HR is rarely the best Messenger for your Recruitment Campaigns!

Have you noticed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find and retain candidates for your most important positions? Has it become challenging to even quickly fill roles that used to receive dozens of qualified CVs in response to your ads?

Congratulations! You are ahead of many others who still fail to recognize that the job market has turned and the decision making scale has tipped in favor of job seekers. Posting a bland job description on the same job board you have been using for the past decade, listing 20 requirements and conducting an authoritative interview that sends you on a power trip no longer works. So what to do?

Fiona Buell from Aldo Group joined us at the #NewSchoolHiring event to share Aldo’s innovative approach to using storytelling to engage potential candidates. According to her, HR is rarely the best messenger for your recruitment campaigns. Who is? Your employees!

Let me ask you a question. Who represents your company at job fairs, open houses and during on-campus recruitment campaigns? My guess would be it is your Talent Acquisition Team. Well, Aldo Group takes a different approach. Placing key importance on matching the message with the messenger, they walk the walk and engage their staff in representing Aldo to potential job seekers. When looking for interns, they let one of their former interns whose position grew into a permanent role do the speaking. When hiring for the Marketing team during an on-campus campaign, they bring an employee who is a former grad from that particular university to speak about his or her experience. Tasked with the ongoing challenge of mass recruitment for their retail locations, Aldo launched a competition that had their employees upload self-made videos on social media essentially “selling” the company’s employer brand. After Fiona played one such video, the audience erupted in applause. Profoundly effective and all she did was let someone else do the talking!

As Fiona said: “We need to start treating our candidates as we do our customers”. Your marketing department reaches customers via storytelling, media campaigns and the use of testimonials. Your HR team needs to take a step back, craft a strategic campaign and choose the best media to deliver your employer branding message to reach your candidates. Are you ready to relinquish the power and let someone else be the messenger?