Quality candidates know what they want from employers, and companies who don’t define and market their value risk losing them to competitors.

It’s no secret that top-quality candidates are more savvy than ever before, and with the majority being passive candidates, companies are realizing the value in communicating through advertising and targeted social media campaigns to vocalize why candidates want to work there. This has led many companies to reevaluate the criteria that attracts quality talent to the workplace. Spoiler: it’s more than just a great paycheck.

Today’s job candidates stress the importance of company culture, social initiative, and work-life balance more than previous generations, motivating companies to double-down on their candidate-facing strategies, namely their Employer Branding and Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Where Employer Branding speaks to the company’s reputation as an employer, the function of an EVP is to make a company or role more attractive, unique, and meaningful to candidates. Both concepts revolve around the qualities that make a company a great place to work, as well as the benefits, career growth opportunities, work-life balance, and company culture that attract top talent.

The Basic Elements of a Strong EVP

How can companies demonstrate their value as employers? Candidates who are open to new opportunities want to see the measurable value of another company, and according to the Corporate Executive Board Company, the criteria candidates find most important are:

Rewards: Salary, benefits, and vacation

Work: Job-interest alignment and work-life balance

Organization: Market position, product/service quality, and social responsibility

Opportunity: Career growth opportunities, development and training opportunities, and organization growth rate

People: Company culture, Manager and coworker quality, senior leadership reputation, and camaraderie

Employee Value Propositions are particularly important in today’s job market, as a majority of candidates heavily evaluate companies before they even consider applying for open positions. Knowing what makes a strong EVP and why it matters in recruiter marketing tactics such as job advertising is crucial to attracting and hiring great employees.

It might be tempting for organizations to list off job features and perks, slap an EVP sticker on it and call it done, but a truly successful value proposition tells candidates what an organization stands for, and the reasons employees are motivated to work there. But defining these criteria are only useful if they can be communicated to candidates through intelligent marketing efforts.

Job Advertising Gets the Message to the Right Place and the Right Time
Recruiter marketing campaigns are designed to attract candidates before they even apply, and methods like paid media advertising are ideal for appealing to passive job seekers. Candidates value transparency, so showing a look at what a day in the life of that particular role looks like is one of the easiest ways to highlight the work experience.

Job ads are many candidates’ first impression of a company, making them an ideal opportunity to communicate an organization’s EVP. While it’s all too common that companies copy-paste the same, boring job descriptions, including an accurate and compelling Employee Value Proposition can make a job ad stand out, and is far more likely to attract candidates than a template.

Alternatively, an increasing number of companies are turning to video. According to Hubspot, over half of all marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI, with one digital marketing expert claiming that one minute of video equals 1.8 million words. Video content typically holds viewer attention longer than text alone, and with social video generating 1200% more shares than text and images combined, companies need no other excuse to tap into the internet’s preferred medium of consumption.

When EVPs Fail to Attract

Even with the most airtight marketing strategies, a poorly-constructed employee value proposition can break the hiring process. Some of the ways EVPs fall short are when they don’t differentiate from competitors, the wrong attributes, or fail to deliver on their promise to employees. Before prominently featuring a company’s Employee Value Proposition in recruiter marketing efforts, it’s imperative that companies spend time researching, designing, and implementing an EVP that accurately represents the company’s value to employees.

Research, Design, Implement, Hire

Modern recruiting strategies have adapted to pace the changes in today’s job market, and with the rise of social recruiting, larger skill gaps among tech workers, and unemployment at a record low, companies require new strategies. Additionally, candidates have resources like Glassdoor to find out what employees think of an organization. Successful companies know what candidates care about, build a culture around it, and publicize it. Defining an authentic EVP is an important step to bringing that talent to the company’s doorstep; knowing how to sell it to candidates ensures that they choose your company over a competitor.

In a recent poll, 20% of HR departments felt that attracting and retaining diverse talent, was one of the main hurdles that their organization is faced.

It’s not that surprising that it would be a legitimate concern, considering the different benefits of having a diverse workforce. Diversity and inclusion have been hot topics in the Human Resource industry for years now. But nobody is questioning why it’s been that way for so long?

