Branding for Recruitment
At the beginning of the year, we heard a lot about “The Great Resignation” trend in the United States. From my end, business was as usual. That is, after about 6 months of lag. I soon realized that our hiring pipeline was getting hard to get in quality candidates.
I believe, most of the recruitment companies were head-hunting to fill in the vacant gap, and thus scouting people for recruitment. That leaves us on the brink of not getting enough candidates into our funnel pipeline.
The tech industry just got more competitive. Companies start to advertise their good culture and perks. It was tempting enough to sway me over.
We knew we have great cultures. But, engineering was never part of company marketing strategy planning previously. That’s where we start the conversation about branding.
More than just company branding, leaders have to commit to personal branding. LinkedIn and Twitter were something we using it passively previously have to be more intentional at creating activity. All for the sake of bringing in talent. And oh boy, they have the choice.
Why?
In my opinion, a leader usually has their opinion and voices on the subject or topic that matters. What’s different now is trying to be explicit by making those thought public. People want to know the kind of leader they will be working with. We want them to know about the leader and culture of their future employer is.
As an example, in the light of the recent log4j security breach and AWS outage. How does the company handle them? We encourage engineers to open up their shells and share their experiences through articles like Medium. It is also a way of sharing the culture and practice of how we think about our process and strategy when handling such situations.
We want to give our future/potential hires an inside peek before they start working with us. The fun, the up/down, and the number of things they can learn from/with us.
Double edge sword
I think it is also a double edge sword. We are indeed using this channel to attract talent. It can be the other way around too, where recruiters used it to take our talent by head-hunting them.
We will be happy for them. From an employee standpoint, I think it is only fair this way. A company will need to compensate us fairly, such that we are willing to stay.
Compensation is not just about the money. We need to consider the whole package such as growth, learning opportunity, work-life balance, and other perks working for a company.
Conclusion
It was part of my goal for 2021, to begin with. I have spent time polishing my profile and making it public, starting an Instagram theme page, and so on.
I am proud of using my name as the brand that I am creating. And, there is still a lot more work to be done in this space. Nevertheless, what I am doing here is aligned with the company’s bigger goal. #RecuitementAsStrenght.