There’s an old saying about professional services: “all your assets walk out the door every night.” And that’s also true. Expertise is your product and it’s all you have to sell. Without the right expertise, your company cannot attract and retain clients. The right people provide you with a competitive advantage and can put you on the road to success and profitability. Just as important, great talent tends to attract more great talent.

The Difference Between Talent Acquisition and Recruiting

It’s not uncommon to confuse talent acquisition and recruiting — and that can be a mistake for a professional services firm. The difference is significant. Talent acquisition is a long-term strategy that identifies and addresses business goals, while recruiting is simply the process of filling a specific position or positions to address more immediate needs.

Talent acquisition is about identifying talent in the marketplace and building a pool of potential candidates, sometimes to fill expertise needs that aren’t even requirements yet. Talent acquisition is proactive while recruitment is reactive.

10 Elements of an Effective Talent Acquisition Strategy

To be effective, a talent acquisition strategy must have the full support of your firm’s leadership and complement your overall business strategy. To accomplish that, you’ll need to understand what talents will be required at various stages of business growth and establish a process to attract and engage the requisite talent when needed.

Let’s walk through the 10 key elements of an effective talent acquisition strategy:

1. Research

It’s crucial to roll up your sleeves and do some original research on your market to determine what’s important to new hires. What motivates the best candidates to choose one firm over another? Is it corporate culture? The workplace environment? The benefits? What will give you a competitive advantage? Often the nature of the work and the caliber of colleagues are key.

2. Your employer brand

Nobody likes working for a lousy boss. How current employees feel about the workplace environment and firm leadership will go a long way in helping – or hindering – how you position your company to attract new talent. Your employee brand must be consistent with your overall brand. If your organization has, say, a fun, creative reputation your employee brand better have an equally fun and creative vibe to support and reinforce your firm’s brand.

3. Messaging

What specific messages do potential hires need to hear to seriously consider working at your firm? What are the concerns or objections typically raised by candidates with the talent and skill sets you’re looking for? Are you and your company positioned to successfully address and overcome them? What evidence do you need to be able to present to support your argument?

4. Your Website

These days, your website is the first place candidates are likely to go to learn more about your firm and attempt to determine if it’s a good fit for them. They’ll not only be looking for information about specific positions but to gain a better understanding of your culture and what it’s like to work there. Does your website reflect a place where employees are encouraged to learn and grow? Does it represent both your overall brand and employee brand and convey key messages that promote and reinforce them? Your website can be an effective centerpiece for your talent acquisition strategy if it’s optimized for online search, incorporating keywords best associated with the types of talent you’re looking to attract.

5. Social Media

There is no question social media is the place many people turn to get what they perceive to be honest and accurate information about any number of subjects — and to see who is driving conversations on various platforms. Many firms use LinkedIn and Twitter for business development and Facebook to convey their culture. In fact, research we conducted on high-growth, high-value professional services firms in the course of writing our book, Spiraling Up, revealed that high-growth companies are more likely to rely on online recruiting than more traditional approaches for talent acquisition.

That why it’s important to cultivate positive engagements on social media and regularly share your firm’s expertise there. Sharing expertise and providing something of value not only attracts new clients, it also helps land highly qualified prospective employees.

6. Visible Expertise®

To ensure that your firm’s expertise gets recognized by the right people, it needs to be visible. That means exposing it to the right audience through speaking, writing, blogging, and opening dialogs through various channels. It’s what we call becoming a Visible Expert®. It’s a valuable, effective way to develop new business and recruit new talent. Encouraging staff to become more visible helps the individual and the firm by fostering an environment that supports learning and growth. That kind of proactive, nurturing environment also acts as a powerful incentive for prospective talent to join your team.

7. Awards and Recognition

While having a positive culture and policies in place that can help recruit the best talent does not guarantee that those features will be readily apparent. Prominently displayed recognition or awards from objective third parties, however, can help overcome those limitations. For example, it’s one thing to say your firm is a great place to work. It’s quite another to have an award from a respected industry association or publication that touts your company as a Best Place to Work.

8. Talent Evaluation

Once you’ve attracted talent, how will you evaluate it? Evaluating talent can be challenging because there may be a variety of criteria, some of which can be conflicting because of things such as short-term and long-term needs. What may not be all that important right now may be crucial down the road, so be aware of future potential as well as current, relevant skills and experience. Don’t forget any applicable current and future regulatory requirements, depending on your industry and timing.

9. Promotion

Once you determine what expertise you’re going to promote, you’ll need to figure how you’re going to promote it. How will you make your firm and your experts visible? Of course, there’s no shortage of paid recruiting sites. But think larger. Try exploiting social media not only to recruit for a vacant position, but to build awareness and appreciation for your unique expertise, work environment, and value. Make a clear case for why the best talent would want to work at your firm.

10. Policy Alignment

After addressing the previous nine key elements to a successful talent acquisition strategy, don’t get caught between your desired culture and your formal policies. Do you have policies in place that make your firm a great place to work? Are they at odds with your strategy? Do your policies encourage your staff to share their expertise and become more visible or do they actually discourage it? How much flexibility is there? Policy alignment is critical for creating and supporting the kind of corporate and employee brands that attract top talent.

A Final Thought

Talent acquisition is central to the success of most professional services firms. It’s unlikely that your firm will attain its true potential unless you have a proper, proactive talent acquisition strategy in place. The ten key elements we discussed here provide the framework that will make your strategy as effective and efficient as it can be.

The post Talent Acquisition: How to Develop an Effective Strategy for Your Professional Services Firm appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Since your people’s expertise and time is your “product,” your firm’s success depends on your ability to put highly qualified people on any given project. The right talent, at the right time, doing the right things, drives higher value.

In this post, we want to explore how an employer brand can benefit your firm. We’ll look at what an employer brand is, how to build an employer branding strategy, and how it helps you meet critical challenges faced by professional services firms everywhere.

Employer Branding Defined

Your employer brand is simply your reputation as a place to work. It can have general elements (for example, “a great place to work”) and very specific attributes (“they have a very high-pressure culture” or “they have the most family-friendly benefits in the state”).

Employer brands also vary by the level of visibility they have within certain groups of potential employees and referral sources. For example, one firm’s employer brand may be well known at one university and virtually unknown at another.

Employer branding strategy is the way — usually formally documented — your firm wants to be viewed in the competitive talent marketplace and how this reputation will be built and maintained. A typical employer branding strategy describes how your firm is different from competitive employers, why employees would want to work for your firm and how your employer brand will be strengthened over time.

The Employer Branding Process is the step-by-step procedure of clarifying, shaping and amplifying an employer brand for one or more target audiences.

Employer branding is sometimes confused with the more general firm brand. That’s not surprising as the two are closely related.

Firm Brand vs. Employer Brand

Your overall firm brand is the combination of your reputation and visibility among potential clients and referral sources. It is typically optimized for attracting new clients and growing the firm.

Your employer brand is your reputation and visibility among potential employees and talent referral sources. Its purpose is to attract, retain and motivate the desired talent to support growth. Your employer brand is a subset of your overall firm brand, so it should be consistent with the overall brand.

The firm attributes that are of interest to potential clients are likely different than those of potential new hires or current employees. That said, there are also likely to be areas of overlapping interest to potential clients and employees. For example, a firm that has a reputation for specialized expertise in a particular industry is likely to be of interest to both potential clients and new hires.

Importance of Employer Branding

Employer branding is a topic that is very much on the radar of the corporate executives. A recent survey found that 41% of companies have formal employer branding initiatives. The figure is even higher in larger firms. Further, 94% of firms plan to maintain or increase their investment.

This commitment to the importance of employer branding is not surprising given that it has been shown to produce so many positive impacts.

Recruiting and Your Employer Brand

Recruiting is the area where you would expect to see the largest impact of your employer brand. A strong brand should increase both the quality and quantity of applicants. Having a larger pool of more qualified applicants certainly makes the process easier. But there are related implications, as well.

Because you have a bigger and better applicant pool, you should be able to attract better candidates and hire good people faster. These benefits are extremely helpful when you are looking for specialized skills and experience.

In addition, the shorter process and larger pool can also reduce the costs of hiring. While many firms are not simply looking for the lowest cost, saving money on recruiting does free up scarce resources.

Talent Retention and Your Employer Brand

Retaining your best employees is an ongoing challenge for professional services firms. This is where a strong employer brand really pays off. Your competitors are only too happy to hire your best employees.

