Plural’s Head of HR and Talent Charlotte Llewellyn spoke with Adrina August, Employer Brand Manager at Greenhouse, about candidate experience best practice.
What is employer branding?
CIPD research defines an employer brand as:
“…a set of attributes and qualities, often intangible, that makes an organisation distinctive, promises a particular kind of employment experience, and appeals to those people who will thrive and perform best in its culture”
Why is employer branding so important?
We’ve been coming out of one of the most competitive job markets in a long time in the UK which has brought great opportunities for candidates. An increasingly globalised labour market, virtual roles and low unemployment has created strong competition for talent. This has started to ease off a little in 2023 with some high-profile workforce reductions.
Nevertheless, employers have faced a tough market over the last couple of years. Therefore, creating and maintaining a consistently strong employer brand has been an important way to attract the best talent. It really encapsulates the importance of differentiating your business from competitors and representing a true picture of your organisation.
You’d like employees to stay a long time and thrive in the role, so representing your culture and roles accurately is vital for both attracting and retaining talent.
What has Plural Strategy implemented to create an exceptional candidate experience?
When I’m considering candidate experience, I focus on the pain points.
Making the application process easy is key
- Candidates can spend a lot of time creating a well-written CV. So when they’re also asked to copy that information into an application form it negates all that effort. So our application process is simple and our portal captures relevant data.
- In addition, we scrapped cover letters. We find that people want a chat about why they want the role at the interview stage rather than writing an essay on it earlier in the application process. For some roles we have some targeted questions with clear guidelines on how to answer, in place of a cover letter, later in the application process
- You can apply for a Plural Strategy job in 2 minutes so it’s really quick and easy!
Communication is another common pain point for candidates
- You can spend all this time applying for a job and you never hear back and it’s so frustrating!
- So, having a timely communication process is really important to us, at all stages of a candidate’s application.
Providing valuable feedback
- We think it’s really important that if someone is giving their time for an interview, that they get some great feedback.
- We offer feedback at interview stage, even for candidates who didn’t get the job and for those going to the next round to help them improve!
- We’ve even had people who’ve not been successful in their application with us use their interview feedback, reapplied, and secured a role with us later down the line.
- Feedback is one of our key pillars and is a valuable way to show Plural’s culture. It’s an absolute representation of our brand.
Transparency
- Salary transparency laws are going into place across the world which is great for diversity and making sure everyone is going in with fair expectations of salary. At Plural we introduced clear salaries on our roles globally before that law came in for any of our geographies because we really believe in it.
- Internally we are also transparent with salary bandings and trajectory timeline expectations for our roles.
- Without clear expectations of the role and reward, you’re more likely to have disengaged employees.
By creating a positive candidate experience, you are also creating a pipeline of future talent.
