Like many, I am active in the job market at the moment, searching for a CMO or Marketing Director role. Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring opportunities and have been in processes with a few different companies. Some have been good experiences; others have been disappointing.
As a marketer, I know that brand building does not happen in isolation only via the brand team. Brand building is an always-on, 360-degree activity, not limited only to consumers of a brand, but including anyone who interacts with the brand, including and arguably especially candidates – many of whom get to experience a deeper connection with a brand, from the inside out.
Paradoxically, many of the same businesses that are spending significant amounts of their budget on carefully crafting and communicating a warm, approachable, trustworthy brand image externally are letting candidates down and potentially damaging this image by something as simple as failing to communicate with candidates for a role they are hiring. It strikes me that there is an opportunity to do better.
Recently, I was introduced by a shared contact to a senior leader who was hiring for a role at an exciting, progressive business (a Sunday Times Top 100 Company to Work For and PR Week Best Place to Work company). After exchanging some emails to check background fit, package, availability, I met her over Zoom. The meeting was positive, we connected well and she asked me to meet the talent lead as a next step.
I spent the following few days further researching the company, talking to friends about the brand, doing desk research, preparing competency-based examples of how I might fit the role, looking at competitors – pretty standard but time-consuming stuff. The talent lead interview was quite intense but went well. It was scheduled for 30 minutes and lasted for 60! I was told during the interview that I’d be contacted later that day with next steps, and I must admit, I left feeling confident that I would be moving through this process to the next stage.
It’s now over two weeks since this interview and I have received no contact, or response to my follow up. Despite the flurry of emails and interest from this company at the start of the process, I have been corporately ghosted!
I’m pragmatic enough to know that the market is unusually competitive at the moment due to the flurry of post-COVID candidates, and it’s very possible that they have found someone with a more aligned background for the role. It’s also possible that the role has been put on hold or some other business change has impacted the hiring process. The thing is, the negative outcome does not concern me. Speaking frankly though, the lack of communication and response does.
I appreciate that talent teams are not only experiencing unprecedented volumes of candidates right now, much of which they seem to be managing directly as opposed to using the support of external head-hunters. I also recognise that they’re perhaps depleted, with people coming back from furlough or maybe even redundancies have been made. I am aware that there is a high degree of uncertainty in business right now, meaning that decisions can be difficult to make and processes can be both lengthy and complex.
However, it’s not difficult to make a positive impact on your brand in the hiring process. The businesses that think about this in an integrated and human way are at the simplest level proactively identifying and following a process and communicating in a timely and respectful manner. For candidates in an advanced stage of the process, perhaps they are sharing feedback proactively and even occasionally creating magical experiences for some (not all!) candidates by allowing them to enjoy their brand perhaps by giving a small token or voucher in order to leave the candidate with a positive feeling, whatever the outcome. Reconciling company values with this process is also a great idea – for example, if a core value of a company is something like respect, delivery, customer-first, trust – these should be woven into the talent acquisition process.
To get this right, I’d suggest that a corporate brand team or a formal strategy is not needed, although these things may help. Businesses need to apply a human lens and some courtesy when dealing with candidates by communicating in a timely, honest and, where possible, transparent way. To do better is to keep business values at the heart of the hiring process and continually consider the positive or negative impact that communication (or the lack of it) can potentially have on what is otherwise likely a carefully crafted brand.