Offering more money is a time-honored strategy for luring away top professionals. But it is not all about money. A strong employer brand can be a powerful incentive to stay with a firm. There is even research that suggests that many employees value a great workplace (and brand) over higher pay.

Employees want to feel good about where they work. Accepting a position at a workplace with a poor reputation is rarely a wise move.

Culture and Your Employer Brand

One of the most important considerations for a potential hire is your firm’s culture. And indeed, how your culture is perceived can be important in recruiting and retention. But there is another reason culture is important.

Your firm’s culture sets expectations about what behavior is valued and what is not. It affects how you interact with your peers and how you treat your clients. Do you have high-quality standards? How important is developing professional expertise?

In professional services firms, where so many employees operate autonomously, the firm culture can be a tremendous asset or a crippling liability. Thinking about the culture you want to develop and using your employer brand to promote it make a lot of sense. 

Financial Performance and Your Employer Brand

If your employer branding strategy is well conceived, you would expect it to benefit your firm financially. And in fact, that is exactly what many employers report.

There are two ways an employer brand can improve a firm’s finances. The first is cost reduction. As we discussed in the recruiting section, the costs of hiring well-qualified team members are often lower over the long run. Your employer brand will produce a higher quantity of quality applicants. These reduced costs should increase profitability.

The second financial impact can be much larger. Having top talent and retaining them over time should also help improve revenue growth. Add to this the benefit of a well-conceived and clearly communicated firm culture and you clearly have a very large financial upside.

Next, let’s turn to how you can develop such a winning employer brand strategy.

Employer Branding Strategy Best Practices

At the heart of any employer brand process is an employer branding strategy. To be successful this brand strategy must take into account marketplace realities. Here are five things you’ll want to consider as you develop your own strategy.

1. Your employer brand must support your overall business strategy.

It’s easy to see talent as a strategic advantage. But all talent is not equal. Different business models require different profiles of their workforce.

To be profitable, some business models have to acquire talent at the lowest possible cost. Other models require hiring talent of the highest caliber. Clearly, these two scenarios demand very different employer branding strategies.

Failure to take the business model into account can have devastating effects. When the strategies are out of alignment, it can be difficult to get the management support you need to build a meaningful employer brand. And even if you are able to launch a new employer brand, your business imperatives will likely lead to its early demise.

2. Your strategy must be transparent and visible.

If your employer brand strategy is not transparent and easily understood it is unlikely to be effective. All of your important audiences, both internal and external, should be able to articulate its key features.

If it’s too complex or opaque, your team will have trouble carrying it out. In the absence of a clear strategy, each manager and each employee will feel free to implement whatever “brand” they prefer. Unfortunately, this situation is all too common in the professional services firms.

Turning to the outside world, you face another set of challenges. If a prospective employee doesn’t know you exist or cannot understand your employer brand, he or she will end up working somewhere else. The same is true of referral sources. They won’t be equipped to refer people who would be the best fit with your firm.

As if that wasn’t enough, there is another downside of failing to be transparent. The lack of transparency, in and of itself, raises concerns among many candidates: “Why don’t they want to talk about their culture and strategy? Do they have something to hide?” Candidates with options will look elsewhere.

3. It must be consistent with how you treat clients.

It’s hard to live a lie. Unfortunately, that is how employees can feel if your employer brand strategy is at odds with your overall firm brand. Suppose you have an approach to clients that emphasizes high levels of technical expertise. You expect employees to reflect this value in their client interactions.

Does your employer brand support this? Does it value and support the continuing development of expertise? Or does it value utilization instead? Unless you can align these two experiences, there will be conflict and disappointing results.

4. Build your brand on reality.

An employer brand can be somewhat aspirational. But as with your overall firm brand, it should not be founded on guesses and wishful thinking. In the absence of sound research, however, that is exactly what is likely to happen.

Our studies into professional services firms show that those that conduct research on their target audiences grow faster and are more profitable. When you understand how your firm is perceived in the marketplace — and your audiences’ priorities — you have a market advantage than can produce higher performance. Ignorance introduces risk. Research reduces risk.

In your research, be sure to sample current employees, referral sources and prospective employees. Understanding what is important to them, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your current reputation, can be pivotal in developing a winning employer brand strategy.

5. Monitoring and optimizing performance produce the results.

You will be making a substantial investment in your employer branding initiative. To enjoy the full benefit of this investment, however, you will need to track its performance.

This will allow you to determine what is working so that you can make necessary adjustments to your strategy and implementation plan. In the absence of ongoing measurement, you will be faced with the prospect of making program adjustments based on anecdotes and hunches.

We describe the monitoring and optimization process below. It does not need to be expensive or time-consuming, but it should cover both program implementation (did we follow the plan?) and success (did the plan produce the expected results?).

The Employer Branding Process

The employer branding process closely parallels the process used to brand the firm as a whole. In fact, they can be conducted in parallel. So if you are planning to rebrand your whole firm, take that opportunity to update your employer brand, too.

Of course, the employer branding process can also be undertaken as a freestanding initiative. Here are the key steps in the process.

1. Consider your firm’s overall growth strategy

Start the process by understanding your firm’s overall strategy for growth. This insight will be essential for aligning your employer brand with the overall business needs of your firm. If you are competing on the basis of having the best talent, for instance, your brand requirements will be very different than those of a firm who competes on the basis of the lowest price.

What if your firm does not have a solid growth strategy? Competing for talent may provide the impetus for developing one. It’s hard to envision how an employer branding process could be sustained if it did not support a firm’s overall business goals. 

2. Research your prospects and competitors

Researching your target audiences is a proven way to reduce risk and improve the likelihood that your brand will resonate with those you want to impress. Most firms target three primary audiences in their recruiting strategy: potential new recruits, recent hires, and talent referral sources. Each of these groups has a unique perspective and important information to add to your understanding.

It is not uncommon to also interview longer-term employees and recent departures to add important perspective for retention and firm culture.

Here are some of the key points you will likely want to cover in your research:

• What attracts prospects?
• Who are your talent competitors?
• How is your firm viewed in the marketplace?
• What sets you apart from competitors?
• How do people learn about your firm?
• What are important decision-making criteria?
• What tips the scale?
• What is the employee experience at your firm?
• What is the current culture like?
• What drives turnover?

Now, not all of these questions are relevant to each audience. It’s also a best practice to have an independent entity that can guarantee confidentiality and objectivity conduct the research. People will not be forthcoming if they believe their comments might be misused. 

3. Develop your employer brand strategy

Your brand strategy has three key components: 1) your differentiators, 2) your positioning statement, and 3) your employer brand promotional plan.

Your differentiators are the attributes that set you apart from your competitors in the eyes of the relevant target audience. Now, you need to be careful here because what is important to one target audience may be irrelevant to another.

To be effective, a differentiator must pass three tests.

1. It must be relevant to the target audience. If not, it will not work.
2. It must be true. If not, employees will not stay.
3. It must be provable. If there is no way to demonstrate that it is true, most people will simply discount it as empty promotional propaganda.

Once you have identified your differentiators (no small task) it is time to develop your second key component of your employer brand strategy. Your positioning statement is a brief description of how your firm is positioned in the competitive marketplace of employers.

Your employer positioning statement is sometimes referred to as an employer value proposition. It describes the key characteristics of the employees you are seeking and why they would choose your firm over a competitor’s. In contrast to a position description, which describes requirements for a specific job position, the positioning statement applies to all employees and the culture of the firm as a whole.

Your employer brand promotional plan is a section of the employer brand strategy document that explains how you will increase the strength and visibility of your employer brand in the marketplace of potential employees, talent referral sources and current staff.

This promotional plan is often related to your overall marketing plan, but there are key differences. Your marketing plan targets potential clients, while the employer brand promotional plan focuses on how to attract potential new hires and retain current employees.

4. Build the tools to communicate the brand

How do you turn your overall strategy into results? It starts with developing the right tools that convey the right messages.

Your single most important tool is your website. It communicates both your overall firm brand and your employer brand. It is the place that almost everyone who wants to work for your firm will visit. It is also a place where potential talent can rule out your firm — without even talking to you first.

The careers section of your website is usually the place potential recruits will go first. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s where it ends. Serious prospects will scrutinize your site to learn what kind of work you do, whom you do it for and what it might be like to work at your firm. They may also try to understand who their colleagues will be and what opportunities may be available to them.

But your website is only one of your tools. Your social media company pages (and your activity on them) are also key areas motivated recruits will explore. And of course, employer rating sites such as Glassdoor can make a strong impression on prospective employees.

Other tools may include recruiting collateral, such as videos, brochures and recruiting tour materials.

