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In March 2020, 6.6 million people in the United States filed for unemployment. Then came 2021, with over 47 million Americans voluntarily quitting their jobs in what was dubbed “the Great Resignation.” Meanwhile, Generation Z, which will account for almost 30 percent of the global workforce by 2025, started entering the workforce.
In parallel, during 2022 and 2023, we’ve witnessed a consolidated shift in talent’s expectations around work and life. To say that we’re navigating a reconfigured talent landscape would be an understatement.
At the same time, generative AI, work automation, new digital business models and other recent trends are forcing many organizations to rethink the way they operate if they want to outperform their competitors.
To keep up with the transformation demands, companies need talent and, therefore, skills. However, 90 percent of them think the skills gaps they are already experiencing will deepen in the coming years. Then, how can organizations effectively engage talent in today’s complex context to recruit and retain the critical skills they need?
Read on to discover the four best practices that often come out in our conversations with leading organizations regarding how to engage talent today. Additionally, learn about the technology that underpins their initiatives and allows them to activate and maintain successful talent programs.
1- Engage Talent by Developing a Winning Employer Brand
Most talent acquisition leaders agree that organizational reputation influences a company’s ability to attract candidates. In fact, a strong employer brand has long been a cornerstone of any successful strategy to engage talent.
This doesn’t necessarily mean having the biggest name in the marketplace but being able to effectively communicate your organization’s employer value proposition in a way that leaves candidates eager to join your ranks. Many of our customers take advantage of their Avature-powered career sites to achieve this.
Since your career site is usually your candidates’ first point of contact with your employer brand, advanced career site technology such as Avature’s gives you the flexibility to include employee stories, describe the benefits of working for you and display relevant messages for different talent segments, all while showcasing your distinctive look and feel.
With candidates increasingly transferring their consumer habits into their job searches, it’s no surprise that 86 percent of employees and job seekers look for organization reviews and ratings to decide where to apply for a job.
In this sense, we recommend you monitor your brand reputation on popular review sites such as Glassdoor. Studies suggest that a large percentage of active job seekers are likely to apply for a job at a company if the employer actively manages its brand by responding to reviews and updating its profile to shed light on organizational culture and benefits.
The impact of social media is hard to ignore. Which is why we also recommend making platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram an integral part of your recruiting efforts. By leveraging these channels, you can showcase what it’s like to work at your organization or empower your own employees to become brand ambassadors to better engage talent.
Strengthening your employer brand is a great opportunity to improve how you engage talent. Be transparent, tweak your content and use the right channels accordingly.”
Kirsten Tolfree-Dart – Head of Operational Excellence – Caraffi
2- Overhaul Your Candidates’ Experience
Candidates’ expectations in terms of experience have changed dramatically. We spoke earlier about the role of career sites in allowing you to showcase your employer brand, but beyond it, they can also enable a high-touch candidate experience when looking for a suitable position to apply to.
Many of our customers are increasingly leaning on Avature’s AI to drive this personalization on their career sites. From suggesting relevant jobs as job seekers type in a search bar to driving recommendations based on browsing history or accurately matching candidates’ skills and past experience with current openings, there is a lot to learn from how they elevate their career site experience.
After submitting an application or joining a talent community upon visiting a company’s career site, unfortunately, candidates too often find themselves dealing with slow response times or no response at all from the recruiting team.
Our customers turn to automation to overcome this frustration. Automated workflows drive their communication strategies, helping keep candidates in the loop at every stage. If they are being dispositioned, they are informed so they never feel like they’ve been ghosted. Personalizing all of these communications drives increased engagement and can be done with a tool like Avature.
Times are changing, as are candidate communication preferences. So we recommend implementing a recruiting platform that integrates with SMS vendors, WhatsApp, WeChat and social media channels, as this will allow you to craft a multi-channel communication strategy that doesn’t rely solely on email.
As you strive to improve your overall candidate experience, your current employees and past applicants can be a source of valuable insights. Survey them to get feedback on their recruitment experience and tweak your processes accordingly to continue honing the way you engage talent.
We are living in a rapidly changing environment in recruiting. The fight for talent intensifies, so it’s important to continue adapting and improving our strategy.”
Karli Azar, National Campus Recruiter at CBIZ Somerset
3- Engage Your Workforce With Talent Marketplaces
We’ve discussed some ways in which talent engagement can be increased during the recruitment process. Now, we’re about to address proven best practices to ensure you retain that talent you fought so hard to hire.
From reducing hiring costs to improving employee engagement, the benefits of an internal talent marketplace have long been known. Now, more businesses are turning to internal mobility to not only save big on time and financial resourcing but as a strategy to provide candidates with new growth opportunities.
This means that organizations must reassess how they engage talent within their own ranks.
Companies such as L’Oréal have already started unlocking hidden talent through an internal talent marketplace and giving their employees greater visibility into the opportunities available within the organization. The result? Filling 75 percent of positions posted on external career sites with L’Oréal employees, leading to significant time and cost savings for the company.
Similarly, Deutsche Telekom is leveraging internal mobility to improve employee engagement. Thanks to Avature Internal Mobility, the leading company in communication and information technology created a one-stop shop where teamwork and development co-exist.
We all know that the war for digital talent is heating up and we want to give our employees that we worked so hard to attract good enough opportunities and reasons to stay in the crew.”
Pranav Chadha, Senior Technical Product Manager at Deutsche Telekom
4- Provide Employee Learning and Development Opportunities
With the shift to digital business models and the accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, many organizations are increasingly looking to develop these highly demanded skills internally. Fostering upskilling and development can also boost employee engagement and retention.
However, many are also realizing that their existing learning programs and systems fail to deliver an agile and engaging experience, ultimately impacting their ability to enable rapid knowledge growth. In this aspect, many of the customers we partner with have highlighted the importance of:
- Understanding the skills that an employee has and those they need to develop.
- Aligning the skills they are learning and those required by the business.
- Catering to learners’ expectations with revamped learning experiences.
By putting in place a modern and social learning experience that fosters knowledge exchange between employees, encourages the creation of user-generated content and delivers curated recommendations based on specific development paths, organizations can find in employee learning and development a valuable resource to engage their existing talent while cultivating skills for the organization’s present and future.
We believe learning goes beyond traditional L&D programs, an idea shared by the leading enterprise organizations we work with. As such, the ideal technology should help mine a workforce’s wealth of knowledge and facilitate its dispersion, uncovering the ‘voice of the employee’ to bring learning to life.”
Dimitri Boylan, Founder and CEO of Avature
Ensuring Engagement Across the Entire Talent Lifecycle
As we navigate reconfigured talent and business landscapes, it becomes imperative for organizations to reassess how they engage talent.
In this blog, we’ve shared best practices that many forward-thinking organizations that partner with us implement to transform their HR operations. For talent acquisition, they consistently stress the importance of engaging talent through a compelling employer brand and a high-touch candidate experience.
But what happens when a candidate becomes an employee? How can you further engage the talent already within your ranks? By putting in place internal mobility and employee learning and development initiatives, large organizations have managed to save money and time and, most importantly, grow and retain business-critical talent.
It goes without saying that technology is instrumental in enabling these initiatives. To learn more about Avature’s recruiting and talent management solutions and how our technology can power an authentic HR transformation, contact us.
