How to Make Your Company Most Attractive to Top Job Candidates

If you are tired of experiencing the frustration that comes from losing job candidates to your competitors, you are not alone. We are in a candidate-driven economy, which means that job applicants have minimal competition for the positions they are interested in. In other words, there are more positions than there are qualified candidates!

What this means for recruiters and hiring managers is that candidates have the upperhand in the job application and interview process, and a lot of them know it. Highly qualified candidates can be as choosy as they want when considering where to apply and where to take an offer. This can be pretty frustrating for those of us in the world of hiring and recruitment, but there are some strategies to make this problem go away.

The Importance of Your Workplace Culture

A lot of the time, we end up advising hiring managers about the importance of being fast and efficient at taking talent through the application, interview, and job offer processes. But all of that depends on capturing the attention of top candidates in the first place. How do you get your dream applicants to notice your company and want to work there? How do you build excitement about what your company has to offer as an employer?

The answer is simple to describe, but harder to accomplish: you have to build a desirable work culture.

Let’s talk about what a desirable work culture is, and then we’ll talk about how you can go about developing one. Your work culture is made up of a lot of factors. It has a lot to do with how employees feel about their workplace, including:

• How do your employees feel about their coworkers?

• Do your employees feel they have a good work/life balance?

• Are employees satisfied with their current salary, benefits, and opportunities for advancement and raises?

• Do employees feel valued by their supervisors for the work they do and for who they are as people?

• Are there intangible features to the workplace that make employees feel good about  being there, such as energy, positivity, and respect?

Workplace culture is about creating an environment where employees are satisfied, enthusiastic, and ready to talk about their workplace with outsiders in a positive way. You can post countless ads on classified and recruitment sites, but that’s not going to compare with the kind of talent you get because your employees have spread the word to their friends and peers about why it’s so good to work where they do.

Hiring managers can’t do all the work on their own!

Hiring managers have a lot of authority over certain aspects of the workplace. As the person in charge of hiring new talent, you can shape the experience of a job applicant. You can make them feel welcomed and appreciated during the interview process. You can get them excited about the job. You can be fast and efficient so that they know that you’re serious about the job offer. However, for as much as you can control, work culture is not one of those things.

Creating a desirable work culture requires buy-in from numerous individuals and decision makers. It is important that hiring managers create enthusiasm for this idea among other managers and supervisors.

How to Start Improving Your Workplace Culture

We recommend the following steps for making changes to a workplace culture that needs some improvements.

1. Change the things that are within your purview. Evaluate your current policies and practices and determine how you can make them better for everybody in the organization.

2. If you recognize something needs to be improved elsewhere in the company, be a positive, enthusiastic advocate for change. Don’t step on toes or start ordering people around, but figure out a way to show the decision-makers in that area how an improvement could raise morale and improve workplace culture.

3. Give people who report to you permission to be creative and advocate for change.

4. Seek out professional development opportunities where you can talk about ways to improve workplace culture with people who care about the same things as you.

5. Value the people in your workplace. They are the most important thing about your company, and there’s a good chance that they don’t know that. Make sure they know how important they are to you and to the organization on the whole!

The Next Steps

If you’re ready to take the next steps and find out how you can improve your ability to attract top level talent to your company, let’s talk. We would love to help you come up with a plan that will create more opportunities to attract top talent and get them to accept your job offer! To get started, you can also check out our free offer, “Attracting Talent in the Candidate-Driven Economy.”