5. Launch the new brand

When you have your strategy set and have assembled and updated all the tools you need to communicate your employer brand, you are ready for the brand launch. A successful launch involves not only implementing a promotional plan aimed at your external audiences, but addresses your internal audiences, as well.

In fact, an employer brand launch is a firm-wide effort that involves recruiting, human resources, marketing and senior management. Remember, an effective employer brand must reflect your real firm, not a contrived fantasy. Living the brand is an all day, every day effort.

6. Optimize for visibility and impact

As with any complex, firm-wide endeavor, you will not get everything right in the beginning. That is why monitoring the performance of the program and optimizing it over time is so important.

You will want to monitor two kinds of variables. The first is implementation. Is the program being rolled out as planned? Are activities happening on schedule? Are employees participating? If the program is not being fully implemented, don’t expect to see great results.

The second set of variables is impact. Is the program producing the desired results? Are you getting the right kind of referrals in sufficient quantity? Are candidates responding in the right numbers? Are your hiring goals being met? Is retention where it needs to be?

With adequate data you will be able to identify where the branding program is succeeding and where there are trouble spots. Before you optimize, however, check on implementation. Are things actually happening?

If implementation is on track you can then focus on identifying alternative strategies that were not part of the original plan. Make sure that these alternative approaches are consistent with the overall firm brand as well as the employee brand.

The next step is to test the new approaches to see if they produce better results. This testing and ongoing monitoring is important. In the absence of systematic testing, it is easy to lose your way and hop from one shiny object to another — and never see the results you need.

The six-step process outlined above works. We’ve used it. Our clients have used it. And it consistently produces good results. The key is to follow all of the steps. If you cut corners and skip the research, your risk of failure will increase dramatically. Launch without a strategy and you are unlikely to have the success you seek.

The post Employer Branding Strategy for Professional Services Firms appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

What would frustrate or motivate these mid-career employees to throw up their hands one day and say “I quit”?

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

We surveyed 284 people in mid-career, leadership, and senior executive roles to get our answers in this new study, CULTURE CLASH: The EMPLOYEE Experience Problem And How To Fix It.  As we were pulling together our findings, a couple of themes kept popping up. 1.) A fair amount of people are not satisfied with their company culture—no matter how you look at it. 2.) Mid-career professionals and senior executives often had different responses and perspectives on culture-related topics.

These two themes unveil a culture clash that is happening in companies across the globe. Many companies may not be aware of this culture clash and that these themes represent the primary drivers prompting so many resignations. 

For example, take a look at this chart:

More than 48% of mid-career staff are dissatisfied with their current company culture while only 10% of senior executives are dissatisfied with their culture. That is a noticeable difference in opinion and may impact how certain culture-related decisions are made or not made. However, employee segment is only one way to look at company culture dissatisfaction. As you can see by the following chart, company size also plays a role in culture satisfaction and dissatisfaction. 

We were a little surprised that there was more culture dissatisfaction within large companies where there tend to be more employee benefits and programs in place. We found some explanation for these results later in the research, when we asked for recommendations to improve company culture.

It is also interesting to look at company culture satisfaction and dissatisfaction by industry. The only clear winner is the software and technology industry, which had the highest culture satisfaction (36%) and the lowest culture dissatisfaction (24%). Clearly, the industry that needs to focus most on company culture is architecture, which has the lowest percentage of culture satisfaction and one of the highest percentages of culture dissatisfaction. The other industries seem to have a mixed bag of responses with “On-the-fence” being a large variable condition. It will be interesting to see how these industry responses change in future research studies.

Company culture satisfaction and dissatisfaction are variables that should be measured on a regular or consistent basis. If you can address the dissatisfaction before the level starts to rise, you have a chance of affecting positive change and averting a disruptive situation. However, when dissatisfaction rises to a certain level your employees move from “Not Seeking” status to “Passively Seeking” status. Even worse, if the dissatisfaction levels continue to rise, your employees will move from “Passively Seeking” status to “Actively Seeking” status and then it is much harder to retain them. See the following chart.

Not Seeing Eye to Eye

Wanting a better company culture is definitely a key driver of the culture clash. It is the #2 reason respondents gave for quitting their jobs in the past year (see the chart below). The #1 reason for all of those resignations in the last year was: “I was frustrated with leadership/management at my previous job.”

Let’s look deeper into these contrasting perspectives. As the following chart shows, there are many reasons why employees who are dissatisfied with their company culture feel that way. A number of these reasons tie back to interactions with or decisions made by senior executives, including not:

• Feeling comfortable sharing thoughts with leadership
• Receiving transparent leadership
• Getting a clear promotion path 
• Obtaining adequate training

The difference in perspectives between senior executives and mid-career professionals lies at the heart of the problem of dissatisfaction with company culture. Notice what is not at the top of the list driving culture dissatisfaction: lack of salary, paid time off, or work-life balance.

Not seeing eye to eye continues as we ask for recommendations to improve company culture. As shown in the chart below, mental health days rank highly with mid-career employees at 36.1%. Yet only 8.8% of senior executives selected mental health days as a culture improvement option. As we mentioned in our Navigating The Mid-Career Talent Crisis study, senior executives may not be aware of the stress and frustration that mid-career professionals are under.

Typically, it is the mid-career staff that works with senior management to develop strategies. They then work with junior employees to executive against those strategies. The mid-career team is usually responsible for assigning work, motivating employees, and ensuring that goals are met. They are the ones that have to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty when necessary. At the same time they are managing remote resources, changing schedules and priorities, and more. For many, they have reached their wit’s end as they manage all of these moving pieces and make sure that they and their team stay healthy and safe.

Believing that their corporate culture does not meet their needs or that they are not getting support from their senior management team is enough to push them over the edge and either find a new job, start their own business, or take some time off to regroup.

Walk Awhile In My Shoes

For those who did not know about culture clash, hopefully your eyes have been opened and all parties can come to the table and begin discussions. Perhaps you need to start with more specific research about your organization. For those of you who knew about the culture clash and chose to ignore it because you thought the solutions were cost-prohibitive, we hope you will take this opportunity to revisit the topic. Surprisingly, many of the recommended ways to improve company culture in this research study do not cost hard dollars, they only require an investment of time and resources.

We believe that if you can get ahead of culture dissatisfaction levels before they rise too high, you have a great chance of minimizing or removing the culture clash. You will be surprised how far your organization can go if your employees feel that they are heard, respected, valued, and noticed. And employees, how do you expect your senior management to know what you are thinking if you don’t let them know. Maybe now is the time to go back to senior executives and others and try to build new lines of communication and support.

Be sure to download the CULTURE CLASH: The EMPLOYEE Experience Problem And How To FIX It study today. We not only cover talent retention issues, we provide talent acquisition findings and insights as well. You may be surprised what was ranked as the #1 service or program to improve company culture. Let the conversations begin!

The post Culture Clash: The Problem Driving Millions of Employees to Quit appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

But were you aware of the rapidly growing “Mid-Career Crisis”? Typically, there is an abrupt change in behavior in someone who is in mid-career. That behavior may cause some to abandon responsibilities in lieu of more fun, rewards, or satisfaction.

Contrary to public belief, the mid-career employee segment, not the entry- or junior-level employee segment, is the largest group leaving jobs today. They are leading the disruption in the Great Resignation trend. While more than six million employees quit their jobs in February 2022, 20% of them were mid-career employees. According to a new research study from the Hinge Research Institute entitled, Navigating The Mid-Career Talent Crisis ⏤ A Report For The Professional Services, that percentage rises to 30% when you look at those surveyed who quit or switched jobs in the past year.

About The New Research Study

The Navigating The Mid-Career Talent Crisis research surveyed more than 284 professionals currently working in the professional services industry. Mid-Career employees accounted for 91 of those survey responses. The research participants completed an online survey that included both quantitative and qualitative questions. The research was produced by the Hinge Research Institute and is available at no cost.

Who Are The Mid-Career Employees?

The mid-career employees were those with titles of manager, senior manager, project lead/manager, or something equivalent. Their ages ranged from 30 years old to 45 years old. The leadership employee segment included those with titles of director, senior director, partner, or vice president. The senior executive employee segment included the titles of CXO, president, managing partner, founder, or principal.

Why Are Mid-Career Professionals Leading This Trend?

For years, corporations, firms, associations, and other organizations have relied on the mid-career staff to solve problems and move things forward. Mid-career team members were in the precarious position of accepting and being held accountable for leadership and senior management’s strategies and goals⏤while also being responsible for ensuring that their staffs achieved those objectives.

