Why New and Potential Hires Are Your Most Important Customers

How does your business treat its potential customers? You’ve probably heard time and time again about how good customer service can be a profitable strategy. Maybe you’ve used tactics such as setting (and then exceeding) expectations, creating touchpoints with customers, and making it clear that you are listening to their needs.

Chances are that you’ve invested a lot of thought, effort, and resources into perfecting your sales pitch and customer service standards have had a lot of thought and effort put into them. After all, that’s how you attract and retain customer loyalty.

Here’s the next question: do your employees get the same treatment?

Thinking of your business’s workers like you would a customer might seem a little counterproductive. However, when you examine the attitudes in the workforce today, it becomes obvious that times are changing. What worked in the past to nurture employee engagement and retention may not get the same results now.

Members of the millennial generation, many of whom are now taking the workforce by storm, value different aspects of employment than their predecessors. Recruitment candidates today desire opportunities to learn, grow, and advance. Between these values and a highly transparent job market (thanks to the internet), the following statistics are a little less surprising:

• 90% of recruiters believe that recruiting was candidate-driven in 2015
• 84% of employees would leave if they were offered a job from a company with a great employer brand
• More than 25% of employees are high-retention-risk

When you factor in the average cost to fill an open position ($4000) it becomes clear that recruiting and onboarding practices are a worthy investment. These processes should be treated with the same care and attention you would give your customers for the best results.

It’s clear that this paradigm shift is important if you want to get the most out of your hiring process in today’s workforce. Here are a few practices you can implement to start treating candidates and new employees like your best customers.

Boost your employee value proposition

When you sell a product or service to a customer, you are providing something of value that they feel is worth the investment. Likewise, potential employees must choose whether a position is worth investing their time and effort. Your company’s employee value proposition (EVP) is the “deal” you are offering. This includes salary and benefits, but also extends further to work environment, employee autonomy, and rewards and recognition beyond salary.  As you examine your current EVP, ask yourself if it’s competitive in the job market. You want your company’s value highlighted in a way that attracts the interest of potential future top performers.

Eliminate friction in your process

From interviews to job offers to onboarding, the time period between when a promising candidate applies to when they are a fully-fledged member of the team is a critical one. Bottlenecks in the process can stop it in its tracks, leaving an opening for the candidate or new hire to accept a position with a different company. It can be difficult to remove every factor that could be contributing to friction, but providing new hires and candidates with honest timelines can ease frustration. After all, you wouldn’t leave customers dissatisfied with delays during a sale if you could help it.

Keep culture front and center

The most loyal customers are those who identify with the brand. The same can be said for your employees. Strong company culture leads to more employee engagement (which is considered to be the current number-one challenge for businesses worldwide.) Start early, helping candidates become familiar with your company’s culture during the recruiting process and highlighting the passion and values of your team. Then, keep it up during your onboarding process to help set realistic expectations and integrate new hires into the overall workplace environment.

Learning how to appeal to the modern workforce is incredibly important to building a strong and successful business. Check back soon for more tips and tricks for providing the same value to your employees that you do your customers.