Your talent brand: are you ready to compete in a buoyant market?
In this Guest Column, Martin Anderson (Founding Director, Carrot Recruitment) discusses talent brands, and their importance as we approach more buoyant market conditions. The Evidence Base is pleased to welcome Carrot Recruitment as our new Talent Partner.
What is your talent brand?
Ensuring patients have access to the drugs they need requires a specialized set of professionals to understand and navigate complex regulations and market dynamics to ensure affordability and accessibility. Having the right people in the right role is key.
Differentiating your talent brand is therefore critical in a specialist market where niche and highly skilled employees are in high demand. And, as it is broadly anticipated that the market will become more buoyant in the coming months, now is the time to refine your talent brand to something that connects with your intended audience on an emotional level.
As a business, two key audiences you must engage with are your potential customers (achieved through your ‘customer brand’) and your potential employees (engaged via your ‘talent brand’). Getting both these right will increase your chances of success.
Your talent brand is what will attract potential applicants to your business and it is what will engage them immediately (or not) as they begin to consider your organization as a potential place to further develop their careers. It is how your brand is perceived in the candidate market and it is what forms their impression of what it might be like to work as part of your team. It is difficult to measure of course, because it is often subjective and not always tangible, but it is critical in differentiating your business from your competitors to help you attract the best talent to your business.
Your talent brand is essentially everything that faces externally and anything that potential future employees can see or read that might influence their opinion of you as an employer. Your ‘About Us’ and ‘Careers’ sections on your website are key and should contain the clear messages that you want to convey. Also, your home page should immediately engage and appeal, albeit the messaging here will be directed at your prospective clients; regardless, it provides candidates with a clear idea on how you position your service offering and how you differentiate. Google reviews, Glassdoor ratings, your company page on LinkedIn, your presence and contributions throughout other media channels and platforms, how you interact with your recruitment partners, how you interact with applicants throughout the recruitment process, and what ex-employees say about you – it is all part of your talent brand.
Connecting on an emotional level
This is where your talent brand differs from your employee value proposition (EVP). The latter is more about the material benefits on offer, and what tangible rewards an employee can expect in return for the work they do. But the talent brand should be more than that. It should make people feel that they want to be part of your journey; it should make them feel somehow connected with your brand.
This is achieved through clear positioning and clear messaging, and completing the checklist above is a good starting point for achieving this. Engaging visuals and a clear purpose will help. But so will your initial engagement with applicants, and how you sell the opportunity – allowing them to visualize themselves working with you.
It is also how you engage and brief recruitment partners, getting them fully engaged and excited about your talent brand helps to motivate them to deliver for you. They go to the market with a more positive and enthusiastic approach, and ideally with some clear differentiators to sell your offering over that of your competition.
Check out more content around the talent markets at the Talent Hub, in partnership with Carrot Recruitment.
What does a good talent brand look like?
It is difficult to find one firm that has absolutely nailed their talent brand from all aspects, but one firm that I do think presents itself well in this space is MAP Patient Access, a market access consultancy specializing in the innovative technologies market.
On first impressions, you can see a very clear proposition, with the various service offerings clearly and succinctly illustrated. The tone is just right, highly credible but approachable, and not overly corporate. Dynamic stats and blogs add instant credibility, and their values are there to see on page one. All very easy to navigate and digest.
Delve into their careers page and we see their offering to the talent market as comprehensive and compelling. There are reasons to join, values, and a downloadable booklet which is well presented. The Founder’s Story is a nice insight too. Their LinkedIn page is well cared for and further enhances their talent brand with relevant and regular posts and webinars. The LinkedIn page could perhaps do a little more on talent attraction content, but with no vacancies advertised at present, perhaps it is not the priority.
We know also from working with MAP Patient Access that they have a very smooth and efficient recruitment process and they ensure candidates are looked after brilliantly throughout, regardless of the outcome. More could certainly be done with Glassdoor and Google ratings. Overall though, I would suggest MAP Patient Access have a strong talent brand that is engaging and easy to like, helping with that emotional connection.
