Many of those on the job hunt feel adrift, left behind by the culture of their previous workplace, and unsure if they’ll be able to find one any better. If you want to give your business a competitive edge during recruitment, you’ll need to put culture first.
This concept isn’t just speculation, either: workers are desperate for a healthy office environment where they can thrive. Mental and behavioral health services provider Pathways at Work reports that 63% of employees feel ready to leave their current positions to avoid job-related stress. That number translates into an equally large proportion of job seekers looking for a good fit. Here’s how you can show them just how welcoming your culture can be:
1. Paint a picture of company life.
It can be easy to think of culture as something distant and intangible, but it can actually be felt in the daily goings-on of your business. There are a number of different ways to demonstrate your company culture, but one of the best is to let applicants know what their job operations will be. The responsibilities of a software engineer at one company can be wildly different from those at another, and prospective employees will be able to garner quite a bit from such simple info.
It’s even something they’re actively seeking out: research by Gartner found that sharing crucial minutiae such as the kind of work a position involves increases the possibility that an applicant will find the job desirable by 23%. One of the best ways to go about this is by learning from exit interviews. Use the information provided by the person leaving the position to develop a more holistic picture for the person about to fill it — the honesty will attract qualified applicants.
2. Give (virtual) office tours. (attend meetings)
Of course, a simple job description can't sum up a company's entire culture. Your culture is your team, your traditions, and even your office itself. By breaking down walls and letting potential hires see precisely how the sausage is made, you’ll be integrating them into the culture from before day one. It’s no wonder, then, that the majority of job applicants want to learn about culture through office tours, according to a LinkedIn survey.
Unfortunately, not all offices are available for touring just now. Virtual office tours will not always have the same impact but can still offer healthy opportunities for meeting cultural leaders in the workplace. Another possibility is letting applicants sit in on company meetings. While these moments likely won’t show your culture’s playful side, they will give potential employees a helpful experience to compare against previous workplace cultures they've been a part of.
3. Let the team run the interviews.
For some team-oriented cultures, a simple virtual meet-and-greet will not be enough for showing applicants just how synergistic they are. The top-down approach of most job interviews means that very little evidence of culture actually makes it through — interviewees are generally too tense or too focused to see the nuances of your company’s attitudes. Instead of continuing to rely on this outdated model, hand over interview duties to your team instead.
Team-run interviews allow for two things to happen: it ensures that the interview will be composed entirely of questions whose answers are relevant to your operations, and it allows your applicants to learn about the makeup of your workforce and see them in action. Each interview will be like a model team meeting, and the discussions that go the smoothest will be the top candidates — bringing them into the fold before they even start the onboarding process.
4. Maintain an active culture blog.
Businesses generally view their blogs (if they even have one) as an opportunity to draw in new customers and direct general traffic to their site. While blogs are great for this, those aren’t the only things that they can do. Potential employees watch company blogs just as closely as potential customers do: a years-old survey from employment research firm PotentialPark found that 40% of job candidates are blog visitors, and there’s every reason to believe that this number has risen significantly since.
Make your blog an extension of the values present in the office. Write posts about the things for which your business is passionate, but don’t be afraid to embrace your company’s playful side as well. Remote writing Job applicants want sincerity, but they also want to know that they’re signing up for a culture that values happiness, fun, and well-being too. If it helps, you could even encourage employees to contribute to the blog to let readers get a full-scale view of your culture.
5. Make your employees your influencers.
Employee influence doesn’t need to stop at the company blog. There are no better vanguards of your business’s culture than your workers, so why not ask them to show it off? Your company’s digital footprint extends far beyond just your website, and your workers can help ensure that messages about your culture extend to all corners of the internet for 1377x proxy.
It could be through LinkedIn posts, Twitter conversations, or TikTok videos — top-level job applicants will almost always be researching your business through multiple platforms, so rise to the challenge by deploying relevant information on as many platforms as possible. The more your workers make their voices heard online, the more of an impact they will have on potential candidates on candidates; it even implicitly lets them know that they’ll want to spread the word too should they become a part of the team.
It’s hard to know how outsiders will view a culture you are so steeped in — it may even be impossible. All you can do as a leader is spread the word about your culture and trust that those who will work well with it will come knocking.