On top of that, those in their mid-careers are the ones who assume the burden of creating an environment that is supportive, fun, visionary, purpose-driven, and more. Unfortunately, with all the unstable health, social, economic, and political conditions arising in these times, mid-career staffs are tired and stressed…making them more sensitive to the challenges of their employment situations, other opportunities, and life priorities. In our research, less than half of mid-career employees were satisfied at their job.

In fact, for some, frustration or the desire to change circumstances are so strong that they are prompting mid-career professionals (30%) to quit their jobs without having another job offer.

What Is Driving Dissatisfaction?

There are two reasons that stand out above all the rest as the reasons why mid-career employees quit their jobs: 1) Frustration with leadership/management (75.9%) and 2) Desire for a better company culture (72.4%). These two reasons ranked higher than “wanting a higher salary” at 44.8%, “unable to get a promotion” at 31%, or any other reason.

Now is the time to conduct employee research or surveys to collect more input around your company culture and suggestions on how to improve it. It may also be the time to invest in leadership assessment and training. Keep in mind, a lot of folks rise to leadership positions because of their performance and accomplishments⏤not because they have great communications or management skills.

Diving deeper into leadership issues, those mid-career employees that gave their company culture a low rating (6 or less) did not feel comfortable sharing thoughts with their leadership (94%), did not see transparent leadership (82%), and did not feel that their leadership provided clear promotional paths (79%). These are large percentage numbers concerning leadership and should be addressed if you want to navigate through the mid-career talent crisis. Start by running a survey within your organization to see if you get similar results or if other leadership concerns arise.

So, The Crisis Has Been Identified, How Can You Minimize It?

To start with, be pro-active but don’t overreact. Address it in stages or phases. The more information and feedback you can collect, the more you will be in a position to plan, prepare, and respond. Keep in mind that there are three disruptive components of this trend:

1. Employees that you have invested in and rely on may leave with little to no notice⏤impacting deadlines, dependencies, and deliverables
2. These departing employees may get other employees to think about leaving
3. Backfilling these open positions may take a long time or may not happen at all

The key to minimizing the Mid-Career Crisis is to effect change before your mid-crisis professionals reach “the point of no return.” If they can see that they are being heard and changes are being made, they may not reach the snapping point and maybe you can get them to de-escalate from the active seeker stage to the passive seeker stage to eventually the satisfied employee stage. A lot of the triggers for mid-career staff departure are focused around not being respected, heard, challenged, or appreciated.

One of the best and fastest ways to improve company culture and create an environment of hearing and appreciation is by having in-person, work-related social events on a regular basis. The face-to-face corporate happy hour is back! It’s true. This was highest ranked service or program recommended by mid-career professionals at 43.1%. Keep in mind that these events must be in-person. Virtual social events ranked lowest on the list of recommendations at 4.2%. Perhaps it is because this employee segment in particular has to interact with so many other employee segments that they are tired of the daily virtual meetings. They want to get back to the days when they can forget or laugh about their issues with others who understand their issues over a mixed drink, pint of beer, or glass of wine.

Another fast way to improve company culture is to provide a mental health day. Make it a floating holiday. This is a tangible and meaningful way to show employees, especially mid-career professionals, that they are valued and appreciated. Mental health days ranked second at programs that could help improve company culture by mid-career staff. When looking at the responses of the three employee segments that we researched, mid-career professionals valued mental health days significantly more at 36.1% than did Leadership (18.5%) and Senior Executives (8.8%).

Where Are Prospective New Hires Learning About Your Company Culture?

Despite your best efforts, several mid-career employees have left your company and now you must replace them. Since corporate culture is such an important consideration for many of your mid-career job prospects and candidates, where do you need to make sure your corporate culture is clearly conveyed and showcased? The top answer according to our research is your website. “Looking at the company website” (79.8%) ranked higher than “social media” (60.7%), “Glassdoor reviews” (58.3%), “online search for articles about the firm” (50%), or “discussing culture with interview participants” (29.8%).

So, how does your corporate culture come across on your website today? Step back and assess. Does your culture come across as inviting, caring, purpose-driven, respectful, team-oriented, and more? Are their webpages that could be tightened up or reformatted to tell a better and clearer story. Could the navigation be improved for a better journey? Are there components you could add to your website so that visitors stay on your website longer? A lot of first and last impressions are made from a website visit. Make sure you have done everything you can to make sure that prospective candidates want to interview with your company.

Next Steps

While this article does not cover all the findings in the Navigating The Mid-Career Talent Crisis research study, it does provide a strong foundation for you to begin listening and adapting to the concerns of your mid-career employees. Here are three steps to follow:

1. Realize that many of your mid-career staff will consider leaving this year. It is a fact. It has been happening month after month. Even those who are satisfied with their corporate culture are being tempted. Now is the time to roll out a phased retention plan that may include training, improved communications processes, in-person social events, and more. Show your mid-career team that you are listening and appreciate them.
2. Don’t underestimate mental health days or DEI programs. As we mentioned earlier, mid-career professionals are more stressed than ever. When asked about programs that help improve company culture, “Mental health days” ranked at the top. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs ranked second (26%) on the list of programs that mid-career staff see as improving company culture.
3. Re-assess the messaging of your website. The focus on corporate culture is stronger than ever and your website is the highest ranked location that job prospects access to learn about an organization’s culture. How does your culture come across? Ask friends and family members to visit your website and give you their impressions. Nowadays, there are so many techniques you can use to make your culture stand out on your website. Be sure your website is a high-performance website.

There is a lot to take in with this new research study. Your organization may not be feeling the negative impact of the Mid-Career Crisis yet. That is great. You have not felt the disruptions to business and you have time to adjust and plan for it. Too often we find ourselves in situations where we say, “I wish I had known about it” or “I wish I had more time to prepare for it.” Make the most of this opportunity. Download the free research study today and learn more about mid-career professionals including how they search for new jobs. And remember, you don’t have to do all of this on your own. Hinge can provide expertise to help you with your website, research, or content needs.

The post The Great Resignation: Navigating the Mid-Career Crisis appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

The reality is that not every professional services website is built with recruiting in mind though. And this is a mistake! In a competitive marketplace where recruiting top talent continues to be a challenge, optimizing your website so that potential hires have a positive user experience is essential.

In this post, we’ll explore the role your website plays in attracting top talent and highlight a few ways it can avoid scaring away possible recruits.

Your Website is at the Center of Your Employer Brand

The important role your website plays in the recruiting process isn’t speculation, but rather an insight derived from the Hinge Research Institute’s latest Employer Branding Study. In the study, we asked both job seekers and professional services recruiters what the top elements of an employer brand were. Here are the top five results:

You’ll want to address each of these issues on your firm’s website, but notice that the website itself was called out as a top element of an employer brand.

Similar to the journey buyers take when evaluating you as a service provider, potential employees are seeking information that will help them make the right career choice. Leading recruiting and job board companies like Indeed.com encourage job seekers to check a company’s website for information on its culture, leadership team, and services in preparation for a job interview. Will they be able to find this information on your website?

If your website is disorganized, outdated, lacking sophistication, or rarely updated, you risk scaring away potential recruits who are evaluating you as a possible employer. Your website is critical to your employer brand, so it is essential that you prioritize updating or redesigning it with future job candidates in mind.

Building a Strong Careers Page

Top talent is hard to come by in professional services. That’s why it’s important to have a dedicated Careers page on your firm’s website. You may even want to feature it in your main navigation. When a potential employee arrives at your website, you don’t want them to struggle to find your Careers page. 

But all Careers pages are not created equal! What are some ways you could strengthen this page? Here are some ideas:

• Use real photos of your team in action
• Film an overview video highlighting employee culture
• Feature current job postings (or link to your job portal)
• List common benefits and amenities
• Describe what differentiates your company culture
• Use videos or summaries to spotlight employees
• Provide the location of your office(s)
• Call out special groups (interns, students, veterans, etc…)
• Include a form to contact you with questions

This page may be a prospective employee’s first glimpse at your company culture. Make sure you put your best foot forward and tailor it to the kind of prospects you want to hire.

3 Places You Should Link to Your Careers Page

Apart from providing a clear link to your Careers page in your site navigation, there is ample opportunity for you to feature your Careers page on other parts of your website. With the goal of bringing more visibility to your Careers page, consider linking to your Careers page on these other locations on your website. 

