Every person connected to your organization is in sales and marketing. Each interaction anyone connected to your company, your government agency, your non-profit, or your university has with the anyone is an interaction with your brand.
Every interaction with a vendor, supplier, or competitor is as important as an interaction with a potential customer. At each touch point, your organization sells your organization’s values; each and every time.
But what does this have to do with human resources? Traditionally? Nothing. But today, everything. And to bring this into a more clear picture, think on this: every job applicant or potential employee your organization deals represents a potential customer or potential former customer.
If you believe this, then your entire candidate tracking program should be treated as importantly as your sales people treat their sales pipeline or customer relationship management.
A recent article from the United Kingdom Poor treatment of failed job applicants ‘hurts consumer brand’. Here are some highlights:
HR departments that fail to respond to every job applicant could be hurting their organisation by alienating potential customers, experts have warned.
Half of UK jobseekers have been left with a negative impression of an organisation following an unsuccessful job application, while a fifth have stopped buying their products as a result, according to a survey from talent assessment specialists SHL.
SHL warned that although many organisations were now inundated by applications, they risked alienating customers and damaging business performance by failing to realise the link between the employer brand and customer brand.
David Leigh, CEO of SHL, said: ‘It can be easy to dismiss applicants who aren’t suitable, but employers must remember that unsuccessful job applicants are also potential customers and ignoring them could impact the bottom line. A bad recruitment experience can be at least as damaging as a bad customer experience in-store.’
Cultivate your recruiting as another sales channel. Even if you can not hire every great candidate you can certainly treat every candidate with respect and decency and keep them as an advocate.
Here are 5 reasons to make every candidate feel like an important customer:
- Your candidate is a customer, can be your customer or just as easily your competitor’s;
- A candidate with a positive feeling continues to believe in and advocate for your organization;
- Your candidate might make a great fit in another position;
- Your candidate might make a great fit at another time;
- Your candidate might recommend someone as a better fit (we all know why we value employee recommendations)
As a human resource professional you are either making a business case and driving sales or you are simply a staff function.
You are either improving financial performance or you are a cost center.
As we have seen the last few years, if you are a cost center you are not a core competency – get a seat at the table with a candidate relationship management system.
Make the business case for your entire organization to treat interviewing and recruiting as a sales call. After all, that is your job.
5 reasons human resources hurt consumer brands is a post from: Toby Elwin Copyright ©2013 TobyElwin.com. Please share freely, but link back to source Toby Elwin - .
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