We all know that the world is not a perfect place. There are people (hopefully not leaders) that have biases that favor a group of individuals, and on the flip side, don’t include another group of people.

What those people should at least respect is that diversity in the workplace is vital to a company’s success and growth. Make sure that people are included and have a sense of being wanted from their employers.

The reality is that there’s a huge value of having a diverse workforce, and it’s up to leadership and employees to be accepting of having employees that are different in their own way.

Here are some of the ways a diverse workplace can be beneficial:

More Productivity

There’s research that has negative reasons behind the “positive” things or “benefits” of having an inclusive and diverse office.

One said that having people from different backgrounds allowed them to offer different language/s based on their cultural background. It may sound nice, but isn’t it wrong to assume that the person wants to be used solely for their linguistic abilities? Also, can’t a person from a different background learn that language?

One of the other reasons that studies found a diverse workplace “helped” was that it can help a business attack different market segments. That’s right, people say that if you have people from different demographics representing your company, it’ll help out reaching the customer base of that background.

The real reason having a diverse workplace is effective is because it allows employees to be more productive. The flow of ideas that comes in from different minds from unique backgrounds is almost limitless.

Inside of the office, people need to let go of any biases they may have and just worry about working together. It’s already bad that on a global scale there are countries that can’t get along, societies that can’t along, communities that don’t agree with one another.

Why bring all those worldly stresses that don’t necessarily affect an office, to work?

The reason our survey platform works is because we ask questions to make sure that people are comfortable enough with each other to a point where they can solely focus on their work and making a better company.

The second that people get rid of those things that may kill their company’s culture, they can start creating great things together.

However, there still has to be a large shift in the way that offices operate. People need to start thinking outside of the box, in terms of how they approach diversity and creating a more diverse, yet, unified work environment.

More Ingenuity

Currently, there’s a book on top of my desk that is titled “A Brief History Of Time.” The professor who wrote this novel is one of the most brilliant minds in the planet, he goes by the name of Stephen Hawking.

Though I haven’t mastered quantum mechanics, nor fully understand a multi-verse, I still respect the hell out of the person who was able to think of it.

Now, if Professor Hawking was not able to work at a place where they accepted him for his disability (ALS) or his peers would have not listened to him; we would be a less-informed society … or at least the science community would still be wondering what the heck black holes are all about.

So that’s just the most famous example of someone who had an unfortunate circumstance that wasn’t neglected. Fortunately, people (specifically, his employers at Cambridge) overlooked all of that, just to keep this genius around.

Think about other occasions where someone was turned down for having something different about them?

If you would like to hear a story about a person that changed society, but was stopped before he can go any further, take a look at Alan Turing. This young man was a genius in his own right, creating a complex machine that was able to decode a complex code, which ended up shortening World War 2 by several years.

He was well on his way to completing a complex machine that was similar to the modern-day computer. However, he was shamed and given harsh treatment from the government due to his sexual orientation.

Had he not passed, inventions like the computer, laptops, mobile phones, could’ve come a lot sooner and society would have been extremely different. Fortunately, his studies were written and published. And he is known as the father of computers.

Why Is This Good To Know?

It goes without saying that society could have been more advanced had we not let some of our previous biases interfere with our growth.

Regardless of the industry, if a person that does not fit the cookie-cutter image of what we want that kind of leader or employee to “look” like, do not let them go away. Greatness comes in all shapes and sizes.

Even if an employee isn’t the superstar/exceptional employee, learn to make them great. Allow the person to grow and learn more. If you have an employee that isn’t necessarily fond of having a diverse office, let them know about the good and how it outweighs the bad.

If you want a company to be great, don’t judge an employee by the following:

• Race
• Religion
• Age
• Sexual Preference
• Gender
• Weight
• Political Preference
• Accent
• Hierarchy
• Introvert vs Extrovert
• Myers-Briggs personality type
• Planet Of Origin?

Basically, do not look at the person (or animals/aliens, if they evolve to join us at work?) as just one thing because of their background. Look at the genius, the greatness, the potential that they have.

The real value of having a diverse workforce is that a company will be able to have different minds come together for a common purpose and create.

Everyone will bring a different bit of information, everyone will be trying to do things in their own unique fashion, and once everyone finds a way to work together. It creates an amazing atmosphere with engaged employees and a company culture makes employee’s ambassadors.

