As labor shortages remain a concern for CEOs, a Gartner survey of more than 800 HR leaders listed recruiting as one of their top priorities for 2023. When there’s an urgent hiring need, it’s tempting to fill the position with the first qualified candidate who comes along. However, as we all know, successful recruitment is not as simple as finding people with the right skill sets.

You’ve likely heard the advice, “Train for skill; hire for culture.” It means that a good culture fit is an essential consideration for a successful hire. So if you have to choose between someone who has all the right skills but isn’t a good fit culturally and someone who has some skill gaps but seems to be more of a culture fit, which candidate should you go with? Research shows the latter is the better choice. Why? It’s easier to develop someone’s skills than to try to change their values and belief system.

In a time of uncertainty, resilience matters, and top talent is critical. As many as 84% of recruiters recently surveyed said that culture has become a prominent factor in the selection process. One survey participant said, “It is not only recruiters who increasingly recognize the importance of culture fit. It has become a growing concern among employees themselves, particularly Gen Y [millennials], many of whom look beyond job content to scrutinize more closely whether they will experience a good fit with their new employer.”

Every organizational culture is unique and not suited to everyone. The key is to find candidates who have similar values, believe in your brand purpose, and are proud to be part of your organization because of what you stand for. We call this brand pride, and it’s a powerful motivator.

BRAND PRIDE IMPROVES PERFORMANCE

Candidates or employees whose beliefs are aligned with the organization’s purpose and corresponding behavior norms are more likely to have a good experience, stay with the organization longer, and be more engaged and productive. A cohesive culture creates brand pride—a powerful emotion that can unite teams and individuals across the organization, create a sense of collective connectedness, and go beyond the employee experience to positively impact the customer experience.

If you’ve ever been in a cultural environment that was not a fit for you, you know firsthand what an uncomfortable and dissonant experience it can be. You feel confused, uncertain, and disconnected from who you are and what you believe in. On the other hand, if you’re in an environment that connects you to your truth, you feel exhilarated, and nothing can stop you.

Culture is something you feel. It is ingrained in who you are collectively as an organization. And ultimately, it translates into individual and organizational performance. Research has proven that organizations that consistently live their values and ignite brand pride outperform their competition.

With that in mind, here are 5 steps to successful recruitment:

According to SHRM, most business executives list improving employee engagement as one of their top-five business strategies. In today’s remote and hybrid work environments, this is top-of-mind more than ever as organizations struggle to keep their cultures alive and their teams connected beyond office walls. 

A recent Gallup poll of 14,705 full-time and part-time U.S. employees found that engagement is at its lowest, with only 32% of employees engaged in 2022, compared to 34% in 2021 and 36% in 2020. It’s trending down, but organizations can do something about it. 

WHY ARE WE ALL SO PREOCCUPIED WITH ENGAGEMENT? 

Not only can engagement drastically affect employee retention, productivity, and loyalty, but it’s also a key link to customer satisfaction, company reputation, and overall business performance. It’s widely accepted and proven that employees who are actively involved and excited about their work and organization are more connected, committed to, and invested in the quality and outcome of their work and their organization’s success. 

At the end of the day, individually engaged employees translate to engaged teams, which in turn translate to the ability to advance important business initiatives and achieve desired business outcomes—regardless of the type of organization and economic conditions. Engaged employees are emotionally invested in committing their energy, time, and talent toward their team and organization’s greater goals. 

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? 

Engagement doesn’t just come from organizations creating opportunities for social connections or perks. Yes, these are nice, of course, and are usually appreciated and contribute to satisfaction, but they’re far from enough. What else then? Although there isn’t a universal list of factors that create employee engagement, most would agree that creating clear job expectations and growth opportunities, as well as getting meaningful and ongoing feedback, mentoring, and recognition from one’s manager are all important. 

Companies are investing billions in HR/employee engagement platforms that help orchestrate communications and feedback. But what about one of the deepest and most emotional levers of engagement? We’re talking about “purpose.” People want purpose and meaning from their work. The paycheck is no longer the top driving factor, and purpose is moving to the top of the list. Having an authentic and inspiring brand purpose your people can rally around is critical to creating employee engagement. 

However, plastering a purpose statement on the wall or your website isn’t good enough. You need to bring personal meaning to it by helping people connect the work they do every day to the organization’s brand purpose. They need to understand why their work matters beyond the product or services they create, make, or sell—how they impact their communities, society, or the environment. And they need to feel connected to each other by that shared purpose. 

This is not a one-time, said-and-done sort of thing. This is about mobilizing your purpose so that it’s reinforced through all that you do. That way, it’s not just nice words framed on the wall, but a living, breathing North Star that guides your organization and your people. 

When launching a new brand, it’s natural to think about external audiences, carefully planning the road map and sequencing of channels and touchpoints for various external segments. However, more and more companies by now have realized that internal audiences should come first and that a successful launch needs to start inside before it can have any chance of being rolled out successfully outside the organization.