Considering the market conditions
Thinking from the candidate’s perspective is a great way to start when analyzing present market conditions within the recruitment space. At the moment, the number of vacancies is down significantly in comparison to recent years, and there are more available candidates in the market due to redundancies, restructures, etc. In these sorts of conditions (a job-led market), having the strongest talent brand is not quite as important because you are probably not hiring much, and there is plenty of talent available to choose from should you wish to hire.
However, if we flip the scenario and consider a buoyant market, where your services are in much higher demand, and therefore your need to attract high-quality talent to deliver projects is much more acute – here we have a market (candidate-led) where you and your competition are vying for the attention of the best talent.
From the candidate’s perspective, what is going to attract them to you? How are you going to engage them when the conversation starts, and, once hired, how will you develop and retain them? This all stems of course from your broader talent strategy, but the initial phase of attraction and differentiation is vital.
The point is that as we move towards a more buoyant market, now is a great time to review your touchpoints to your talent pools to ensure you are in a strong position when your recruitment activity picks up. A spring clean if you will!
There are many things you can do to optimize your talent brand, in readiness for a buoyant market:
- Ensure your website is immediately impactful and dual facing (for clients and candidates).
- Check your messaging is crystal clear (in all collateral), in terms of your service offering to clients and your offering to employees and potential employees.
- Build a comprehensive and well-structured ‘About Us’/‘Join Us’ page.
- Be clear on your Purpose & Values (make these genuine) and ensure these permeate other touch points with your talent market.
- Build out your company page on LinkedIn to mirror the key messaging on your website.
- Ensure your job adverts are succinct, clear, and compelling.
- Implement a very clear recruitment process that remains consistent, and try to move through it relatively quickly, otherwise you will lose talent to your competition.
- Part of this is developing a strong relationship with your recruitment partner(s) as they are representing your brand and are essentially an extension of your firm. How they go to market and the messaging they use is critical to perception in the market.
- Think carefully about the candidate’s experience. How you interact with candidates throughout the process is crucial because you want them all to have a positive experience and to say nice things about you when they talk to colleagues.
- Benchmark your EVP – are your salary bandings and benefits competitive?
- Engage with current employees to ensure strong levels of motivation and retention.
- And consider external influencers like your Glassdoor profile and reviews. How can these be harnessed positively?
In summary, here are the key points to consider in relation to your talent brand:
Your talent brand exists in everything that faces externally, and so has numerous touchpoints.
- A strong talent brand is essential in attracting talent to your business and differentiating your offering from that of your competition.
- A strong talent brand is more crucial in a candidate-led market where talent is in high demand.
- Your talent brand should be part of a wider talent strategy to engage, onboard, develop, and retain.
- A talent brand is more than your EVP – it should connect with your audience on an emotional level.
- How you position your culture, your purpose and your values will help create an emotional connection, as will positive commentary, reviews, credible content, and ratings.
Now is the time to get your talent brand shipshape – in readiness for returning buoyant market conditions.
I hope you found this article useful. Please view Carrot Recruitment as an extra resource within The Evidence Base community – we are happy to offer advice on anything related to your talent strategy and happy to set up informal conversations should you require any support or guidance.
Author
Martin Anderson, Founding Director
Martin formed Carrot Recruitment in 2006 having spent nine years in life science consulting and industry positions, initially with the Adelphi Group in Patient Outcomes and Business Intelligence, and then in commercial roles at Merck Serono. He co-leads the business strategically whilst remaining very active at a senior level within the Market Access, HEOR & RWE space, partnering with clients exclusively to source exceptional talent. Martin also consults with businesses around their talent brand and recruitment processes, offering reviews and strategic direction to help them differentiate their proposition to the talent market.
[email protected]; +44 (0)7786 024 142
Sponsorship for this Guest Column was provided by Carrot Recruitment.
To learn more about Carrot Recruitment, visit its company profile.