How to Recruit Talents using Employee Experience (Part 1: Attracting Talents)
How to give a good start for your employee’s journey.
Employee Experience is currently gaining a lot of attention worldwide. According to this article by Charles Rogel, there was a 140% increase for the term “employee experience” on Google Search, and thousands of LinkedIn profiles are starting to be filled with the term “employee experience”. The trend even captured the attention of Indonesian HR communities, that in 2019, Indonesian HR Summit uses it as the main theme. Dubbed “HR Transformation to Win Employee Experience”, this international conference will involve a lot of high ranking figures, starting from government officials, corporate leaders, HR practitioners, and scholars — including Jacob Morgan , one of the leading experts in employee experience.
I’ve written a little about my take on employee experience on my previous post, albeit it leans more on the philosophical side. This time, I will focus more on practical side, more specifically, about attracting employees.
Why Attracting is an Important Part of Employee Experience
In their perspective of employee life cycle, Gallup mentioned that there are seven phases that typically are gone through by an employee during their time in an organization: attract, hire, onboard, engage, perform, develop, and depart. On its core is the “engage” phase, because it channels the fresh recruits (who are still learning about their place in their new role) with achieving performers (who are accustomed to their role and can deliver high results). The phases before it, the attract, hire, and onboard, basically function to convince new recruits to stay and commit to their new jobs. Here are the main questions that are presented by Gallup for each phase:
- Attract — What elements of your culture are you highlighting to attract top talent?
- Hire — Does your hiring process pick stars?
- Onboard — Do you affirm the decision employees made to join you?
Most recruitments will consist of these three phases, but I will focus on attracting talents. Now, the “attract” phase is important because it is the first contact you establish with the public about your company. First impression is often considered important, and it can make or break the chance that someone is applying to your company. This is also the best chance to showcase your company’s brand and align your potential (or new) recruit’s expectation with the brand that you have been promoting.
Tracey Mallet and Matthew Wride, the authors of the book called The Employee Experience: How to Attract Talent, Retain Top Performers, and Drive Results wrote that every employee comes with an expectation. To expect is human, they said, and when an expectation is betrayed, employees will feel angry and suspicious. On the other hands, employees will be satisfied when their expectations are met, and will more likely to be loyal if those expectations are exceeded. According to their experience, expectation gap (or what people have been promised and what they believe they have been promised) is one of the main drivers of employees’ discontents and disengagement. The point is here: you can underpromise, but do not underdeliver.
Employees become attracted to join a company because they have a set of expectations of what they will experience when working in your company. That is why, although we want to give a positive image to the position that we are offering — we are selling that position to those candidates after all — we might not want to go overboard with it since they might develop an unrealistic expectation to your company.
So, with those in mind, here are things that you can do to improve employee experience in attracting talents:
1. Acknowledge the Employee’s Expectation by Applying Empathy from Design Thinking
A lot of articles and books associate employee experience with design thinking, particularly because: one, they share similar human-centered approach, and two, both have a holistic procedure in mind. Design thinking has always been a huge part in the development of CX and UX, and now, it is starting to be adopted as a part of CX development as well. In design thinking, designers (or in this case, the human resources) focus on the need and expectation of an employee to create an integrated system that accommodates the journey of an employee. This is known as “empathy”.
Empathy has always been a staple of design thinking. Tim Brown, the author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation wrote that every design thinking starts with “putting people first”, and no better way in doing this than by understanding their need. Practicing empathy by standing in one’s shoes provides an insight to “understand the world through others’ experiences, and feel the world through their emotion”, which is very crucial in designing both CX and EX.
Deloitte, one of the renowned business consultants, stated in their report called Reimagine and Craft the Employee Experience: Design Thinking in Action that empathy is practiced to understand the unique need of the “HR’s customers” — or in other words, the employees. “High-impact HR organizations,” they wrote, “ create experience strategies to understand who their HR customers are, what they need, and the specific HR experiences that matter most to them”. This is done through a series of interviews, with question focusing on the things that excite them the most about their jobs or their pet peeves. Acknowledging such needs and expectation would be beneficial in defining what kind of employee experience is important for your future employees.