1. Homepage – Your homepage will be the first landing spot for many potential hires. One common way to ensure they navigate to your Careers page is to dedicate a section to your homepage to job seekers. If the mainstage area of your homepage is a slider, then the Careers page can be included as a slide. Alternatively, you could add a small careers panel toward the bottom of your homepage.
2. The footer – Users generally expect to find navigation options regarding the company at the bottom of your website in the footer. If your website lists these kinds of links in the footer, consider including the Careers page as an option.
3. The About Us page – Almost every professional services website has an About Us page (whether it’s called that or not). As possible job candidates explore your website, many will navigate to your About Us page first. If recruiting is a top priority for your firm, you may want to dedicate a portion of your about us page to job seekers, including a link to your Careers page.

What are Job Seekers Looking For?

Job seekers are not just looking for open positions on your website. Instead, they are looking to make an assessment of your organization as a whole. Can they imagine themselves working for you? What would life be like working with your team? Is there an opportunity to grow? Selecting a place to work is one of the most important life decisions a person can make. And now that we live in a digital world, your website will play a critical role in that decision.

In the figure below, we see what drives decision-making for job seekers. Sure, they want to be paid well for the work they do. Who doesn’t? And perhaps you can call out your firm’s approach to providing competitive compensation on your Careers page. But most job seekers are looking for more than just competitive pay.

Company culture – Job seekers are looking for well-articulated company culture and a firm that clearly defines its values. Your About Us and Careers pages can help check this box! In the About Us section, dedicate a place to share the story of your firm. As you write these pages, appeal to the imagination of not just your buyers, but also your possible recruits. Tell a story that will appeal to them, as well.

Here is also where the imagery plays a crucial role. If your website is full of clichéed stock images, what message does that send to potential recruits? Not a great one. Real, custom photography and video of your staff at work can bring a website to life.

Opportunity for growth and career advancement – Again we see an opportunity for storytelling to play a role in your Careers section. Can you feature a story about a newbie you hired straight out of college who grew into a major contributor to your organization? Videos and articles showcasing how employees at your company have realized tremendous professional growth and success can be a powerful addition to your Careers page.

Doing a variety of interesting and challenging work – Excellent job candidates will likely explore your whole website. As they prepare for a possible interview, it will be essential for them to understand your services and how you’ve helped other clients. Provide detailed information about your service offerings and case stories to illustrate them. Case stories bring to life the kinds of challenges prospective hires might face in their professional life at your firm.

A clear vision for the future/strong leadership – Job seekers want to work with a strong team led by capable leaders. Strong leadership profiles share an individual’s background and credentials in detail. They also often link to a leader’s articles and speeches and can showcase notable projects and accomplishments. And some will even include videos highlighting the executive and their role at the company.

No Time to Wait

Think about your future employees as you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your website. The competition for top talent is fierce. And remember: as the shift toward a more digital recruiting process accelerates, your competitors are recruiting online, too.

There is no time to wait. If your website is missing many of the elements described above — and if recruiting top talent is a high priority at your firm — there’s no better time to make some critical upgrades.

The post Is Your Website Scaring Away Top Talent? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Hiring and retaining talent is one of the top challenges faced by most professional services firms. In fact, it’s third only to increased competition from new firms and downward price pressure/commoditization according to Hinge’s latest research study.

There’s isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. In a tight job market, it can be tougher to attract quality talent than find new clients. But there are steps you can take to help great people gravitate to your firm. And your very first step should be to craft an employer value proposition (also called an employee value proposition or EVP).

What is an employer value proposition?

An employer value proposition is nothing more than an engaging appeal to prospective employees. It’s made up of a set of characteristics, features, and values that describe what it’s like to work in your organization and how it improves employees’ lives.

It is both a marketing message and a promise, so be careful that you don’t make claims that can’t come true. At the same time, you want to develop a message that’s positive, approachable and energizing. You can use your EVP anywhere you want to speak to potential employees — your website, recruiting collateral, displays and HR talking points.

Examples of a value proposition

The easiest way to understand an EVP is to examine real-world examples. You can find these yourself by visiting a firm’s website and checking out their Careers page.

Unfortunately, not all firms have a well-articulated EVP. In fact, most don’t — which is exactly why you should. Let’s take a look at a couple of solid examples to get started:

Accenture:

Help Build the Future
Make a difference your way
Work where you’re inspired to explore your passions, where your talents are nurtured and cultivated. Innovate with leading-edge technologies on some of the coolest projects you can imagine. And get the tools you need to keep learning and growing so you stay continually ahead of the game while making a difference in the world.

Jacobs:

Where can your career take you?

At Jacobs, we help prepare people for new opportunities and challenges in their careers. With positions at every level, openings in multiple disciplines, expertise in a range of markets and offices around the globe, we create an environment where you can learn, grow, and thrive.

If you share our commitment to doing what’s best for clients, enjoy working in teams and hold yourself to the highest ethical standards, you’ll fit right in.

Ingredients of a Strong EVP

So what makes these EVPs effective? And how do you develop your own?

First of all, writing your employer value proposition is an act of persuasion. So approach it as if you were marketing one of your services.

Your goal is to stimulate interest in three things: 1) your firm’s mission, 2) its culture and 3) employee career development. By “mission,” I don’t mean your mission statement. Think instead about how your firm helps clients, is advancing the industry or creating some greater good. What is your firm’s larger purpose? In the Accenture example, one of the world’s largest consulting firms can credibly say “Help build the future… Make a difference your way.”

When you talk about your culture, think about what keeps employees happy and engaged? Jacobs says it creates “an environment where you can learn, grow, and thrive.” To address career development, consider how you improve the skills and prospects of your team members. Do you offer training, tuition assistance, a clear career path? What’s the biggest reason people stay at your firm? Accenture offers opportunities to “innovate with leading-edge technologies on some of the coolest projects you can imagine.”

As I was digging around to research this article I noticed that many firms use the phrase “make a difference,” or something similar, in their EVP (see the Accenture example above, for example). These companies are clearly tapping into people’s more altruistic desires to live meaningful lives and contribute to the betterment of society.

While I don’t necessarily recommend that you lead with this sentiment (after all, an EVP is should distinguish you from the competition), you may be wise to consider a social message in your value proposition. Keep in mind, that it should reflect your firm and its values. Better not to include such a statement than to set up an expectation that you can’t live up to.

So when the rubber meets the road, your employer value proposition should be compact and written in simple language. You can always expand on individual points in other places. Your EVP should be a brief paragraph or two that lay out the key benefits and appeal of working at your firm.

Getting the message right is one thing, but if you are struggling to come up with these benefits, it may be time to consider focusing on creating a more compelling employer brand and culture. Firms with a compelling EVP are at a distinct advantage in the employee marketplace.

Conclusion

If finding great people is an ongoing struggle, you should take a critical look at your firm’s employer value proposition.

Are you describing a place that sounds appealing, even exciting, to work? Are you painting a picture for prospective employees that draws them in and makes them think, “Hey, I might really like it here”?

An employer value proposition is a simple idea that can have a powerful impact on your business. What’s yours?

Free Resource

The Brand Building Guide for Professional Services Firms

Download Now

The post What’s Your Employer Value Proposition? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

In truth, some of the most sought-after professionals in your industry are searching for a better place to work right now. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to attract these employees into your organization – and this “10-Minute Survivor’s Guide to Winning the Talent Wars“ will show you how to do it, while keeping your existing team satisfied, engaged, and more productive than ever. 

In the 10 minutes it takes to read this guide, you’re going to learn:

• What an employee recruitment strategy is;
• The benefits of developing a talent recruiting strategy;
• The importance of research-based recruitment strategies;
• 9 research-proven employee recruitment strategies that work; and, finally, 
• How to retain top talent after hiring them.

What Is an Employee Recruitment Strategy?

An employee recruitment strategy is a plan for attracting and retaining the talent required to execute your overall business objectives. An effective employee recruitment strategy consists of two essential elements: (1) the identification of the talent sets you need; and (2) the process that attracts, screens, onboards, and retains the people who possess these talent sets.

What Are the Benefits of Establishing an Employee Recruitment Strategy?

Our research shows that a clearly defined employee recruitment strategy offers the following benefits and advantages:

• Clearly communicates the recruitment strategy: Codifying your talent recruitment strategy makes it easier to communicate the details of the strategy to all staff involved in the recruitment process. When everyone is on the same page, your team can work in synergy to support the larger hiring needs of your organization. 
• Serves as an essential element of your growth strategy: As the size and profitability of your company grows, your staffing and recruitment requirements will expand with your organization. Therefore, every growth strategy should include a corresponding recruitment strategy.
• Documents and tests your assumptions: The first iteration of your recruitment strategy is a “work in progress” that will require continuous adjustments. Codifying the strategy with your team allows you to standardize the implementation of your assumptions and test them for efficacy. As elements of the strategy prove or disprove themselves over time, you can document changes while keeping all team members on the same page. 
• Measures desired outcomes and troubleshoot solutions: A good recruitment strategy empowers you to measure your recruitment actions against desired outcomes, so you can troubleshoot solutions and improve the overall efficacy of the strategy. 