Better Workplace

The fact of the matter is, a diverse workplace is a creative workplace. My favorite song, Imagine by John Lennon, alludes to the notion of having a world with no borders, no religion, etc. And all of us just coming together as one.

That hippie dude with the funky glasses was on to something.

We’ll never have a “color-blind” world. We will always be different from one another. We aren’t robots, and we are prone to fall. BUT, when it comes to the place that you and others make their livelihood, just let all that stuff go.

Create, innovate and learn from one another. Do not lose time with negative feelings toward others. Try growing as a person and hearing others thoughts out because they are different from you.

Grow and grow, and make sure when you think you can’t anymore, help others get better. This process will create a perfect workplace and allow more productivity and innovation. We often talk about

We often talk about employee engagement, and it’s only for the mere fact that engagement leads to more collaboration, communication, and success. First thing’s first, get rid of any biases in your company or office, and start learning from one another.

Not all offices are perfect, but if you can change one person’s opinion about a group it could lead to greater things for your organization.

What Do You Think About Having A Diverse Workplace?

This article was written by Jeff Fermin from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. SmartRecruiters is the hiring success platform to find and hire great people.

What’s the distance between your company culture and your brand? Answer: There shouldn’t be any. A company culture that’s authentic and deep will translate through the employer brand, conveying the same tone, the same mission, the same values to job seekers and new hires that it does to fully entrenched (and hopefully engaged) employees. 

But if we’re out of the dark ages in terms of the new World of Work, we’re still in the dim outskirts. Consider employee engagement, a key indicator for one thing, more quantitative data (such as career satisfaction) can be gleaned by employees already at a workplace than those still considering it. If employees are not as engaged as they should be; not buoyed by the spirit of the organization they spend most of their time in; that’s a sign of a visible gulf.

Last month a friend and colleague Susan LaMotte made the smart connection, and it’s been an ongoing talking point for me as well. Susan compared how much we’ve been spending on employee engagement with how successful that output has been. Answer: Depressing: Not very. We’ve spent more than $720 million according to a Bersin study. Compare that to a survey by Gallup that revealed that only 13% of employees consider themselves truly engaged in their work.

If your employees aren’t engaged, that’s a serious detriment to your employer brand, and that’s what going to translate down the pike. Proof is in the pudding — or not — an organization without a strong company culture will lose out to companies that do.

Here are two values it’s key to transmit:

1) Supporting Your Employees As People With Lives

Companies like Apple and Google clearly align employer brand with workplace culture. Why are we still talking about these more mainstream brands you ask? Because they have historically embedded themselves into our collective brain. Innovation, creativity and teamwork are part of that culture, as is the message that to keep people inspired, fresh and happy, the organization has to support them. Job seekers are savvier than ever and will turn on a dime: a company that touts “long hours in the trenches” translates as “doesn’t respect my need for a life outside of work.” One that doesn’t address childcare and benefits for a family translates as “we are more important than your family.” That won’t work, particularly given this intensely competitive recruiting culture, not to mention ever-increasing workplace options.

2) Living Your Mission Statement

Integrity is key among the values external job candidates are shown to hold dear in a prospective employer. That’s what happens when the mission statement is clear, authentic, and transparent. Make sure your employees are part of the mission statement so it aligns their engagement with the company goals — they are the embodiment of your employer brand. And make sure the same clear goals and values in that mission statement are part of your recruiting strategy, your videos, your mobile and social platforms.

There are more ways than ever to convey employer brand, whether to active or passive candidates: social, mobile, onboarding, video. And we have the immense power of analytics to draw from. Yet while the workplace is transforming rapidly, it’s still plagued by some of the same issues that have always plagued it: employees disengage, recruits go where the grass looks greener. There’s still a gulf between the organization, brand and the human being. More than ever, it’s time to change that.

This article was written by Meghan M. Biro from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. SmartRecruiters is the hiring success platform to find and hire great people.

“The strength of the team is each individual member.
The strength of each member is the team.” – Phil Jackson

The importance of valuing your colleagues opinions when hiring is proving to be a vital component to a successful hire. As we all should know, successful hiring of the RIGHT people is the #1 factor that enables a company to grow and thrive.

