For problems with your employee experience, press 2…

Sarah Redmond
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

For all the good that technology does, generalising the customer experience isn’t one of them. It’s true for retail, and it’s true for companies. When you think of your “humans” as simply “resources”, you lose everything that makes them a value-add to your business.

There are a lot of ways that experiences can be personalised throughout an employee lifecycle, and it costs far less that the idea of churning through staff and having to put more and more people through a generic process. As a few ideas, here’s how to personalise the recruitment and employment experience.

Pre-Recruitment

Every single person in the job market (whether active or passive) is someone who is watching you. Get your employee value proposition (EVP — your “why you should work with us” story) in order, so that your message is consistent. Follow it up with the ability to personally interact with potentials. Make the effort to get to the careers fairs, meetups, conferences and networking events and publicise where you will be so candidates can find you. Your recruitment team aren’t just there to sift through resumes that have been sent in, they need to “get out there” and find people to proactively fill positions you haven’t yet dreamed about needing. Allow your recruitment team to be your EVP ambassadors and build long term relationship with potential team members.

Recruitment

Assuming that you don’t find the right person through your pre-employment activities, a well written job ad in the right medium, coupled with a proactive search should get you quickly to a point where you can start weeding out the deal breakers. If someone is kicked out at this point, send them an email stating why — they don’t have right to work status or their experience in xyz isn’t sufficient compared to other applicants. State that you realise an email isn’t a fun way to hear bad news, but encourage them to get involved with your recruiters through the EVP programs, and apply again.

As you do shortlist and look for people to come in for interviews, give them a good breakdown of who will be in the room and why, what the focus of the interview is and how they can best prepare (research, linkedin profiles etc). You’ll get the best out of a candidate when you partner with them in the process and don’t treat it as an “us” vs “them” experience. As you shorten the candidates, personalise the emails as much as possible and again, encourage them to stay in touch and involved (maybe an invite to a networking event?)

Train your managers on how to conduct a thorough but meaningful interview process and how to think through a candidates ability to take on one plus one roles (the role being advertised and one role above) — hire potential as well as skill as you want them to grow with you.

Employment

As soon as an offer is accepted, celebrate it! Don’t just send over a contract and ask them to dryly return it, send over a video of their team members saying hello (seriously, an iPhone and 3 minutes is all it takes). Give them access to non-sensitive systems, ask them what their technology requirements are, work with them to choose working hours that suit their life, start them on a Tuesday and be sure that everything they need to be a useful and valid team participant is ready to go before they arrive. If you have a virtual all hands, a team meeting or an offsite, invite them along! They don’t have to accept, but it gives them a warm way in to the company if they do.

Their manager should call them the day prior to their start day to talk through logistics, expectations and answer any final questions they have — it’s courtesy and a good way to be sure they know where they are going.

Personalising an employment experience takes a little more time to get right, but it pays off in lower turnover, higher engagement and lower time to productivity. Plus, you get the best people through the door to drive your business forward.

Sarah Redmond

Written by

I like thinking about enabling better, smarter, more progressive, more thoughtful workplaces which create happier, healthier people. Then I write it down.

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