The Importance of Research-Based Recruitment Strategies

Some of the most common recruitment tactics – even some that you’ll learn at HR conferences – do not have any foundation of evidence to prove that they work. Other common methods may have worked in the past, but they no longer produce the results you need in a contemporary hiring context.

With this in mind, it’s important to understand that some – if not all – of your recruiting ideas, habits, and assumptions might not be effective. They could even be working against the hiring goals you’ve set out to achieve. Through careful research – and critically examining how your hiring practices are performing – you can better identify the strategies that work and the ones that don’t. Over time, you can adjust your tactics to make sure they’re working based on reality as discovered through research.

9 Research-Proven Employee Recruitment Strategies That Work

At Hinge, we developed the following research-proven recruitment strategies from key insights in our 2021 Employer Branding Study: 

1. Get to Know Your Targeted Talent

The recruitment strategies that attract one type of employee could serve to dissuade another type of employee from wanting to join your firm. Therefore, the first step toward developing a sound talent recruitment strategy is to understand the specific needs and priorities of the talent you’re targeting. 

Just as marketing firms develop detailed customer profiles, your goal is to create a clear picture of your ideal job candidate and what they look for in an employer. Once you have that picture, you can adjust your recruitment strategies to attract these employees.

As an example, our Employer Branding Study offers the following insights into the different priorities of entry-level versus mid-career job seekers:

Entry-level professionals seeking jobs: 

• Most are aged between 25 and 34.
• The only career level to prioritize both salary and professional growth equally as the top deciding factors.
• Prioritize nearby jobs that don’t require excessive travel or relocating.
• Search for jobs via company web pages, social media, job fairs, job boards, and educational facilities.

Considering this information, firms that want to attract entry-level candidates may want to focus on local recruitment activities while clearly communicating the growth and advancement opportunities available to entry-level hires.

Mid-career professionals seeking jobs: 

• Most are aged between 35 and 44.
• Seek positions with greater responsibility. 
• Value workplaces with cultures of respect and honesty more than other career levels. 
• Want to know that they will receive recognition and appreciation for their contributions.
• Prioritize salary first, company culture second, and “companies with a clear vision for the future” third.
• Concerned about being “stretched too thin” and “wearing too many hats.”
• Search for jobs via recruiters, staffing firms, trade associations, and referrals from friends and colleagues. 
• Prefer human-centric job search methods over online job platforms.

Source: Employer Branding Study Executive Summary

Considering this information, firms that want to hire mid-career candidates may want to clearly communicate their workplace cultural values – especially as they relate to respect and honesty. Job descriptions should be clearly defined and reference more focused roles. Finally, during interviews, companies should provide evidence that they recognize team members for their contributions. 

2. Target Passive Job Candidates

Active job seekers are the ones that come knocking on your door, making them the easiest and most convenient employees to hire. However, in the “employee’s market” of today, active job seekers are hired and taken off the market almost immediately – i.e., they’re pretty few and far between.

In contrast, passive job seekers are interested in new opportunities but they’re not actively searching for jobs. They could be working at a competitor, taking leaves of absence, or they might be taking it easy after losing their jobs in the pandemic. There are plenty of passive job seekers available in this market – but employers have to be proactive in reaching out to them.

Interestingly, our employer branding study showed that passive job seekers have dramatically different employment priorities than active job seekers:

• Active job seekers: Prioritize career growth opportunities, a great professional culture, good communication, and they prefer jobs that offer stability. 
• Passive job seekers: Prioritize better pay, a strong sense of connection with fellow team members, and they want to join firms with a clear vision for the future.

Source: Employer Branding Study Executive Summary

By understanding the different priorities of passive job seekers – and the fact that passive job seekers are more prevalent than active ones at this time – HR teams can strategically adjust the way they present their firms when reaching out to passive candidates. 

By stressing the points that passive job seekers prioritize – such as competitive salaries, a close-knit team environment, and an impressive corporate vision – our research shows that firms will have a better chance of convincing these job candidates to join their teams.

3. Assess Your Employer Brand

What is the experience like as an employee working at your firm, and what are people outside the company saying about the work experience? When you find the answers to these questions, you’ll have an excellent assessment of your current employer brand. Are you happy with it? Does something need to change to attract the top talent you need?

Beyond the most general aspects of your employer brand – such as having a reputation for being “an excellent place to work” – there are more specific elements. For example, your employer brand could be known for any number of positive or negative attributes:

• Negative: Having a high-pressure culture where employees have to work late at night.
• Positive: Offering a full month of paid vacation to employees who have been there for more than three years.
• Negative: Being stingy on year-end bonuses and vacation days.
• Positive: Providing a fully stocked breakroom with the best free snacks and drinks.
• Negative: Having a highly critical culture where micromanaging is the norm.
• Positive: Having a culture of respect and honesty where all employees get to participate in important management decisions.
• Negative: Having limited resources and out-of-date technologies.
• Positive: Being a place where new grads find exciting opportunities to grow their careers.
• Mixed: Having a competitive hiring process where only the best candidates can get a job.

Employer branding also refers to how your company is perceived by different industries, groups of employees, universities, and referral sources. For example, your company could be well-known among top-tier law school graduates as a coveted place to work, while less prestigious law school students see your firm as “overly pretentious” because it only gives opportunities to ivy league grads.  

At Hinge, our Employer Branding Program assists firms in the process of developing a powerful employer brand that attracts top talent. The first step in this process is the careful and honest assessment of your reputation as an employer. After we get to the heart of what people are really saying about working at your firm, we can identify cornerstone employer branding elements that – once addressed – will transform your organization into a place where the most talented individuals in your industry are proud to be employed.

Learn more about the Hinge Employer Branding Program here.

4. Tune Up Your Culture and Communicate It 

According to our employer branding research, an attractive salary is a top consideration among prospective employees. However, the desire to find an excellent cultural fit also carries a lot of weight. For example, our research shows that job candidates predominantly want to work at companies with a culture that values honesty and respect – while also supporting the career growth of their employees.

Source: Employer Branding Study Executive Summary

Does your firm need a culture tune-up? At Hinge, we’ve found that the most effective way to tune up your culture is to focus on one priority instead of a dozen. By focusing your culture tune-up on a single, powerful element, you can master this element in a way that truly sets your workplace apart from other firms. 

For example, what if your company culture lacks a sense of warmth, compassion, and respect among team members? Managers can make it their mission to start remembering key details about the closest family members of their employees. By remembering the names, ages, and interests of family members, managers can weave these details into conversations to radically boost the sense of family, warmth, and trust throughout the organization. 

After implementing a cultural tune-up like this, make sure you’re communicating the new values to job candidates. Weave “culture” into interviews by explaining why these values are important to your firm. Also, talk about your company culture in visible places – such as your website, social media pages, and marketing material – so job candidates see this information while researching your company.   

5. Showcase Your Expertise

Another top selection factor among job candidates is the degree of industry expertise your business possesses. Ultimately, your best recruits are looking for the same thing as your clients – an established, specialized company with strong industry expertise where they can work alongside respected and visible experts. 

Source: Hinge Marketing Library, The Visible Expert

Here are some easy ways to showcase your firm’s industry expertise to new job candidates:

• Showcase visible experts at your company: Encouraging your expert team members to teach public classes, give presentations at conferences, and write blogs that potential job candidates will see. If you don’t have “visible experts” on staff, our free e-book – “The Visible Expert” – offers a step-by-step approach to transforming your team members into known and respected experts in their fields.
• Display team members and their biographies on company web pages: Spend time on team member biographies to ensure that they communicate the depth of experience team members have, and share their stories on websites and social media.
• Share firm achievements with job candidates: Make a list of your firm’s most noteworthy achievements and its prestigious clientele. Share this information on social media, in job vacancy listings, and with new job candidates during interviews. 
• Share firm achievements with current employees: Post your firm’s achievements on bulletin boards around the office to remind current team members that their company is highly regarded for its expertise. They will share this information with colleagues and friends outside your organization. 

