Hiring During (And After) A Pandemic
05.27.20
The COVID-19 pandemic has created two extremes in the U.S. job market. Essential businesses, like nursing homes and hospitals, are experiencing a surging demand for select employees. Others have been forced to furlough or layoff their staff as a cost-saving measure. Despite these differences, we believe every business should spend the next few weeks evaluating their efforts to attract and retain the very best employees. Here’s how to start.
Understand the Challenge
Selling a career isn’t like selling a product. Jobs have the single greatest influence on our day-to-day lives. They dictate everything from where we spend our day to what money we make to how we receive healthcare. For that reason, people spend much more time researching and deliberating their career choices than their product choices.
So how does that translate to marketing? For starters, it means your product isn’t really a product. It’s an opportunity. And that opportunity will mean different things to different people, depending on the company, the position and the team. So for you to effectively market your jobs, your marketing needs to reflect that level of nuance and care.
Refine Your Message
Pull up any job board and look through a few positions. You’ll see several companies looking for “self-starters,” “team players” and of course, “hard workers.” And in return, they’re offering “great pay,” a “fun work environment” and “affordable benefits.” If that generic messaging has already made you bored, then imagine what a job seeker feels after scrolling through hundreds of them in a week.
The job market is flooded with homogenous messaging. And we get it: it’s a major time investment to craft an entire message around one job—especially if it needs to be filled ASAP. But the best candidates know what they have to offer and will quickly sift through job postings that seem beneath them. It’s like fishing: if you want bigger fish, you’ll need better bait.
Own Your Experience
For a lot of businesses, the recruitment process starts and ends with a single job posting. Think about that in terms of marketing: it’s like running an entire campaign from a flyer. You simply can’t convey everything there is to know about your company or your job in a single description. Hiring the best talent requires investing in end-to-end experiences that will attract, educate and excite them.
One of our most recent projects was designed to elevate the candidate experience for Bethesda Health Group. We developed a brand new careers website that introduces potential candidates to life at Bethesda. Featuring compassionate language and warm imagery, the new microsite targets professionals motivated by mission and focused on care. The website also serves as a vital link in the talent pipeline. Candidates may see Bethesda job posts on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed, but will now be directed to the careers website to learn more about the company and its culture. This allows poor-fit candidates to self-select out of the process, giving the Bethesda team more time to focus on interviewing the very best candidates.
Start Planning Now
Although the country’s unemployment numbers are abysmal now, we know they won’t stay that way forever. As businesses reopen and the world begins anew, there will be a high demand for new employees—and even higher demand for the best ones. Use this time to get ahead of the curve and develop strategies that drive the right candidates to your inbox. Give us a call today and let’s work through it together.
