As a company, you’re trying to use all the lures available to reel in potential candidates for positions you need filled. There are a lot of recruitment tools you can utilize, such as keywords, perks and benefits for job recruitment. However, sometimes these basic things aren’t enough. You have to be ingenious and savvy in different ways. As people’s needs have changed in recent years, so too have their expectations from employers. Consequently, you need to focus more on how potential employees see your company.
One method of doing this is through devising a company brand that separates you from competitors. While that helps, recruits are also looking for what it’s like to be inside the business, and company culture is becoming increasingly important as a primary recruitment tool.
A society in the workplace
Business executive Henry Albrecht defined company culture on the ERE blog as being the values, beliefs and attitudes of a business as a whole. It’s more than just a mission statement that’s found framed on a wall somewhere in the office. Instead, it’s everything about the company, including its vision, mission, philosophy and how they align employees and systems to contribute to the success of everyone involved.
“Company culture defines employer branding, not the other way around.”
While some would consider company culture to be synonymous with branding, it’s more the effect of one leading the other. The latter cannot exist without the former serving as the baseline philosophy. In addition, while the brand can determine how a business appears to potential candidates, the culture shapes other aspects of human resources as well as the organization at large. In the situation of HR, you’re looking at candidates that fit within your culture, based on how they act and what they’ve done. You should be offering a benefits package that matches the corporate values and mission. Every action and expectation should be based on what attitudes are expected on a daily basis.
Filling themselves with culture
However, for potential candidates, it can be very difficult to separate the brand from the culture itself, even if they’re quite different. Often, they rely on whatever information you provide to get an idea on what constitutes the attitudes and values of the business at large. When that is the case, it’s important to match up the branding statements with what’s actually happening on the inside, according to Simply Hired.
“Employees often look at branding statements about the ‘experience of working here’ and compare it to their real life experiences,” Consultant Terra Winston said to Simply Hired.
By maintaining authenticity, candidates will be a lot less likely to be turned off by the company when they get interviewed. What can help in this way is giving your employees some free reign in making branding statements themselves based on their personal experiences working at the company. Giving them some leeway will help them craft stories that candidates can relate to in many ways. In turn, you create a situation that will attract recruits from various different places, granting you control on how you fill your positions. Your company culture is the one recruitment tool that can make attracting candidates easier and better than ever before.