According to Gallup, less than half of employees in any industry feel strongly connected to their company’s mission or brand purpose. Not paying attention to your own people can lead to brand disintegration. What do we mean by that? Brand disintegration occurs when employees are out of sync with what your marketing promises, resulting in a customer experience that doesn’t match expectations.

So, how do you successfully launch a new brand inside first and keep it alive well beyond the launch? Below are the five guiding principles we follow and advise our clients on when launching new brands.

Make it inclusive

Experience shows that bottom-up efforts are more successful than initiatives perceived to be imposed from the top down. Involving mid-level managers and informal influencers is especially critical to a successful brand launch. Ensure you let your employees know early on what the organization is up to and why. Give them a voice, and make them part of the process—whether through an employee survey, internal roundtables, interviews, and/or workshops. Include them in defining what makes the brand unique, the values that drive the organization, and how these values translate into behaviors. And don’t be shy about asking their thoughts on the best ways to roll it out internally. They know the culture, realize what will fly and what won’t, and can bring creative ideas to the table. Once they’re part of the process, they’ll take pride in leading the rollout with their co-workers and being brand ambassadors after launch.

Make it real

Clever marketing language and taglines may be hard for employees to understand and relate to. Give deeper meaning to the soundbites by explaining what’s behind the words and how employees play a part in it. Get specific about what it looks like for them in their role, what expectations are, and how behaviors manifest through real examples they can use to guide their daily actions.

Make it cohesive

Integrate your brand and behaviors with your existing vision, mission, and values—if they’re already in place and not changing—and explain how they work together and why they matter. Whether you are launching a new brand purpose, launching new values and new behaviors at the same time, or launching a new brand within an existing framework of values and behaviors, make sure you connect the dots so that they don’t seem like unrelated soundbites that reduce the new brand to being perceived as “the flavor of the day.”

Make it impactful

Having a town hall meeting, brand essence video, “living the brand” book, and branded giveaway is important, but not enough. A launch should be a well-orchestrated process of alignment and buy-in pre-launch, with leadership buy-in, mid-management and influencer enrollment and training, as well as a thoughtful launch event (or series of events for geographically distributed organizations). It should be emotional and experiential, celebrating your people for all that they are and inspiring them to take the brand to a whole new level. Beyond the launch “event,” we encourage you to think about a “launch period” where extra effort is put on “enculturating” your people in the new brand and practicing the new brand behaviors. And, of course, the key is to build ongoing mechanisms to keep it all alive well beyond launch.

Make it count

Hold people accountable to live the brand. Build your evaluation, recognition, and reward systems around your brand purpose, values, and behaviors, embedding them into your employment life cycle—from your Employer Value Proposition and recruitment messaging to your onboarding experience for new employees to ongoing employee engagement programs. Give brand ambassadors the tools to capture and share meaningful stories of employees who embody the brand through their actions in order to reinforce desirable behaviors, and build ongoing recognition and reward mechanisms so the brand becomes an intrinsic part of how people think and behave.

Need help launching your brand inside?

Contact us to start a conversation.

The world of recruiting has transformed over the last five to 10 years, bringing with it a unique set of challenges. With record talent shortages seen around the world, candidates have the upper hand.

No longer are employers calling the shots, and no longer are candidates willing to compromise. A survey queried 39,195 employers in 43 countries and found that 45% can’t find the skills they need, and for organizations larger than 250+ employees, that’s even higher, with a staggering 67% reporting talent shortages in 2018.

Simply put, today’s market is a candidate’s market. And candidates are more discerning, more demanding, and more millennial (that’s a word, right?) than ever as demographics shift. They want it all, and they want it on their terms: a good salary and benefits, to be sure, but also a career filled with purpose and meaning.

It’s such a candidate’s market, in fact, that a new trend has HR professionals scratching their heads: “ghosting.” Ghosting is a term commonly used in one’s personal life to describe the experience of being suddenly unresponsive to communications, and it’s now being used in the professional world. Recruiters and HR professionals are increasingly dealing with vanishing candidates. Not only are candidates simply not showing up to interviews, but new hires aren’t even showing up to work.

What does this all mean for recruiting talent? How can we overcome these obstacles? Keep in mind four vital pillars, outlined below:

Prioritize your EVP and never lose sight of it

If there’s one thing you should take away from this article, it’s the importance of expressing a brand as an employer, offering a rewarding, purpose-filled career with opportunity to advance. Developing and driving awareness of your employer value proposition (EVP) is a prerequisite to finding talent. Brand purpose matters. Ping pong tables and baristas aren’t enough; an EVP must deliver on both the surface and deeper-level value propositions. According to Gartner, organizations that effectively deliver on their EVP can increase new-hire commitment by 30%. That can make an enormous difference on productivity, engagement, and the bottom line.

Know your audience and tailor accordingly

These days, it’s all about millennials. According to Pew Research, Millennials have overtaken Gen X and baby boomers, now comprising more than one-third of the American labor force—making them the largest generation represented. And it’s no secret that millennials are a different beast: They’re uncompromising, bold, and demand a career that’s personally meaningful.

What worked before may not work to attract millennials. So, take your time to really understand your prospective candidate base and hire people who are aligned with your organization’s values and culture. That might mean developing candidate segmentations and/or personas to understand what your audience really values and subsequently crafting tailored messages for that audience.

Go where they are and follow them

Millennials are also extremely tech-driven and discerning. Traditional channels such as job boards and alumni networks are being replaced by social media. A study from the Aberdeen Group revealed that 73% of millennials found their last position through a social media platform. That said, using social media to attract, hire, and advocate for your brand is proving to be extremely effective. Whether putting out branded content that attracts potential hires or using Instagram (as an example) to post about job opportunities, social media is an essential platform for delivering thoughtful messages.

Those messages should be mindful of the candidate journey, utilize retargeting strategies, and not shy away from talking money. That means serving up a purpose-driven message at the start, intended to make people fall in love with the brand, followed by a closing message driven by compensation/benefits to help seal the deal with interested candidates.

Once you’ve got them, leverage them

With millennials spending most of their time on social media, that’s an opportunity for them to become brand advocates. Using paid influencers across these channels is no longer effective because millennials are skeptical of their motives and truthfulness. Instead, millennials listen to friends and families. Studies by Nielsen report that 92% of people will trust recommendations from their personal network over advertising and promotions. In the same vein, a survey by Monster revealed that 65% of respondents would consider a job opportunity if they heard about it through their personal network.

By amplifying employees’ positive experiences and furthering social referral programs, social media can be an excellent word-of-mouth platform that creates advocacy for your brand. Organizations should provide turnkey solutions that make it easy and desirable for employees to promote the company. Formalizing an employee referral program that rewards employees for posting company-related social assets, for example, is an effective way to facilitate advocacy.

The bottom line? Be thoughtful about the employer brand you develop, make sure it’s communicated effectively, and keep your eye on the prize. The road to finding the right talent has changed, but it can be navigated. Done correctly, hiring may prove to be more effective at driving your organization’s success than ever before.

Looking to boost recruitment and strengthen your EVP? Get in touch to start a conversation.

You’ve been working on this M&A for months—maybe even years. The numbers add up. It’s a great fit with your business strategy. And on top of that, the cultures seem aligned. But are they really? Is this your “gut feeling” or do you have data to back it up?

Many executives seem content with a general sense of cultural alignment. But even if this is true at a high level, the way people internalize and make these values their own is likely to be different. Your organization and the organization you’re looking to acquire or merge with may value customer centricity like you do, but despite a high-level common goal, you’ll likely differ in how you define and achieve it. Philosophical alignment is a far cry from cultural alignment.

As companies perform their due diligence, there’s a lot of focus on balance sheets and financial data. But what about the human data? I’m not describing head count and organizational structure here. I’m referring to “culture”—the shared values, beliefs, and assumptions that drive attitudes, behaviors, and meaning in the organization. According to a survey of executives, culture clash is the number-one reason mergers fail to deliver on their promise. So, don’t stop at the superficial cultural similarities between the two organizations, and don’t wait until after the deal is signed to worry about culture. It’ll be too late and will already have had a disruptive impact on the success of the integration.

Proper integration planning needs to include cultural integration. There’s no way around it. And it needs to start with a thorough cultural assessment to identify cultural drivers and understand cultural similarities and differences. Using surveys and assessment tools, you can gain a deeper understanding of the behaviors and work practices around business processes, leadership and management style, and employee attitudes. You can then use the assessment as a guide on how to approach cultural integration.

How will you integrate employees into your culture and what effect will it have on the culture? Or are you going to maintain two separate entities and cultures in order to protect what makes each organization unique and successful? Or are you going to create new values and behaviors for the newly formed entity? Those are all questions you’ll need to address ahead of the transition.

An M&A is not just a business deal. It’s a deal that involves people and, therefore, emotion and angst in the face of change and uncertainty. As employees wonder how the deal will impact them and try to figure out what’s expected of them, how to behave, how to initially survive, and how to succeed in this new organization, authentic two-way communication will be a key component of your cultural integration plan.

But don’t stop at discussing the transition milestones—what’s going to happen when and why—or at sharing transition successes and challenges. Inspire and engage employees at a whole other level, as well. If you’re merging the two organizations, shine light on the “why” of the new organization—what it’ll stand for, the impact it’ll have on the world, and what they’ll be a part of. Inspire your people not just through new career and growth opportunities for themselves, but also with the greater purpose that the combined entities will now share. This is a good time to unveil a new “brand purpose”—your reason for being. Being part of a greater purpose can rally and bring people together like nothing else can. It can help you retain them after the integration and attract the new employees you’ll need for continued success.

Evaluating a merger based only on your balance sheet or your business strategy—while ignoring culture—can have a disastrous impact on the success of your M&A. So, plan ahead and factor in the human side of the transition, keeping in mind the following:

Philosophical alignment is a far cry from cultural alignment.

Culture must be a key component of overall integration planning.

Cultural due diligence should assess cultural drivers, as well as similarities and differences.

Use the cultural assessment results to build your cultural integration plan and define the values and behaviors you want post-integration.

Do more than communicate. Engage your people in dialogue and inspire them with a powerful brand purpose everyone can rally around.