How to attract talents in the changing times?

With many of our clients having trouble finding great hires lately, I started thinking a little about the whole Employer Branding question.

Attracting talent is a problem many companies, even the most successful ones, are facing.

It was a hassle pre-COVID, but it’s only gotten worse ever since, as talents are now even more free to work remote at any company or country.

That said, in essence, it is not an impossible mission for any company to attract talent — as long as they actually focus some of their efforts on this.

In my experience, the problem for most companies is that their name is mainly reflected in content aimed at the end customers or within the lists of conference participants and professional associations. However, most of this is not consumed by the potential employees.

At the same time, most companies are working on somewhat boring products that do not create a wow effect in future workers. Yes, these products are important for their clients and could be the underlying infrastructure for most of us. But that is often not enough to attract talent.

From my interactions with developers, marketers and people from other operational roles, I see that most of them primarily consume industry-specific content that is either international or presented at some niche local events. Thus companies must invest in activities that might not help them attract new clients but reach prospective employees.

Meanwhile, one should note that most people prefer to work in well-known big companies (looking for security) or fierce young startups (hoping to win a lottery, #options). So unless your company already attracts talent, you also need to warp the reality so that people would perceive you as belonging to one of those two groups.

In theory, every company already has at least one exciting product in their offering that attracts existing clients. Therefore it might make sense to start building your employer branding around that particular product, not the whole company itself. However, this is probably not enough, and thus it is crucial to do other activities that reach the potential new employees.

Focus on creating a tempting office company culture.

In the past, I’ve constantly pointed out that, in general, employees today are no just looking for someone to pay them a wage. In addition, they expect the work to be fulfilling and the workplace to give them other perks. Thus, in a way, the companies also have to become a “leisure time agency” that helps people experience more excitement in their life.

Of course, people have their personal lives within which they spend time with their families and friends. However, with any work consuming a meaningful amount of time from people’s lives, they kind of expect to build strong relationships within the organisation. But they cannot always do it without some help from the upper management with whom they also need to build relationships anyway.

Either way, it makes sense to offer various perks to people, as it helps retain them. But not only, as anyone hopping from one employer to another wants to ensure they still get comparable perks at the new place, then anything offered also acts as an employer branding opportunity.

This brings us to the specific activities…

As long as we believe that most of us will return to the office in the future, then all the past perks will go.

• Healthy snacks & drinks in the kitchen.
• Sports & health benefits.
• Conference tickets & foreign trips.
• Additional holidays & sabbaticals.
• Other corporate gifts.
• All kinds of events.

At the same time, it does seem that the future is moving more and more in the direction of remote (or at least hybrid).

For example, I just learned that one Estonian company with a great employer brand has now decided it does not make sense competing for the talent locally, so they started only hiring remotely.

Thus the perks also need to change to support remote teams better. For example, here are some ideas for remote perks:

• Organise annual or bi-quarterly international gatherings for the whole team.
• Organise quarterly or monthly international gatherings for smaller teams.
• Subscribe everyone to a monthly or weekly box of healthy snacks & drinks.
• Provide international sports & health benefits, or hire a coach for weekly team training sessions.
• Send those corporate gifts to the employees’ homes.
• And organise all kinds of virtual events and experiences.

The important part is that all of this would get recorded and shared within relevant channels so that potential employees would also see it happening.

Create content that is targeted towards potential employees.

Even if the company builds excellent products and offers various perks to employees, creating content that actually reaches the necessary people is still crucial.

1. The easiest way to start creating content that supports employer branding is to go to an industry-specific niche conference and talk about topics connected with your offerings while also being educative to prospective workers.
   In addition, also create written, video and audio content on the same topics and share it within relevant communities.
   E.g. if you’re looking for developers, then make sure you collaborate with the Algorütm podcast that targets developers explicitly.
2. If you are willing to put more effort into it, start organising the so-called [Insert Your Company Name] University.
   Not only does it enable you to educate your existing team members, but it also allows you to invite outside people to these events or the online environment in which you publish content that can be read, listened and watched.
   In the end, it is almost the same as in the first one, but you have more control over the content and the other participants.
3. Going further along, it makes sense to organise (better in terms of control) or sponsor various hackathons and other challenges.
   In addition to being a great promotional opportunity, these events also provide an immediate opportunity to test the skills of the potential new team members. But it also requires that you put out prizes that might be given out to those who may not end up joining the team.
4. Last but not least, people love parties and other non-work-related events and competitions.
   Again, ideally, it makes sense to organise those by yourself, but they can also be done as part of another event, e.g. Latitude59 or sTARTUp Day.

All of those are great things to test out, but obviously, every company is different, and thus, not all of them might suit you. The important thing is to simply start doing something new and try to reach the potential employees.

Or simply train the employees on site.

Obviously, there are people all around us, and if it seems that we cannot attract the relevant talent, perhaps it makes sense to train them on site.

Of course, this means investing quite a lot of resources without immediate results. However, it solves the issues in the longer term as long as you can retain the people once they are trained.

Either way, the options are to either:

• Hire interns or junior level people and train them on-site.
• Or work with universities and vocational schools by supporting these institutions in exchange for sending talents your way.
• Or giving our scholarships to find students with the highest potential and with whom you can sign fixed-term employment contracts for at least 1–2 years.

In general, it is certain that to hire great talent, you need to do something extra, in addition to just paying HR companies or Google and LinkedIn. Ideally, it starts by making employer branding one of your focus areas.