Do You Really Need That New EVP and Employer Brand Project?

Is your EVP and Employer Brand like driving a Porsche with no engine? I once had a long chat with a federal government agency on their recruitment practices. Giving them some initial tips and advice on their TA function and process flow.

This is a familiar tale of when I first started speaking with them, as with many other corporate clients I serve, asking what their main organisational challenges they were having with their Recruitment. The number one problem they identified was the ability to attract key talent from their industry and get good applications in the first instance. Then they quickly jumped to the EVP conclusion, before really reviewing or analysing what their other TA / Recruitment challenges maybe.

They undertake a knee jerk reaction that they needed to have better (or a new) EVP and Employer Branding messages. And so, will kick off a project or hire someone soon to do this and invest heaps of time and energy into this process. This is the silver bullet, right? New EVP and Employer Brand messaging which will fix everything... Better attraction. Don’t get me wrong - being clear on your EVP and having strong Employer Brand Messages are essential in good recruitment practices for 2024.

However, it’s just one of many things you need to consider and get it right for your recruitment practices and TA function and not the magic pill. I describe it as having “a Porsche with no engine and no fuel”. It may look beautiful on the outside, but in reality, you’re building a nice-looking car that doesn’t actually work and it’s going nowhere fast. When candidates apply, they will soon find out it's all brand and no substance. If the application form or process is poor and slow, if hiring managers give poor interviews, or poor information out and don’t “sell” at the interview. If there is no ATS, not a smooth process, poor candidate experience and no support for hiring managers. If the recruitment process itself is clunky and disjointed, you have no systems or HR Tech in place, no data, poor reporting, or it just takes way too long to get to offer stage. Or the offer process itself and onboarding sucks….

You really need and engine and some oil to make that car go. You’re wasting a lot of time, energy, and resources on looking good when you really need to fix some of the basics first.

Why Care about Fixing the Underlying Recruitment Problems?

Poor Recruitment practices impact organisations in all sorts of ways, especially the bottom line and profits with huge costs and $$ wastage from resource gaps, or poor hire. Including impacting on your Brand and mission statement. Here are eleven reasons just off the top of my head why you need to fix your recruitment operations:

• Time to hire is slow (producing resource and knowledge gaps, high dropout rates)
• Cost per hire is often high (budget blow out on cost centres and projects)
• High use of Agencies or temps to fill all the gaps (potentially millions $ spent)
• Candidate experience is poor (they are your customers too / Brand)
• Quality of hiring is low (poor fit to role, lack of skills, poor culture fit / damages Brand)
• Poor decisions are being made by Hiring Managers (low internal capability)
• Poor quality fit on behaviours and to your culture (values misalignment, disengagement)
• Opportunity costs of having empty seats or wrong fit to role (millions in lost sales / services or poor customer care)
• Business Strategy or Organisational Mission - is not being achieve because of lack of hiring / gaps in resources.
• Service standards are not met (customer care promises not delivered)
• Hiring Managers and HR are all stressed because of a combination the above (burnout)

Think a childcare centre without enough educators to open their doors, a funeral home without enough people to run a funeral and or a Charity without enough Carers to safely look after the children in their care (and time to ensure correct WWC checks not being done…. because of lapses in the recruitment process). Believe me I’ve seen it all.

How to Treat the Causes and not the Symptoms?

Below is a simple nine step guide to undertaking your own Recruitment Review. I’m also going to share how we do it (download the Recruitment Audit Compass and Methodology here). So, in order to look at the underlying problems first before jumping to conclusions and fixes:

1.     Think about undertaking an independent Recruitment Review of your current practices. Ideally someone who sits outside of the Recruitment function and not an IT Vendor or RPO (or EVP) supplier.

2.     Map this out against four key quadrants and diagnostic assessment on your: people, process, place and possibilities (a 360-degree view) See our Recruitment Audit Diagrams and Methodology. Which can be downloaded from the website.

3.     Do a deep dive on your data and analytics (the answers are in there) especially spend.

4.     Speak to your stakeholders: VOC (Voice of customer) from candidates, hiring managers, recruiters, HR, suppliers (they will tell you what’s wrong and remember to listen)

5.     Map out your process flow, Spot any key bottle necks, timings, single person reliance etc.

6.     Map this all out in process flow diagrams

7.     Undertake a SWOT analysis.

8.     Finally, what’s good? (Think STOP, START, CONTINUE model) that we don’t want to loose?

9.     Produce an insights report where pain points are identified, and your strengths recognised too. Then cost out key changes to Operations / systems / headcount and also the potential cost savings from the changes creating efficiencies.

What Next?

Download the diagrams and Recruitment Audit process and have a look at 16 facets of your Recruitment Operations.

Note: The EVP, Brand and ATS / HR Tech reviews would all fit under the possibility’s quadrant (see model diagrams above).

All the answers will be there.

So now back to the original question -  is EVP and Brand your most important priority to fix? Where is the low hanging fruit, the quick wins and the longer-term projects and infrastructure that needs fixing first before you buy that bright shiny car?

Where to begin?

If you'd like some help, I'm always here and happy to have an initial chat about your recruitment strategy, Operations and TA modelling.  Its what we do. Recruit Better. Contact me Rachel Hill Rachel@hillconsultinghrs.com.au

For more general help and tools visit the Tools and Resources page on our website www.hillconsultinghrs.som.au