While he focused on finding opportunities that would fit his skills and interests, I was noting some potholes developing in our user journey.

Obviously, we’d expected that the availability of jobs would drop because of the pandemic—even for software engineers. But I was interested by the approach that companies had taken to this on their websites.

Those companies who were still recruiting had mostly taken the time to explain on their web pages how the pandemic would affect the recruitment process—video interviews instead of group assessment centres, for instance. Often, they talked about how the pandemic might mean remote working. This is helpful to the candidate and shows a realistic and practical approach.

Some companies chose to put a banner at the top of relevant pages, inviting the visitor to find out more about the company’s response to the pandemic. Some companies added content to each page as a lead-in paragraph.

However, some of the companies that would normally recruit graduates, but had put in place a recruitment freeze were less helpful.

Dead-ending the candidate journey

Some of the companies who were no longer recruiting simply didn’t show any relevant jobs on the job search page. ‘Apply Now’ links from the usual pages about the graduate programme to the job search pages worked, but there were no jobs available.

• Suggestion: put a message at the top of the graduate pages to indicate that there is a recruitment freeze due to the pandemic. Bonus points for an indication of when recruitment might restart.

Some replaced the ‘Apply Now’ button with a button saying ‘Express Interest’. This enables the company to continue to build their talent pool and potentially identify outstanding candidates for future recruitment. It also lets the potential applicant know that there is no job open at the moment.

• Suggestion: invite your potential candidates to express interest—don’t let them fall into a black hole

A few companies had deliberately broken the links to the relevant pages, so that when we clicked a link to find out more about a specific graduate programme, it went nowhere. This wasn’t a 404: someone had edited the link and stripped out the destination, so that it simply reloaded the same page.

• Suggestion: create a single page that says ‘sorry, we have had to stop recruitment for the duration of the pandemic – please check back later’ and link there. This would involve only minimal extra work but, importantly, doesn’t create a hole in the website, or a dead-end in the user journey.

Another set of companies had decided it would be better to leave the relevant page in place, but to remove the content—so that we saw a header and a blank page. This leaves all the pages and links in place but is not at all helpful to the candidate.

• Suggestion: provide an explanation instead of a blank page – or redirect to a single page as above.

Patching up and making do in a recruitment freeze

This pandemic is difficult for everyone, and you are probably shorthanded.

But be helpful to the job hunter, especially if your recruitment pause is unusual. Tell them that you are not recruiting up front—don’t hide it.

If nothing else, being helpful and honest will support your employer brand.

• Bonus suggestion: put the dress code for video interviews in the FAQ, especially for developers. Most technical interviews conducted by software engineers are, in our experience, conducted in casual clothes – typically t shirts and jeans. But what if the technical interview is for a bank? Do things change if it’s all online, and not in-person? Letting the applicant know what is expected in your company is helpful to them, and reduces the number of emails to you asking about the dress code—win:win.

 Is the COVID-19 freeze leaving potholes in your recruitment website?

Job seekers’ behaviour on corporate websites, especially graduates, is probably not what you’d expect. Listening to the research that Max has done would lead you to re-evaluate where you focus your online careers efforts. And when the job-seeker does get to your content, the thing they really value is authenticity.

It’s a brave company that allows employees to be authentically themselves while representing the corporate brand. And yet, in this new world of social media, this may be the best way to attract potential candidates, by conveying the corporate culture in the natural voices of current employees.

Max believes that social media and networking technologies are in the middle of – or perhaps only at the beginning of – changing massively how organisations connect with everybody, especially jobseekers.

He talks about actions some of the more adventurous companies are already taking, and the opportunities for firms to steal a competitive advantage by taking the next step forward.

Do listen: the interview is full of valuable pickings gleaned from the coalface of careers communication: the way candidates view companies; how they use the corporate website and social media in practice; and the reality of recruitment pressures.

I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.

Part 1: Change, choice and channels

Key topics:

• ever-increasing choice of channels
• wide-spread availability of information about people’s experiences within companies
• reduced trust in employer communication

Soundbite:

“The world has changed from one where corporate communications could control the brand, control the message… all they can do these days is really engage, participate and influence.”

