitting in an internal recruiters inbox for over a week because they have so much to deal with and are snowed under with applications to go through. How can we help them to help you achieve the positive perception of your brand that it deserves?
All recruiters are assessed on their performance – which generally means their performance in finding, engaging with and placing the right candidate for an opportunity. However, should we be looking at much more than this? Should we be considering the message they are sending (if any at all) to unsuccessful applicants? Should we be considering the time required to handle application rejections in a way that is in keeping with your brand values?
What about staying in touch with credible, skilled individuals who are not right for the current live opportunity but could be right for an opportunity in the future? What about proactive talent pipelining or succession planning? Are your internal recruitment teams involved enough in the longer-term talent requirements of your business and are they sourcing and building relationships with your potential employees of the future?
Can you give them the time they need to uphold your brand reputation with unsuccessful applicants? It really should be something that is built into their responsibilities and recognised as a key part of their role.
Internal recruitment is so much more than working and placing a live role. This team is an integral part of your organisations current and future talent acquisition. The awareness that they build of your brand links to the beginning of every potential employees decision process to start their next career move search. We need to ensure that every talented individual that comes on to the market is already aware of your business for the right reasons and actively seeks out opportunities to work for you.