Every January many of us consider what we learned the previous year, and then make New Year’s Resolutions about what we can do to improve in the coming year. It’s a great opportunity to reflect back on professional learnings and goals.
I am guilty of making (and sometimes breaking) resolutions each year, although my efforts to stay more hydrated, take time out of my schedule to practice yoga and read more are not in vain. This year, I thought I would share some simple and actionable advice for evaluating and improving your employment brand. Here are a few ideas to consider:
1. Don’t underestimate your Employee Referral Program (ERP)
Your ERP program is a reflection of the health of your employment brand. When employees believe in what they are doing, the business mission and the overall leadership capability, they want to refer those they know (and believe in) to their company. It takes time and effort but Dell’s five year journey of rebuilding and improving our referral program, shows how you can double your referrals and minimize cost significantly.
2. Candidate experience, candidate experience, candidate experience
This April I will be joining a great group of industry leaders in Toronto to share Dell’s candidate experience journey. I plan on sharing everything from evaluating our application experience (and reducing the number of fields by nearly 60 percent), to improving our digital user-experience and using the Talent Board Candidate Experience and Qualtrics survey tool to truly understand what our candidates want from us as a potential employer. Guess what? They don’t want non-mobile friendly applications and they also like to actually hear back from someone with the company!
3. Don’t just post/monitor and listen on social platforms – engage!
Candidates want to ‘peek behind the curtain’ and hear the real scoop about your organization – from both current and former employees and even other candidates. By embracing Glassdoor and electing to be an “Open Company”, Dell is demonstrating the willingness to be transparent and use open platforms that are managed by the community. This isn’t easy and takes guts, and is an important component of our employment brand moving forward. Outside of Glassdoor, there are other opportunities for companies to engage with candidates and followers – check out this post about our social media journey and some of the efforts we are taking to continue the conversations online!
Another key call out? Have a feedback mechanism in place so that the boots-on-the-ground leaders and local HR teams know what people are saying and can consider making changes. To learn more about our industry leaders and what they shared at the Glassdoor Summit, check out this webinar recording.
And finally, I can’t stress enough the importance of engaging with your employees to drive advocacy for your company. Candidates tell us time and time again that they trust what subject matter experts and front line employees have to say more than the PR team, HR or even the CEO. Check out this post by Paul Petrone, writer with LinkedIn about some of the success we have seen at Dell. This isn’t easy –leadership buy-in is required to have a program like we have but it is well worth it.
4. Share something unique about your value proposition
Whether it is unlimited vacation or another enticing benefit, be sure to share and promote the value proposition you provide your employees that is unique to your company.
At Dell, we launched a connected workplace program in 2008 and have a goal of making 50 percent or more of our eligible employees part of a formal connected work arrangement by 2020. A robust flexible program needs top-down support and dedicated program management to support its administration, policy and promotion but the pay-off can be huge.
Our flexible work program is consistently ranked as one of the most meaningful and appreciated programs by our employees. Dell’s employees in a flexible arrangement and those who are part of our formal employee advocacy programs consistently have a higher employee net promoter score (NPS). This proves that employees who are allowed to create a schedule that works for them, their team and their customers are more engaged and have increased motivation and commitment to the company.
To learn more about some of the benefits and experiences of our employees check out this post as well as this follow up post on remote.co featuring some of us that work connected!
I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions so, if you have any resolutions or employment brand stories and for the coming year – please share.