6. Introduce Job Candidates to Your Team

Most companies only allow key decision-makers – like managers and HR personnel – to meet new job candidates during the recruitment phase. This is a mistake; job seekers want to know who they’re going to work with before they accept your job offer. 

During interviews, consider talking about individual team members, their achievements, and the common interests they share – and let new recruits meet their future co-workers ahead of time. When job seekers feel a connection with the team they’re going to work with, they’ll feel a lot more comfortable accepting your offer.  

7. Leverage Social Media

According to our employer branding study, professional services job candidates use LinkedIn and other social media websites to evaluate their employers. Therefore, it’s essential that your company’s descriptions and posts on social media convey the right employer branding message to future job candidates. Check these sites carefully to ensure that they’re not just speaking to your customers, but also to your future employees.

Video posts are an excellent way to boost the quality of your social media presence. Consider posting videos of your employees talking about why they enjoy working with your company. This will help future job candidates feel closer and more comfortable with your organization and team. 

8. Embrace the Niches 

Most businesses offer a mix of general and extremely niche services to their industries. The general services your company offers might be your “bread-and-butter,” but your niche services are probably the most interesting and memorable that set your firm apart. 

Make sure to identify the niche services your company offers. Post job listings on niche job boards and communicate your most exciting niche specializations to new recruits.

For example, a personal injury law firm might generate most of its income from litigating workers’ compensation claims. But it could be notorious for winning asbestos-related lawsuits, and maybe the nation’s leading asbestos litigation expert is an employee at the firm. As an attractive niche that makes the company stand out among job candidates, the law firm may want to showcase this niche in job postings and interviews.

9. Get the Professional Help You Need

Last but not least, if you’re having a hard time attracting new employees, you don’t have to struggle alone. Consider hiring a professional researcher, recruiter, recruitment trainer, or headhunter to help with your recruitment efforts. Oftentimes players with niche expertise can help you reach specialized talent pools that a general recruiter is unfamiliar with. 

But don’t limit your efforts to recruiting help only. Consider retaining a firm that can help you assess your employer brand and evaluate what cultural adjustments can have a major impact on your recruiting success. As more research comes out, you’ll be able to zero in on the changes that will make the most sense for your firm. 

Finally, remember that recruiting and retaining is very much a marketing endeavor, so don’t forget to include your marketing team and pay special attention to your website. Arguably, the most important consideration is search engine optimization (SEO) so that you’re found in the first place for the expertise that your firm already possesses. This also helps you understand how you’re viewed as a workplace. If you don’t have these specialized talents on board, retaining them can have a big impact on your ultimate success in winning the talent wars.

Retain Top Talent by Addressing Resignation Triggers

Equally important to attracting and hiring top talent is keeping your employees on staff. Understanding the circumstances that trigger resignations in today’s marketplace, avoiding them, and preparing for them ahead of time is an excellent way to boost your employee retention figures. 

According to our employer branding study, these are leading factors that trigger employee resignations in today’s marketplace:

• Your firm employs a large number of workers who have been in their positions for 3 to 4 years: Professional staff members are most likely to leave between their third and fifth years of employment. Therefore, organizations should pay close attention to these employees. Talk to them, learn about their needs, and find out how you can make their work experiences better.  
• Your firm operates in a professional services industry: Departing baby boomers, COVID-19 stresses, and increasing numbers of mergers and acquisitions have hit professional services jobs particularly hard. Now more than ever, professional services firms need to build their employer brands while implementing solid employee recruitment strategies. 
• Your firm has experienced an event that triggers resignations: According to our employer branding study, recent events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and the rising number of corporate mergers and acquisitions were important triggers for professional services resignations. A significant number of employees who were actively seeking new jobs said that they were dissatisfied with their firm’s management of either COVID-19 or a recent merger and acquisition event.
• Your team members are unwilling to recommend your company as a place to work: When team members will not recommend your workplace to friends and family members, it’s a clear sign that employees are not satisfied with their work experience and the loss of top talent could be on the horizon. 

A Final Thought

Now that you’ve finished this guide, you should have some excellent, research-based employee recruitment strategies that will help you attract and retain the best employees during these difficult times.

Even as the battle for top talent intensifies – due to COVID-19, rising mergers and acquisitions, retiring baby boomers, and the “Great Resignation” – the recruitment strategies in this guide can give your organization the competitive edge you need. However, if you’d like to supercharge your talent-attracting abilities even more, Hinge is here to help. 

The post Employee Recruitment Strategies: Your “10-Minute Survivor’s Guide” to Winning the Talent Wars appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

The word sparks feelings of joy as it evokes the beginning of something new. A new teammate, a powerful fresh start and a clean slate. However, with great power (and joy) comes great responsibility. You’ve just deemed this person worthy of joining your team and company. Now it’s your job to ensure they feel welcome, know what they’re doing and settle in nicely. 

Below, I outlined four steps to make this tall order seem much more manageable in a virtual world.

1. Give them the tools they need

Connect with your new employee before their first day to discuss how they’ll receive their computer and other office equipment. Whether you’ll be mailing it or doing a contactless handoff, it’s important to make sure your new hire has the physical tools they need to make their early days a success. Make sure that all applications they need are loaded on their computer and that their email, chat and other key services are set up and running. You may want to attach a sticky note with their login credentials. You may even want to send their equipment in advance, giving them an opportunity to familiarize themselves with it before day one.

2. Plan the first week

Try to imagine what your new hire’s first days should be like. That first week is a crucial—setting the tone for the weeks and months to come. Plans can of course change, but having an idea of how your new teammate should spend their time will ease anxiety all around. Think about shadowing opportunities for your new hire so that they can get real-world experiences under their belt. Your new employee will be bright eyed and bushy tailed this first week. Capitalize on this by throwing them in the deep end and exposing them to meetings right away. Ask for feedback. Or give them an assignment, such as “observe this meeting and share your thoughts with me”. It’s a great, low-risk way to get them actively engaged in your business.

Remember that your new employee likely came from knowing everything about their job to starting over at ground zero. Simple exercises like the one above will give them a sense of pride and accomplishment right off the bat. It may even give you some fresh insights into your processes and meetings. 

Here are some other meetings you might want to include in their plan:

• HR/finance meet and greet/paperwork finalization
  • Send paperwork to your new hire ahead of time so they can come to the meeting prepared and ready to ask questions.
• Technology check in and troubleshooting
  • Server overview and shared drive orientation
• Meet and greet with:
  • Manager
  • Core team
  • Office buddies

Of course, in these modern times, all of these meetings are likely to be virtual.

3. Over Communicate

Open communication is important in a normal office setting. In today’s COVID world, it’s critical. Don’t assume that your new hire knows what they are doing. Check in multiple times and encourage their peers to do the same. Encourage your new staff member to ask questions, no matter how basic. They have to feel safe and motivated to adapt to their new, largely abstract, environment. If you’re not getting any questions, you should absolutely probe for them.

You can also set new hires up for success by assigning them office buddies. Select the three to four people in your office who “know it all.” This way, if you’re stuck and can’t help, you have back up. The last thing you’d want is for your new teammate to suffer alone when they don’t know the answer to something. 

4. Set short- and long-term goals

You hired this person because they would bring something of value to your organization, so don’t lose sight of that fact in the onboarding process. Before they even start, identify specific achievable goals and expectations for them—tasks and metrics you can review together  on a 30, 60 and 90 day basis. It’s important for the new employee to know where they can turn for support, so make sure those are identified, as well. These can be things like FAQ docs, process documents, teammates, consultants and other resources that will help your new hire be successful.

Long-term goals will help your new hire understand what success looks like. Include attainable KPI’s and metrics so that you can measure success. Seek input from your new hire, as well, so that you’re both aligned and headed in the same direction. Check in on these goals on a regular basis—at least monthly, and perhaps more frequently at first. These meetings will be your opportunity to course correct and offer ongoing guidance.

A thoughtful onboarding process will make your new employee feel excited to get started in their new role. Your job is to set them up for success by providing a strong foundation. Ensuring that your new hire understands company basics and has a strong support system is a surefire way to guarantee their success. Structured onboarding provides valuable experience for all and makes it far more likely a new employee will stick around for the long haul. Happy planning! 

The post 4 Tips for Onboarding New Employees in a Virtual World appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

McDonald York Building Company, a construction firm based in Raleigh, North Carolina, is an example of a professional services firm that is doing client experience right. In fact, they have even branded their CX program, which they call MYWay®. The program consists of three core practices that affect clients at every point of the engagement:

1. Continuous Innovation — a deep cultural commitment to finding better ways to deliver their services.
2. Progressive Processes — their whole-hearted adoption of leading-edge processes, programs and standards, from safety to quality to sustainability.
3. End-to-end Workflows — a customized approach to project delivery that builds on up-front data, careful cost controls and respect for the schedule. The firm is involved in every stage of a project, from pre-construction to post-construction services.

