If you’ve done your employer branding homework, you probably have a good idea of how to talk to candidates about your company culture. You may have even mapped out the candidate journey, and made efforts to improve your hiring process. But do you have a good sense of the environment your candidates are operating in, and how other companies in your area are managing their own hiring process? And do you have data to back it up? If your answer to any of these questions is no, you’ll want to read on to find out how to better understand the competitive environment in recruiting.
Greg Nika, Glassdoor’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, brought together two experts in the candidate journey for a webinar, How to Outcompete Your Competitors for Top Talent. Alex Lebovic, Head of Talent at Grand Rounds, Inc., one of our 2016 Best Places to Work, spoke about how a growing company uses Glassdoor to improve its processes and stand out from the competition. Lever Chief Marketing Officer Leela Srinivasan shared an analytically driven perspective on competitive research and employer brand differentiation.
Use your Mission and Values to Stand Out
There’s no doubt that a mission can motivate employees to do their job well, and research from Deloitte supports it. For Grand Rounds, “being a mission-based company is one of the things that has made us competitive in our hiring and overall productivity,” said Lebovic. “We’ve gotten feedback from both candidates and customers that our mission and values matter and are reasons they choose to use Grand Rounds products and services. We want to make sure that we’re transparent about those values and that we amplify them as much as we can in both our hiring and our actions.”
Lever recently went through the process of rearticulating its mission and values. Srinivasan suggested that companies “use language that’s a bit less ordinary” to spark interest with employees and candidates. Common values like integrity and innovation can fall flat with candidates if they’re not put in the context of the company’s unique mission and culture.
Learn from Candidates and Competitors
When you’re trying to understand the candidate perspective, Glassdoor interview reviews are a great place to look. Lebovic shared how a growing company can use them. “As a high-growth company that is learning and defining our processes continually as we scale, we’ve been able to use the feedback we’ve gotten on Glassdoor as actionable insights. What we learned allowed us to create a baseline of what candidates thought was normal and fair, make our processes tighter and convert more people to employees at Grand Rounds.”
Nika explained how to evaluate interview reviews from competitors on Glassdoor – checking to see what kinds of hiring processes competitors use such as video interviewing, testing, creative questions – and learn how recruiters communicate with candidates.
Leverage Glassdoor and ATS data
A competitive analysis of data can offer clues into where you can improve your processes and messaging relative to the competition. Perhaps your interview cycle time is slower than the competition, and you’ll want to give candidates a heads-up. Or you have an above-average percentage of declined offers. All the information you gain can inform your mission to be an attractive place for candidates that you convert into employees.
Soon-to-be-released benchmarking data for Lever customers will offer additional insight on time-to-hire and sources-of-hire. When you understand how different sources net different applicant-to-hire ratios, you can invest more in the most productive sources, such as employee referrals or direct sourcing. This helps you create the best recruitment sourcing strategy. Srinivasan suggested thinking outside the box for sources and having “source jams” in which employees reach out to find candidates directly.
If anything speaks to the power of having a great hiring process, it’s getting referrals from candidates your company didn’t hire. As a testament to their hiring process improvements, Lebovic mentioned that Grand Rounds had made several of these hires.
When it comes time to gather the resources you need to implement your findings from a competitive audit, you’ll want to have as much data as you can to back up your plan, and measure success going forward. For more comprehensive notes on setting up your competitive audit, check out the presentation slides, and be on the lookout for our upcoming eBook, Stealing Your Competitor’s Playbook: How to Win the Competition for Talent.
