Does your Talent Acquisition Program have an effective Go-To-Market (GTM) Recruitment Strategy? If your answer is no, especially for those working for smaller brands, read on to learn why this is a missed opportunity! A concise GTM approach that promotes your Employer Brand will enhance the company’s “Curb Appeal” and provide a competitive advantage in the market. Focusing on differentiating your organization from competitors in your ecosystem is vital.
Competition for top talent has never been greater, considering the vast array of job advertising platforms, social media reach, technology automation, and marketing strategies available to employers. Small brands face a monumental challenge when competing against Google, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, and other household names with deep pockets. Competing with giant brands is possible, but you need a clear plan. Use a concise GTM strategy and become intentional about attracting and recruiting talent. Don’t leave anything to chance, as there is less room for error when brand recognition is limited.
Your company’s Employer Brand is an essential component of the talent attraction and recruitment process, and it is a foundational component on which you need to refine your focus when designing a winning GTM strategy. In parallel, work to understand how your firm is perceived in the market and focus on strengthening your image in critical areas to reflect your culture and values more accurately.
Your GTM model acts as a roadmap and a step-by-step process for recruiting talent. Design a series of reusable assets and collateral available online and in the form of PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and similar documents. Now, let’s talk about where to start and cover some of the primary elements that should be included in your GTM strategy.
Employer Value Proposition (EVP). An EVP (and tagline) is a statement that connects the benefits of working for your organization with the company’s mission, goals, and core values. The EVP should be a compelling message (paragraph in length) that employees can replicate to create consistent messaging across job descriptions, career sites, social media landing pages, online profiles, and related collateral.
Company Content and Marketing Collateral. Forge a relationship with your marketing and creative teams to build a significant online presence. Showcase company events and employee images (avoid stock photos), culture and testimonial videos, job marketing graphics, case studies, diversity and inclusion content, workplace accolades, hiring process FAQs, etc.
Easily Accessible Company Information. Inevitably, candidates will research your people and corporate information before applying and during the hiring process. Ensure that online company information is robust and easy to find; if it takes less effort to find tidbits of dated information, candidates will lose interest or come away with a misimpression.
Fresh Online Company Content. Be sure you have relevant, current content on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, your career site, job boards, company pages, or other websites where your company has a profile.
Job Descriptions. If you don’t have a job description template, you should create one that includes company marketing content, core value information, and your EVP. When describing the role, move away from reserved corporate verbiage and build more exciting content to catch the reader’s attention.
Key Differentiators. Equip recruiting team members and hiring stakeholders with a compelling message and marketing content to keep candidates excited and engaged. Differentiate your organization from the competition and share why your firm is an employer of choice.
Competitive Market Research. Research the key competitors in your industry sector to understand their health benefits, 401K matching, time off policy, equity grants, remote work flexibility, and cultural or technological advantages. This type of research prepares recruiters to answer challenging questions and help position critical counterpoints of your company’s strengths.
Candidate Experience. When brand recognition is limited, providing a world-class candidate experience becomes vital. A positive candidate experience begins during the recruitment and interview process and continues through effective onboarding and assimilation programs.
Empathy. Recruiters should share updates, respond to inquiries, and offer a degree of closure to candidates who have invested time interviewing with your organization. Simple human interaction can make a huge difference in a candidate’s experience.
Recruiter Brand, LinkedIn Profile. Your Recruiter Brand is your market-facing image, which can set you apart from the competition. A well-constructed profile lends credibility early in the recruiting process and promotes confidence in your skills. Elevate your brand by posting interesting articles, blogs, reactions, or responses to posts and adding great content to your profile. Ideally, the recruiter’s profile should align with their role – if you recruit technologists, highlight that in your summary and employment experience.
Use these elements to build out your GTM plan in a format that can be shared with the recruiters on the front lines of your hiring programs. Once equipped with a concise step-by-step outline of critical differentiators, they can share this information succinctly and proactively with prospective employees during recruiting calls.
Bringing eminence to your employer brand and building significant collateral for your GTM is a labor of love, and it may only be intuitive for some marketing or creative teams. The support and partnership of those two functions is critical. If the concept is new to your firm, introduce the idea and don’t expect immediate action. Leverage relationships in adjacent departments and build awareness, highlighting the importance of strengthening the company image you are projecting externally. Be tenacious, but recognize that it takes a series of discussions to yield the results you seek.
Whether this strikes you as pushing a boulder uphill or sparks ideas for refinements, don’t expect to accomplish everything overnight. The goal is not to turn a small brand into a household name. You may never see that phenomenon happen. The key is that your talent acquisition program utilizes all advantages to attract talent, continually reinforcing company culture and values by leveraging robust collateral coupled with a well-constructed and compelling narrative. With a robust GTM strategy, your recruiters can become a force of nature and present an irresistible case for joining your organization, one candidate at a time. That is how you beat the big brands!