In fact, 96% of executives cite that lack of collaboration is the cause of workplace failures. Considering the thoughts and opinions of some of the valuable people already in your organization not only benefits the company, but also the candidate, the existing team, and the manager responsible for filling the position.

In my short tenure as a budding professional, I have experienced varying interview structures. At SmartRecruiters, multiple people in the organization interview every qualified candidate, and we use our own platform as a way of collaborating by sharing feedback. Who else knows more of what it takes of the position than the team members currently performing the business function on a daily basis?

As a hiring manager, one can be blinded often by your own perception of the candidate. Allow me to enlighten you on the benefits of collaborative hiring:

1.) Team Buy-in

For one, teammates that will eventually be peers of the next hire are more vested in the company and in the onboarding process of the next hire. Often times, candidates speak more freely when talking directly with peers, and their personality is more transparent. Your company culture, and the subculture within your team is key to sustained success. Additionally, your existing team members have the opportunity to learn a new perspective from that candidate that could be missing from the environment currently.

2.) Transparent Candidate Perception

The candidate now has the opportunity to hear from the people that they will be working alongside directly! A more clear transgression is shared as to the exact details of the position beyond what the Job Description lists. Additionally, the candidate now knows more than one or two people (future colleagues, future bosses) in the company. We’ve all been a jobseeker before… It is one thing to know who you will work FOR, but it’s even more enticing when you know who you will work WITH.

3.) Hiring Manager Engagement

As the hiring manager, you own a lot of responsibility for how the next hire effects your company. You could end up being a rockstar for building a productive team that delivers results, or, the other end of the spectrum, you could be the person tied to a bad hire. Imagine having the luxury of being able to see all of the feedback provided by your team, your co-managers, and your executives as it pertains to your hiring/recruiting efforts.

I demonstrate the SmartRecruiters hiring platform every day. Every time that I show the product’s homepage to the Recruiter, the HR Director, the VP of Talent Acquisition, and even the CEO, they are amazed by the visibility provided. A hiring newsfeed where one can quickly view, comment, and agree with the thoughts and opinions of my existing employee network. I can almost hear our customers and prospective customers picking their jaws up off the ground as we speak…

Now that you’ve got a team that’s bought in, your candidates have a better insight, and you’ve got the feedback you need to make a decision… Happy Hiring!

Blake Owen (b.owen@smartrecruiters.com) is an ambitious Account Executive at SmartRecruiters. He’d be happy to give you a demo.

SmartRecruiters is your workspace to find and hire great people. Read the new eBook, “Collaborative Hiring: Leveraging Social Software to Hire Top Talent.”

First of all, we have to determine some Talent Management Areas, to make it easier to understand, here are the 5 steps in the talent management: Attracting, Recruiting, Onboarding, Developing Loyalty, and Upcycling. Let’s have a look at each of them to enlighten the impact of value in each stage of the talent management lifecycle:

ATTRACTING

This step is very tricky, because, when we’re speaking about attracting great candidates to your business, we have to be very precise about what we mean. Generating a lot of applicants is usually not the issue. The point is to generate very targeted and talented  applicants with deeply embedded motivations in regards of your company values. Another issue is to be found in how to generate expressed values of the company that are anything but an advertising plan. 2.0 Companies have to face with a leaky tissue layer, we just can’t think like we use to, in terms of inside and outside the company (I had a discussion with a private school in which students planned to make a “Titanic Theme Party,” and where nearly nobody wondered about what message could be understood/misunderstood by reading the ensuing facebook statuses, and tweets and so on outside the school in terms of e-reputation … But party must go on, No ?)

RECRUITING

The way you manage your recruiting is an accurate good reflection of your company values for a candidate. The way you contact a candidate, the number of steps and meetings the candidate has to pass through before hiring, the ability of speaking with people doing the same expertise as he is expected to do, the way you negotiate the new contract, the way you will ask one to sign his contract (there is more than one way to make a job offer: whether you have to print a paper, firm it, scan it and mail it, or having an appointment with the company’s boss for an eye to eye meeting). Another point is how do you manage the time between signing the contract and the 1st day in … All these steps are saying a lot of things about your company’s values to your future employee, because he lives through it. The hiring process is not only wonderful words merged together to be the advertising-value-package-of-the-company, but a real experience and the more distortions between the promise and the reality of the experience, the less engagement you will earn … And all the effort done in the ATTRACTING step could be annihilated.