Part 2: Facing the fear and doing it anyway

Key topics:

• where to start
• overcoming the corporate fear of:
  • conversational overload
  • brand-threatening conversation
• the benefits of social media for promoting employer brand

Soundbites:

“[some companies] lock their pages down so that students can’t engage… that’s actually a big turn-off and I think massively limits the power of the medium.”

“Having sat on that side, planning those activities, I know full well what the concerns are… but the reality of it is quite different”

“If you’re talking about [communicating with] university students, then really Facebook has got to be one of the primary platforms, because [of the] 650 million people […] and all university students, pretty much, using it”

“In the year that Ernst and Young began its Facebook activity, they had a massive jump up the Universum rankings, I think they got to the top, or very close to the top.”

Part 3: Employer differentiation and corporate culture

Key points:

• importance of people in conveying culture
• using home-grown advocates to connect
• using LinkedIn to connect: know your audience

Soundbites:

“By the time [students] have seen three or four [milkround] presentations, they can’t remember who’s who, or what’s what! And what they fall back on, and this is why face-to-face continues to be arguably the most important channel, is ‘Did I like the people?’ ”

“The reality is, if you empower an employee to speak on your behalf… they’re not going to say negative things. They’re going to be positive”

Part 4: Employer Brand and Values

Key topics:

• relationship between employer brand and corporate brand
• relationship between employer brand and corporate values
• how best to use advocates to communicate values

Soundbites:

“There’s value in trying to understand who you are, and trying to express that. But there’s a real danger that it becomes very manufactured [and that is] an increasingly big turn-off to candidates who really are interested in authenticity.”

“If you let employees talk about their experience authentically… those things [values and culture] will shine through.”

Part 5: Employer brand online: corporate website vs Facebook

Key topics:

• behaviour of students in usability tests of the corporate website
• migration of the careers site towards Facebook

Soundbites:

“[On their first visit] university students pretty much didn’t go to the careers website… They did come and visit the site for one thing, and one thing only. And that’s to make an application… They wouldn’t come back at all unless they got some kind of positive response from us.”

“There’s a number of studies that show that if you’re two clicks away from Facebook, you lose half the people.”

“The web is shrinking, apart from social, which is great. And you see a trend now where you see big employers actually moving their careers site, almost lock, stock and barrel, into Facebook”

Part 6: Evolution, ethics and expenditure

Key topics:

• evolution of the employee profile
• Facebook, privacy and ethics
• where to put the corporate budget?

Soundbite:

“The single most powerful thing is campus events… this is an opportunity with social to really viralise your content and your messages.”

“So when you go on campus, and you’re going to do a campus event, for goodness sake, take some pictures, post some pictures up, get people tagging themselves. Encourage candidates to do it. And actually, because the more authentic it is, the better, actually: shoot some video. Get some vox pops saying, ‘What do you think?’ ”

Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.

Many thanks to Max for taking the time to talk to Paul.

Who were we speaking to?

Formerly Global Head of Employer Brand at Credit Suisse Max Heywood has spent the last 10 years running Talent Attraction programs for Investment Banks, previously JPMorgan, HSBC and UBS.

His experience is centred in graduate recruitment but also includes experienced professional recruitment, internal mobility initiatives, HR and employee communications, HR systems and HR transformation programs. He began his career as an account manager at EURO RSCG, and went on to successfully co-found his own digital marketing agency, before moving across to the client side to manage global agency partnerships and run recruitment marketing operations.

Max is an enthusiastic advocate of Social Media for recruiting, and has been active across all of the major social networks for some time.

 Employer Brand, Culture and Authenticity: Interview with Max Heywood

A television ad has been running in the U.S. to promote disability/diversity awareness.  Watch the spot online if you haven’t seen it—but basically, it’s a running (or actually, rolling) gag in which an African American woman in a wheelchair goes through the hallways of her workplace, commenting into the camera about the many types of “different” people in the office.

