7 steps to Yes: do I want to work here?

Last time I suggested some ideas to help your prospective recruits find out something about what your company does.

Their next step will be to decide whether they would like to work for you.

Step 2: “Would I want to work for this company?”

Answering this question is a chance to sell your corporate culture. What is so special about your company? Why would someone want to work for you, rather than for your competition?

People will want to know about:

• where you are
• what they would be doing
• what training you would provide
• what career path they might expect
• what benefits they might receive
• what other people like them have been doing
• your corporate culture
• your ethical policy
• your policy on diversity
• your relationship with the community
• your views on green issues

Some elements you could consider here include:

• a map of your locations with information about the region, images and a video tour of each location, and use of your current employees talking about what its like to work and play there (whether by video, audio or text)
• a clear explanation of the package and other benefits. You could consider discussing your salary policy, and offering some sample salary paths
• a description of your training schemes, whether there is any progression to professional qualifications (which may or may not be relevant), whether you offer support for people who’d like to do an MBA
• descriptions of both potential and actual career paths
• provide a set of role models from across the organisation, from senior management to mid-level staff and new graduates. Provide profiles of these individuals, perhaps with an interview from them about their careers so far, or what they do in a standard day, and linking to role descriptions and salary bands for the roles they are in.
• provide blogs from new recruits. Some companies provide blogs written by people who haven’t even started yet, but it is more usual for these blogs to cover people in their first year of employment with the company
• increasingly, CSR is important to recruits, particularly the community/environment angle, so explain what you do and how employees can get involved. People want to be able to believe in and trust the organisation that they work for – so give them reasons to like you. Back in 2006 BT said: “Our strong commitment to social responsibility underpins our employer brand and has shown direct benefits in attracting, motivating and retaining good people to work for us. In a recent survey we found that 63 per cent of employees felt more proud to work for BT as a direct result of our CSR activities. Of our recent graduate recruits, 30 per cent identified our social responsibility as a reason to join BT – up from previous years.”

It isn’t easy to convey the corporate culture as a deliberate action. It’s certainly a difficult thing to put down in words (and all too easy to say what you’d like it to be rather than what it is). But you will be conveying the corporate culture with every page on the site, with every image and tool provided to help the visitor, and with every interaction that you have with them.

Are your images all of elderly white males? Do the images truly reflect the diversity of the organisation? If someone contacts you via the site, how do you respond? Are your emails formal or informal? In your audio or video sections, do your colleagues call each other by their first names? Are people wearing suits or ‘smart-casual’? When your web visitors call the numbers on the site, how are they handled? Do the numbers go through to the right people? How about the style of writing on your website – clearly it should be well-written, without spelling or grammar mistakes – but is it written so an outsider can understand it?

Lots to think about. But look at your website with an objective eye, if you can (or ask someone else) – would you want to work for this company?

Author

Lucy Nixon

Website

Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye