Your Career Site Is a Marketplace — Learn to Bring in Consumers
I mention this because Amazon (and its subsidiaries, obviously) is a deft hunter when it comes to online marketing. It knows what you want, and it’s going to use that information to follow you across the Internet in the hopes that it will bring you back for another purchase.
And, honestly? I always come back. You probably do, too.
According to Will Staney, Glassdoor’s head talent warrior, recruiters can learn a lot from Amazon’s multi-channel approach to marketing. “We’ve now moved into more of a two-way conversation, not just in recruiting, but in business and the way we communicate with customers,” he says.
For example: I went to audible and bought a book. I made the first contact. Audible started a dialogue: it found me on social media asked me what else I wanted; it gave me suggestions based on my previous purchase. Now, it’s my turn to keep the conversation going.
“We can apply that consumerization to recruiting as well,” Staney says. “Before it was just your career site. You had to wait for candidates to come to you and tell your story, but now it’s a multi-channel marketing approach, where you’re out there with candidates, pulling them in.”
Staney says we can think of career sites as our Amazon marketplaces, and the way we manage our employer brands online is our targeted marketing. We contact candidates via various social media channels and try to pull them into the marketplace, where a transaction can happen — in this case, the transaction is applying to a job, rather than buying a product. Still, the logic is the same.
The key difference between Amazon’s marketing and companies’ recruiting is that Amazon knows what individual consumers want. It uses previous purchases to spark your interests and bring you back. Employers, on the other hand, aren’t as good at giving candidates what they want.
What Do Job Seekers Want to Know?
According to a recent survey conducted by Glassdoor, most job seekers researching employer brands online are looking for one major detail: what makes the company an attractive place to work? In fact, 76 percent of surveyed job seekers were looking for that information.
In fact, details like compensation (70 percent looked for this); benefits (62 percent); the company’s mission, vision, and values, (60 percent); and “basic company information,” like number of employees and locations of offices (55 percent), were significantly less important to job seekers, on the whole.
“It seems that the things people are really looking at when researching a company is really trying to figure out what it’s going to be like to work there,” Staney says.
The problem, Staney says, is that traditional career sites do not offer job seekers the information they really crave. These career sites are often too job-focused, emphasizing the sort of basic company information and position details that many job seekers don’t care as much about (not that job seekers don’t care about these things — just that they care a lot more about what it’s like to work for you).
How Do We Give Job Seekers What They Want?
If employers want to be more like Amazon, they’ll need to follow in Amazon’s footsteps: engage with people across the Internet; bring them to your marketplace by giving them what they want.
So, how does an employer show candidates what makes it an attractive place to work?
Staney says it’s all about telling authentic stories: create spaces online — especially on social media — where employees can share their experiences and insights with potential candidates.
“Candidates can tell when it’s not authentic, or when it’s just marketing,” Staney cautions — so make sure employees are allowed to be truthful and honestly passionate. In other words: don’t script their stories and make them dance like puppets.
But employee perspectives are only half of the story, Staney says. Job seekers agree: 89 percent of them value the employer’s perspective when researching brands.
Employers are in a better position to talk about the overall culture of the company, Staney explains: “Where an individual can only tell their story, a company can tell many different employees’ stories, which together, I think, create the employer brand and the culture of what it’s like to work there.”
Job seekers often have a much easier time finding employee perspectives, even if a given employer isn’t sharing their authentic stories. After all, sites like Glassdoor exist, which allow employees to review their companies openly and honestly. How can employers balance the story, then?
Staney’s advice: employers should engage with and respond to these employee reviews! He explains:
“Let’s say you have a negative review from someone who had a bad interview experience. You address that issue, and you implement some hiring manager training. You go back and respond to that review and say, ‘Thank you for your feedback — because of you, we actually improved our hiring manager training, so this shouldn’t be a problem anymore.’
What was a negative review becomes something even more valuable than a positive review. What you’re showing is that you’re not perfect. You change and listen to what people, employees, and candidates are saying, and make changes. That’s the kind of company people want to work for, because nobody goes into looking for a job or researching a company thinking that any of them are perfect. What they’re more attracted to is when the company admits that they’re not [perfect], but are proactive to be better and better as they go.”
As a final note, we’d do well to remember that Amazon’s multi-channel marketing is so successful because it’s highly targeted. Employers need to be just as precise, Staney says.
“Do your research and understand the kind of people who culturally would succeed at your company, and find out where they are [online],” he says. “If you know where you’re audience is and you know some cultural information, you can target that.”