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Give your HR the help they need. The help they get is the help your employees need and what your employees need is what the business need. Break the system, because your employees need you!
In the past year I wrote about Employee Experience (EE) and why it is the change workplaces need. We have created an Employee Experience audit and tested our theories with five companies for free. Yes, you missed it, sorry! Lot of work has been done changing, adjusting and sometimes throwing everything out we thought would work.
Our EE audits showed that organisations are more concerned about their systems than their users (employees). So we reverse engineered everything and created a framework that allows organisations design their EE with people in mind. It is not that difficult.
We broke EE down to seven pillars (that's the basic level) to:
ATTRACT | HIRE | ONBOARD | MOTIVATE | PERFORM | DEVELOP | EXIT
Let's look at ATTRACT - Designing Experiences From The Candidate's Point of View.
Here are some of the questions our audit toolkit includes:
Every section starts with a question: How Do You Want Candidates To Feel About You When Seeing You On Social Media? Guess what, HR and leaders find it very difficult to articulate it:-) It is not easy because we have never been taught to think that way. We have been taught to run processes.
The toolkit then goes into details with questions like:
Do you know what candidates you want to attract, want to see from you? What are they attracted to/by? How do you know? What data do you have?
Have you conducted an employer brand audit? Are you aware of your company's reputation among job seekers, or even your employees. How do you collect that information? Surveys, social media searches, organisation culture survey, online reputation/reviews or internal data from engagement and exit surveys?
Do you have a unique value proposition? Why should people work for you? What do you have that others don't? And if you don't have something unique who can you still appeal to and how? Who is your target audience?
Do you have the ability to market your proposition in a meaningful way? How do you do that? Who are you appealing to? Does it work?
Do you run social media marketing campaigns to attract talent? How do you do that? Do you use user generated content? Is you presence exciting or boring? Be honest!
Are your job advertisements represent the EVP and the company's style? Are they modern or traditional in terms of the language, format, visual? Do they appeal to the audience you want attract?
Do you intentionally or unintentionally leave job postings running? Do you have a limit when you close the system and clear job postings?
As I said, these are very basic questions (there are more) that impacts candidate experiences and their decision to even apply, hence your ability to attract talent. If you get these wrong or give it no thought you will be flooded with 1000s of low-quality CVs and you will have to pick from them which means, you are building a low-quality talent pool.
One of the companies we worked with, decided to scratch the job posting process (no job advertisement) and created social media content where they ask people what they think of the company (based on that video) and if they know people with certain skills, experience etc. who would be interested in working in such environment. The fun part is that it is a construction company with dirty jobs not a nice office environment with slides and coffee machine.
When I asked about the thought-process the team said "We want to set expectations and what people will get themselves into. They get to see the job and meet some of their possible colleagues. This job is hard but we have a fantastic leadership team that makes it easier and we want that message to come across."
I was so happy that they got the memo, the memo that says, Think from the candidates point of view! They have also decided to move on the user (employee) generated content for their social media marketing and all they do is repost their employees content. It is genuine, nobody is pressured to post or to say anything specific. They had one criteria, "Be honest, but don't tarnish the reputation of the company." It is risky but guess what? It forces leaders and managers to behave & manage in a way that employees don't feel the need to vent online. They post about handling cranes, mixing concrete etc. making the job and the people over there appealing.
How does is sound to you? Do you think you could do something like that? Let me show you why this works. If you are not on the North Sea TikTok videos you are missing out. These videos are scary as hell, yet, job applications for the jobs went up by 2500% since this random guy (nobody knows who) started the videos. We are all on them lol The motto is: Show me the job skip the crap.
These videos are not a nice polished version of work and perks carefully designed by the marketing department. They are the real thing and believe it or not, people can deal with the real thing. Have a look:
PS: If you want the EE Audit Checklist message me. Or, if you know somebody who would like to redesign their employees' experiences and change the mindset that governs these old-school practices I would appreciate the connection. HR has changed, and we are here to help them because nobody is helping them let's be fair. We just all blame them.
In the meantime, answer those questions and see whether your organisation gives a thought about EE or just looking after their processes.
