How internal communicators can help bolster corporate recruiting

Unpredictable staffing can dramatically harm your ability to go after new clients and to guarantee high-quality service.

Quite literally, the success of your company hinges on your ability to attract and retain top talent. Communicators play a key role here. Here’s how you can help spearhead change and bolster your corporate recruiting efforts:

Review your employer brand.

You already have an employer brand — whether it’s any good or not is another discussion. As you think about how attractive your company is for candidates, you will, at minimum, want to come up with an employment elevator pitch and some messaging about why you’re better than the competition.

Talk to your recruiters about what’s working and what they need. Then, address weak messaging areas accordingly.

Smooth out the candidate experience.

Like employer branding, candidate experience is a longer conversation, but you can do some basic housekeeping by looking at the application process. Go through your careers site (on a mobile phone, as that’s how many applicants do it), and look for points of friction that might cause a candidate to abandon ship.

Talk to your recruiting team about the tools they use to manage the whole thing — those could also be causing delays, unpleasantness or terrible experiences.

Clean up your job postings.

Most job postings are based on job descriptions, and that generally means both of them are pretty terrible. The point of the job posting is to help candidates understand what it’s like to work there and to help them decide whether or not to apply. If your postings are just dry, jumbled masses of buzzwords, you’re missing an opportunity. Your job descriptions should be vivid and enticing  — exciting, even.

Focus on communicating culture, working conditions and employee experience, versus qualifications and skills. The more video you can use, the better.

Deal with your bad reviews.

Reviews on sites like Indeed and Glassdoor can tank your best recruitment efforts. We know that almost all candidates look at reviews before applying, so it’s pivotal to address pertinent comments. This might seem daunting, but it’s easy to do. First, make sure you are responding to any and all reviews, and not with some robo-response. A human response. Second, encourage your existing employees to post about their experiences to help cancel out any Negative Nellys.

Keep in touch.

Why would we go to all the time and expense of attracting an application and then throw it in the garbage when the candidate either declines or isn’t a fit? If this were a sale, our sales managers’ heads would explode. Oh, wait a minute: it is a sale. We’re selling a job. So we need to do what good sales and marketing teams everywhere do, and that’s fill and nurture our funnel until it’s the right time for that person to re-engage with us.

Wherever your company is in its recruiting journey, make sure you have a seat at the table to support this crucial function. Directly supporting employee onboarding, recruiting and retention is a substantial way communicators can prove the ROI of their efforts.

Elizabeth Williams is managing partner at The Academy of Business Communications, a communications consulting and training organization. Read more of her work her BizMarketer blog.