ONBOARDING

It’s affiliating time, you have to transmit your company culture to a new buddy! The more your employees behavior will align to the values of your employer-branding-communication, the more engagement you will earn. By contrast if there is a perception distortion between the candidate experience and the newbie employee experience in terms of felt values, you will have pretty much no chance to further engage these people.

DEVELOPPING LOYALTY

I’m upset by the term of retaining!!! (but perhaps it’s that the french word “retenir” means keeping with you someone who wants to escape). Loyalty is the point we have to face with. Someone who want to exit very often has good reason to do so and you as a manager have to help him in this endeavor. Retaining means stopping someone from doing something he or she want to do; and if you do that you kill motivation and engagement. The persistence of values in your company can help you to develop people loyalty, in our crazy faster and faster society, values are escaping families, politics , and so on, it could be great (even more for younger employees – millennials) to have this system of values as a permanent reference to anchor the people.

UPCYCLING

First of all,  I have titled this step upcycling and not exit for two main reasons: upcycling is a design concept I love: you take some wastes (plastic bottles for exemple) to build something with a very higher value (some polar coats for exemple). And often in talking about HR we are denying the facts: yes, we are producing human wastes when we retain people too long in our companies without any opportunity to grow up, and No it’s not a waste to invest time into an employees’ exit, allowing him or her to keep on growing. Another point, is that when you think upcycling you must have “eco-systematic” (from ecosystem, which goes beyond your current employees)  thoughts, and so you have to measure the way your employees exit the company; this is a good indicator of your company values. I go a little bit further: the way you imagine your employees should exit your company is structuring all you talent management policy.  Thinking of an employee leaving as exiting – and not upcycling – can traduce all your system of values. I mean if upcycling is the end it is also the goal of talent management; for how to grow my company value in my ecosytem is the very point. What’s the goal of talent management, more often we hear about retaining people, with social networks we can think different: what about if the goal were to make your former employees member of your loyal employee alumni or to imagine that some of them could keep on growing their skills in another company and return to yours the day opportunity strikes (ala Steve Jobs back to Apple). By giving yourself that upcycling aim, you will be obligated to improve the consistency of your value system with regards to your managerial practices within your entire ecosystem.

After some 10 years working in Information Technology, Vincent Rostaing Owner of LE CAIRN 4 IT, believes that Valor is in Human Capital. Vincent Rostaing works to improve talent lifecycle management in new technologies firms.  Photo Credit ToolStop on Flickr.

For more on company value, check out: “Value of Company in Talent Lifecycle.”

A company needs to be valued both internally and externally: internally, to promote the process of personal belonging; externally, to facilitate adherence of the customers to the products or services. The valuation of the company concerns of all its stakeholders and resources.

In psychology, Schwartz and Bilsky explain that value is at a more universal level than the motivations.

In sociology, Emelie Durkheim and Max Weber have shown that values are axiological beliefs (axiology is the philosophical study of value, ethically and aesthetically) that are intended to serve the community (i.e. company and customers) as a viable and strong guides, but this perception is filtered, transformed, or even disqualified by reality.

In structural anthropology, Marcel Mauss confirmed that membership in a culturally structured collective gives every man his human status. Levi-Strauss has shown that man has a symbolic thinking in parallel of its technical thought, which tinkers the collective pattern that is necessary for his humanity.

Lebailly tells us that the improved performance of an organization requires the determination of technical values by community values. What will man/woman do and what do the people around one expect? Values.

Semiotics (which studies the signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior) gives three definitions of value:

• the value that allows the differentiation in discourse;

• use value of any object (technical value);

• and the base value which is reached through the object or discourse (ethical, moral, group…).

Within this framework it combines clear, the identification of your company values along with better management and representation of those values, contributes to the performance – in nearly all aspects – within your company.

Jerome  Guibourge is a independent consultant with specialities in strategic planning, design management, corporate identity and brand image. Photo Credit Climate Safety

Read More to uncover how “value” affects the talent management lifecycle.