How to Promote Your Company Culture to Future Candidates (Guest Blog)

Developing a winning culture is about more than just setting your core values and sticking to them. To make sure your organization develops the type of culture needed to succeed, you need to find ways to market your company culture to job candidates. This is because the people you add to your organization are going to have a profound effect on the way things are done in your organization, so you need to do everything you can to make sure new hires are a good cultural fit.

As such, it’s important to promote your company culture to job seekers. This will not only help attract more better-qualified candidates (company culture is now one of the most important things job seekers look for when considering a position), but it will also help push away those who might not be a good fit, leading to a larger candidate pool with a higher proportion of qualified people.

But how exactly do you promote culture to future candidates? Culture is something that exists very much inside your company, meaning it can be hard to broadcast it to those on the outside. Yet it is possible, and here are some ways you can do it.

Unify Your Messaging

Promoting your company culture to job candidates can be done by creating an employer brand, which is the image or set of associations people make about your company as an employer. And just like other types of branding, consistency is key. People are going to come into contact with your employer brand in many different places, and for you to accurately demonstrate company culture, it’s important all messaging says the same.

This means taking a look at all the different mediums used to communicate with job seekers, such as job boards and postings, social media, your website, etc., and making sure each one has accurate and detailed descriptions of what it’s like to work for your company. To help you make your messaging more consistent, you may want to work with a professional human resources firm. They can look at your job descriptions and postings, as well as the way you’ve designed and described roles, to help you come up with ways of better presenting your employer brand. 

But to get you started, take a look at how you can better present your company to people considering your positions. Images or testimonials from company events, such as team building activities, community participation, conferences, etc., can all help demonstrate to candidates that you’re words about culture are backed up by actions. However, no matter what you post, make sure you’re consistent so that people get the right image about your company.

Be Active on Social Media

Social media has completely changed the way brands can interact with their audiences. And the same is true for reaching job candidates. Posting frequently about what your company is doing helps to give people an idea as to what it might be like to work for your company.

Again, many businesses like to promote themselves as active members of their community. Live-tweeting your participation at a local charity event, or posting to Instagram afterwards are great for helping you share with your different audiences what kind of an employer you are.

This method is particularly effective, though, because it allows you to also communicate with your customers as well as candidates. It’s a rare opportunity for you to demonstrate all aspects of your brand, which will help make your messaging more authentic and therefore more effective.

Develop an Excellent Candidate Experience

The concept of a candidate experience has taken the recruiting and HR world by storm in recent years. Motivated somewhat by the concept of “user experience,” which is used in the tech world to help develop software that’s elegant and easy to use, the candidate experience refers to what people go through when they apply to one of your open positions.

More specifically, it looks at how easy it is for people to access your application, how long it takes for them to complete it, how often you get back to people, and what the interview process is like. Forcing candidates to go through long, cumbersome procedures is not only going to turn people away from applying for your positions, but it’s also going to communicate some things to them about your company culture.

For example, a poor candidate experience might send the message that you’re disorganized, or that you don’t place a lot of importance on people’s time. Or it might convey that you’re lazy. And it won’t matter if this is true or not. The perception people form will be the same. And since people tend to talk about a bad candidate experience, it’s important you succeed in this area if you hope to communicate to other job seekers that your culture is dynamic and attractive.

Start From Within

While all this is important for promoting your company culture to job candidates, none of this will work if you don’t first spend time looking at your culture from within. The most important thing you can do in any branding campaign, whether employer or traditional, is be authentic. So to begin promoting your culture, you need to first look at how well your expectations of culture match reality. Address any issues to get your own cultural development on track, and then adopt the strategies discussed here to help you communicate it to those you’re targeting for your open positions.

Author Bio:

Jock is the CEO of his own brokerage firm, Digital Exits. He consults with business owners to help them develop a growth strategy and also plan for their exit. As a result, he has become an expert in business growth and fully understands people are a core aspect of success in any organization.