2. Shape Your Potential Employees’ Expectation by Projecting Your Company’s Values and Culture to Your Recruitment Campaign
At the core of employee’s expectation is their beliefs; what they perceive is true about your organization and what they think they will encounter when they join your company. We cannot control how everyone will perceive our company, but we can try to shape their perception by projecting the company’s values and cultures to our company image. Basically, we are trying to give an insight to potential employees about our company, and thus, attract them with it.
Every company believes in different values and operates in different cultures, so making sure that you or your team know what your company believes is deemed crucial. These already existed elements of values and culture will play a role in your employer branding strategy; it is there to ensure that what you are promoting does not differ too much with what already exists in your company.
In addition to culture, you should also ensure that your campaign is aligned with your business and talent strategies. This is what Deloitte recommended when a company is starting an EX-based recruitment campaign. Basically, it is done to minimize any clash or confusion with existing or higher strategies, thus minimizing any expectation gap that might arise. After that, you can use your cultures and strategies to define how your employee experience will look like and start to brand it through brand contract (more on that later). Make use of social media; LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and even Medium can be powerful branding tools.
One way to attract the talents to your organizations is by asking your employees to share their experience of working in your company and package them in the form of digital storytelling. This can be done through numerous ways, such as making a video about your employee’s story (and upload it on YouTube), taking pictures of your employees’ day to day activities (and upload it to Instagram), or asking them to write their personal experiences (and upload it to Medium). GoJek has done this through their Life at Gojek campaign; they have a YouTube, Instagram, and even Medium account. Through these channels, they are trying to capture the experiences of individual employee and present it as his or her own personal story, so that potential applicants will feel connected with their story. Remember, in employee experience, your employees are the hero of their journey!
3. Manage Your Potential Employees’ Expectation through Establishing Brand Contract
A contract, according to Mallet and Wridem, is “ a perceived set of promises that establishes the terms of that relationship”. Every relationship, according to them, is always followed by a contract.
A contract itself is not only “words on paper”, but, more than that, it carries an attempt to align and manage the expectation between employers and employees. It tries to set boundaries between what should be expected and what should not. Some of those expectations are explicit, and some are not clearly expressed — and this is where things get tricky; sometimes, both parties have implicit expectation about each other. This is very normal in a relationship and should be treated as so. Mallet and Wridem themselves said that understanding what made up the contract — or three sub-contracts — will help employers manage what kind of brand and expectations to offer to their potential employees. These three subcontracts are:
- Brand Contract, or how an organization is viewed publicly. This is what a potential employee usually considers when applying to a certain position in a company, or what they expect to encounter before they join a company.
- Transactional Contract, or the mutually accepted and explicit agreement between employees and employers that defnes the basic operating terms of the relationship. This is what most people refer to when they are talking about contract. In addition, this is usually what a potential employee usually considers when accepting an offer from a company, or what they expect to encounter when they join a company.
- Psychological contract or the implicit expectations and obligations that define the terms of exchange in a relationship. This is usually what an already-hired employee considers when staying in a company, or what they expect to encounter during working in a company.
As written there, by using the brand contract, you can manage your potential employee expectation before joining a company. Maylett and Wride suggested using what they called Employee Values Proposition (EVP), which means the “values that an employee receives from an organization in exchange for his or her work”. These added values are the things that would differentiate your organization from the others that capture the attention of any potential talent. They are fundamentally understood by asking these two main questions: why would someone choose to join your organization and why he or she would decide to stay.
An established brand contract will help the company manage and align potential employee’s expectation should he or she join the company. Of course, just like what a customer would experience, the more an organization keeps its brand promise, the more likely he or she would be loyal to them. Violation of a brand contract will make both customers and employees feel betrayed, which would potentially make them feel negative experience, and, eventually, decide to leave the company. A good and strong brand contract will ensure that employees feel safe and rewarded/appreciated for choosing to join a company, and therefore, it is important to maintain the trust between an organization and an employee by preventing any violation of such contract.
Written by Herjuno Tisnoaji for Human Talent. This article is part of the Employee Experience series that will be published periodically at Human Talent.