The MyWay program is designed to instill trust, foster collaboration and ensure that communication is rock solid from the very beginning of every engagement. In fact, these values are baked into the company’s DNA. According to Ryan, “Their new hires are vetted by MYWay. And it’s in their proposals, as well as in the field.”

But how can a firm like yours start building an extraordinary client experience? McDonaldYork started theirs in 2010. There’s no reason you can’t do the same today.

Perhaps the easiest way to begin thinking about your clients’ experience is to start at the end of the client journey, then design backwards. “If you can understand why your best clients continue to do business with you, you will have taken a giant first step,” says Ryan.

Any successful client experience program must be tied to real business objectives. At Client Savvy, for instance, Ryan’s team determined that their top business challenges were client acquisition and client retention. So they designed CX strategies to target those business functions.

“Now, we have a dashboard that shows how many active business problems we have documented for each client. If we ever see a zero on the board, we know the client has solved that problem (hooray!). But if we don’t discover what their next problem is and start helping them with that, they probably won’t stick around for long.”

Your CX strategy might be different. You might need to fuel your referral engine, enter new markets or reduce employee turnover. Once you determine your critical path, you need to attack it at two levels:

1. Improving the client’s outcomes
2. Motivating your employees to deliver on your promise

In the book Customer Experience 3.0, John Goodman lays out a four-part framework to ensure that CX “is designed into all organizational activities, resulting in a complete, consistent, continuously improving experience”:

• Doing it right the first time
• Encouraging easy access to service via effortless channels
• Creating a complete customer service experience via every communication channel
• Listening and learning by creating an effective voice of the customer process

This approach addresses the full cycle of a client’s interaction with your business — from setting initial expectations (articulating your promise) to delivering friction-free customer service to collecting feedback at the end of an engagement.

As for your employees, CX can’t be “just one more thing” they have to do. “It has to create meaningfully positive outcomes, quickly, for everyone involved,” says Ryan.

“Even before trying to lay out a CX strategy, just start talking about CX. Ask people in your organization to describe great customer experiences they had at a restaurant, while traveling or in a retail transaction. Look for objective lessons and discuss how you might apply those lessons to your firm. More than anything, having these discussions will get people motivated and excited about the changes to come.”

The good news is you don’t have to tackle client experience everywhere in your business at once. Uncover the worst pain points and start there. Keep your business goals firmly in sight. And most importantly, get your staff engaged in the process — because a great client experience always starts with them.

*Ryan Suydam is Chief Experience Officer at Client Savvy, where he helps professional services clients design and deliver an exceptional client experience. You can meet Ryan and learn more about client experience at the next CXps Conference.

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Figure 1. Google Trends report for the term “employer branding.”

Very likely, much of this recent attention is driven by a highly competitive jobs market — and it is especially relevant to the professional services, where talent acquisition has been a perennial challenge and is only getting tougher as the pool of available labor gets smaller.

Download The Employer Brand Study

Whether your firm already has a formal employer branding program or you are considering starting one for the first time, you want to be sure you are investing your marketing dollars in the most effective techniques. But that begs a question: how do you know what works?

What the Research Tells Us

In our 2017 study of over 800 employee candidates and talent evaluators, we set out to find answers. What we discovered was that many employers are investing in marketing channels that don’t produce great results. In fact, a third of firms have failed to recognize the one channel used by more than 86% of job seekers.

Figure 2 shows the five employer marketing tactics in our research that are more popular with employers than with the job seekers they are trying to reach. In other words, firms are spending a lot of money in places prospective employees rarely look. This includes placing traditional job advertisements and participating in job fairs — two old-school techniques, perhaps, whose time has passed (but more on this in a moment).

Figure 2. Marketing channels that are overutilized by employers.

Even Facebook, the digital home to over a billion people, underperforms. Apparently, when it comes to finding their next job, professionals don’t think of Facebook as a serious resource. Twitter, Instagram and other second-tier social media brands also fail to captivate professional services job seekers.

So what are your better options? Where should you be investing your employer branding dollars? Additional data, shown in Figure 3, provide a path forward.

Figure 3. Marketing channels that are underutilized by employers.

The most important takeaway from this chart is that LinkedIn is the single most important marketing channel for recruiting, relied on even more often than networking and personal recommendations. LinkedIn is used by 86% of job seekers, but only 66% of firms are actively looking at LinkedIn for job candidates, a 20 percentage point gap. Clearly, LinkedIn has not only become the networking platform of choice, it’s where job candidates go first when they are ready to find a new position.

Another insight that firms would be wise to heed is the importance of their website as a recruiting tool. A third of job candidates were likely to use firm websites during their job search (frankly, we thought this number would be even higher). But fewer than half of firms actively use their website to attract employees — another large gap.

We can also see that job seekers use staffing firms, job-listing websites and specialized job boards more often than hiring firms do.

The largest gap of all can be seen in the role that published articles play in the recruiting process. According to our study, three quarters of job seekers are looking for a firm that has a good reputation in the marketplace. So it is not surprising that a significant percentage (26%) see published articles as an indicator of market leadership. The vast majority of firms, however, aren’t thinking about their thought leadership as an asset in their employer brand.

A Generational Perspective

Market research is rarely neat and tidy. Often, one set of data appears to contradict another set in the same study — until you unravel it. Our research was no different.

When we looked at the appeal of different channels to different age groups, we found many similarities, but also some stark differences. One of the most surprising differences are job fairs, which I suggested earlier may be of declining relevance. But when we teased apart the data by generation, we were surprised at first to find that Millennials, the youngest cohort in our study, were 4-5 times more likely to attend job fairs than their Gen-X and Baby Boomer peers (see Figure 4.)

Figure 4. Generational differences in marketing channel preference.

We soon theorized, however, that job fairs are probably more suited to candidates earlier in their careers. Most executive-level positions, for instance, are being filled through different channels.

So, are job fairs still a viable recruiting channel? The answer may very well depend on the level of person you are hiring. That said, the numbers don’t support putting a great deal of resources into this technique.

Download The Employer Brand Study

The other results in this data set are not all that surprising: Millennials are more comfortable using digital platforms, including online job listing sites and web-based search.

What This Means for Your Employer Brand

What implications do these research findings have on your employer brand? Here are a few suggestions:

• Don’t underestimate the power of LinkedIn. Job seekers are using LinkedIn more than any other platform to find job opportunities and research firms.
• Consider engaging a professional recruiter to leverage LinkedIn. Many recruiters today are using LinkedIn to contact promising candidates, whether or not they are actively looking for a new position — and with great success.
• Create an appealing employer brand on your website. Devote a page — or even better, several pages — to describe your workplace, culture and benefits. The more you use photos, employee testimonials and specific examples of why working at your firm is a better experience, the more persuasive your brand will be. And don’t forget to talk about the important work you do, your firm’s awards and other factors that demonstrate your leadership and importance to the industry.
• Don’t think of Facebook as your recruiting homepage. Facebook is a perfectly appropriate place to post staff photos and fun memes, but it’s not where job hunters are going first to look for job openings or to learn about your firm.
• Spread the word. When you have a job opening, let people in your network know. Job seekers are asking their friends and colleagues to learn about opportunities.
• Post on niche and general online job sites. Today’s candidates are looking online for job opportunities. Traditional print ads, not so much.
• Become thought leaders. This is at least as important to your client-facing brand as your employer brand. Either way, Visible Expertise is a major win.

If you’ve been building or maintaining an employer brand — or if you are just looking for new ideas to attract the talent you need — these insights should make better use of your limited time and budget. Feel free to share your employer branding challenges and ideas in the comments section below.

Additional Resources:

• Our Rebranding Guide gives you the tools and knowledge you need to lead your firm through a rebranding.
• Get strategies, tips, and tools for developing your firm’s brand with Hinge’s Brand Building Guide for Professional Services Firms.
• Join Hinge University and take the in-depth courses and read the step-by-step How-Tos to take your brand to a new level of sophistication and engagement.

How Hinge Can Help:

Hinge’s Branding Program equips your firm to stand out in a crowded marketplace and build a distinguished brand that drives sustained growth. From strategy to implementation, we take your firm through the rebranding process — painlessly and with exceptional results.

The post Is Your Employer Brand Focused on the Wrong Things? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.