One of her co-workers is “Fashion Deficient,” another is “Copy Incapable,” and a third has “Volume Control Syndrome.”  But, explains the narrator, no one in the office is concerned about labels (not even her own label, which turns out to be “Coffee-making Impaired”) because everyone is appreciated for their individual skills and contributions.  A voiceover at the end says “Labels get in the way.  Disabilities rarely do.”  The viewer is invited to visit thinkbeyondthelabel.com, a website designed to educate decision-makers.

This ad is part of a $4 million campaign that will appear on television, in print, on the web and on billboards, according to the group Health and Disability Advocates (HDA).  “The goal of the humorous, edgy campaign,” according to HDA, “ is to change attitudes about hiring people with disabilities, raising awareness of the need for diversity in the workplace, and countering stereotypes about people with disabilities.”

A New York Times story on the campaign explains that “the ads are being financed largely by agencies in 30 states that provide employment services as well as health and human services to their citizens who are disabled. The agencies have set a goal of raising $10 million for the campaign’s budget for the full year.”  HDA spearheads this coalition, which has chosen to use a bold marketing approach rather than depending on Public Service Announcements to get their point across.  According to the Times story, the campaign—which is targeted toward senior management, HR staff, and hiring managers—is intended to be “on that fine line of provocative but not polarizing.”

The campaign apparently tested well, and I haven’t found any information about response levels in the couple of months since it launched.  I’m honestly not sure whether it’s a good idea or not.  But I will say this:  I really, really doubt that a “humorous” approach to disability/diversity would go down well on the corporate website, or in a board room, or—well, I just can’t think of a real workplace context in which this approach would seem acceptable.

And maybe that’s okay, since advertising is a special category of communication, with its own rules and goals.  But on the other hand, maybe there can be too much of a disconnect . . .

 Can “Disability Humor” Really Work?

So how can you avoid the boilerplate text, and demonstrate that – for your company – diversity really is important, and that you truly do try to treat everyone equally?

Companies take different approaches to try and communicate the importance of ‘diversity and inclusion’. Here are a few examples of how to add some interesting extra material on this subject…

• Safety: Everybody’s voice should be heard

  In their Careers section, Weir Group have posted a video of their Finance Director discussing the importance of diversity for innovation, but also discussing the importance of diversity in the supply chain with one of their key customers, EDF.

  Interestingly, in this video, Janet Hogben, the Chief People Officer of EDF, talks about the importance of inclusion for a safety culture, so that everyone can feel they can speak up and be heard if they see a safety problem.

• Health: Everybody needs to be considered

  Novartis also discuss diversity and inclusion in their Careers section, and offer a Diversity and Inclusion Report with interviews from senior management about how diversity and inclusion is embedded in the organisation’s values and behaviours.

  They also discuss how important inclusion is when developing medicines, to be sure that the medicines are suitable for all.

• Zero-Intolerance: Build a dynamic team

  Yara explain their ‘zero-intolerance’ philosophy on this issue in their Careers section.

  It’s interesting to see that one aspect of their approach is to deliberately secure ‘complementary skills sets, taking key factors such as gender, nationality, age, education and experience into the mix to build dynamic teams’.

• More than compliance: it’s in our DNA

  In their Careers section, Corning’s focus is on innovation. Refreshingly, they say that their diversity initiative began as a compliance-focused effort – but that now it has grown into a strategic advantage and a celebration of diversity and inclusion on a global scale.

  They include a leadership message, a diversity brochure, a one-pager (in multiple languages) and an annual diversity report.

• Thought leadership: diversity breeds innovation

  Rather than being in the Careers section, Merck’s diversity pages are in a ‘Topics and Viewpoints’ section in the Media pages of the corporate website. The diversity page is based around research that shows that companies which attach a high degree of importance to diversity are demonstrably more innovative than those with a more homogenous workforce. It includes:

  • A video from a roundtable discussion with over 20 leading German companies emphasizing the importance of acceptance of diversity and corporate culture
  • A summary of the research conducted by the CTI
  • A press kit covering the study, and packed with useful documents

  Merck aim to foster diversity, and have given responsibility to a member of the Executive Board, as well as appointing a Chief Diversity Officer. The section on The Merck Way explains how diversity is integral to their values and culture.

