Not to sell the products or services that you deliver – though that would be great, obviously – but to sell your company to future employees.
Assuming that you’ve got the right people in the right jobs for them, and that you’re keeping them happy with interesting work and great prospects – who could possibly be better placed to sell your jobs to this year’s crop of graduates than last year’s?
The more information that job seekers can get about what it is really like to work in your company, what you do and what your company culture is like, the more informed their decision – whether to accept the job offer or to apply in the first place. And the more informed your applicants are, the easier (and cheaper) it is for Human Resources. You don’t really want them to have to spend time filtering out people who haven’t really understood your company, do you? Or to spend hours answering emails and phone calls with questions that could have been answered by the website?
Why not use the website to convey to applicants what your company is all about? One good way of doing this is by using your current employees to recruit the new ones.
One-way communication
Macy’s have short video clips of their employees telling it how it really is. This employee, for instance, explains how she hadn’t realised how numerate and analytical buyers need to be.
Increasingly we see big corporate sites hosting blogs written by the current crop of new recruits, discussing what their new roles are like – and what they’ve learnt about the company and about working life. Cadbury’s blogs include posts from people who haven’t even started work yet; they’re discussing why they applied, and what the process was like.
Two-way communication
And here’s a wonderful example of letting future employees interact with current ones … Intel run a schedule of live chats with people from across their company (different functions, different geographical zones), which they then save to the site for future listeners. Nothing wasted! Their live chats archive goes back to January 2006.
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
I am a member of TheCareerMole.com allows employees to make themselves available to be contacted by job hunters considering applying to my company
Hi Oliver – thanks for dropping by. I’ve heard of TheCareerMole, and it seems like a great idea to me. It gives people the chance to find out what its really like on the inside …