• Bring your experiences to the table

  On the main US diversity page, the Why IBM Works video is posted; we’ve talked about this one before, but it is always moving.

  They also offer a section on their diversity heritage, and (unusually) a tab of diversity news, as well as a copy of a diversity brochure and a letter from the IBM chairman and chief executive.

  Note that IBM have a YouTube channel devoted to IBM and diversity.

• Recruiting, targets and Board level involvement

  In the Careers section of the BP corporate website, there is an explanation about how the BP executive team tracks progress against their diversity and inclusion targets quarterly, as well as results against their targets (for example, 74% of employees believe that managers seek out diverse views from their teams).

  “The more diverse we are, the more successful we’ll be”

  In the Sustainability section, BP describe their diversity and inclusion ambitions and progress, and explain that when recruiting they aim for a balanced selection panel, and try to ensure that their diversity ambitions are reflected when selecting qualified candidates for consideration.

• Employee experience: including the taboo topics

  ScotiaBank offer an interesting PDF of their diversity history. They also include transcripts of various employee experiences, from immigrants to people with mental health illnesses. Sometimes mental health issues are not discussed, so it’s great to see this out in the open on a corporate website.

• Employee surveys: what do they really think?

  EY survey their people every two years, and include questions on inclusiveness, respect, teamwork and career progression. They present the resulting statistics online.

So there are options beyond simply posting a boilerplate statement that you support equal rights and diversity, and showing what awards you’ve won. Which would work for you?

***

This post is part of Blog Action Day, which this year is discussing inequality.

Previous contributions to Blog Action Day have been:
2013: Communicating Human Rights
2012: One Plus One Can Be Greater Than Two
2011: Lessons From Food Security: Telling Us What Matters
2010: Mixing Oil and Water
2009: Climate change and the corporate site
2008: Celebrating the FTSE 100: action on the breadline
2007: Enticing the green investor

 Recruitment and Equality: Diversity and Inclusion

However, the market for gap-year internships is incredibly competitive, not just because of the high demand for the top positions, but because of the low supply of serious placements available. Yet, a gap-year intern could make a massive difference not just to your long-term recruitment prospects but also could really contribute to your short-term business presence. Tempted? You should be…

Bright, Fresh and Flexible
Most gap-year students have no expectations, no experience and a lot of ambition. If you want to shape a particular role for someone in the short-term, it’s a perfect opportunity to take someone in, train them in the right skills and then there’s a fixed leaving date. Gap year interns see things from a new perspective that graduates just don’t and this can be a massive help on a short contract deal.

Happy to Chip In
Gap year students will expect to do their fair share of photocopying, tea making and number crunching and, provide you combine this workload with a healthy dose of productive and genuinely important work, you can really take the admin load off your existing staff. Those with a Masters degree in Business Finance may be less inclined to run off to the printers for an afternoon.

Ready Made IT Experts
It’s not too much of a generalisation to say that anyone born after around 1995 is going to be pretty savvy when it comes to Facebook, Twitter and social media, and almost all interns will be very comfortable. Their demographic and experience may well offer you some great ideas and a fresh perspective on your social media.

A Marketing Tool in Itself
Taking on gap-year interns shows not only to other businesses but to graduates that you’re serious about your workforce planning. Most gap year students will end up as graduates and, if the experience is positive, they will tell all of their colleagues about the great firm they’re going to work for. Nothing is stronger than word of mouth recommendations like that.

Undoubtedly there are risks involved in taking on gap year students, many of which can be mitigated by a strict interview process and ensuring you have very high selection standards. It might take your intern some time to adjust to the 9-5, but invest time and effort and you could be surprisingly rewarded.

 Gap Year Interns: The New Graduates?