The best kept secret of hiring top talent: A Great Talent Brand

The ability for a startup to attract and recruit top talent is hard in the early days for 2 main reasons:

— No-one has heard about you yet, and so no-one knows what you’re building. How can you get talent excited about your company?

— Startups have a huge amount of (perceived) risk. How do you combat that and build confidence?

Building a talent brand will help conquer both!

According to LinkedIn, a “Talent brand is what talent thinks, feels and shares about your company as a place to work.” If a team puts effort in to their talent brand from day 1, they are able to reap the benefits of not just talent attraction, but also retaining talent leading to greater time efficiencies and cost savings over time. Investing time early on will help to build a great inbound pipeline of candidates who are interesting in working at your company.

A talent brand is about attracting, engaging with, and retaining talent. Yet so many companies neglect talent branding in the early days.

When a business creates a successful consumer brand, they have created an emotional, trusted and familiar connection with their users, that gives a sense of belonging. A talent brand should feel the same for potential and current employees.

Hiring talent can be very transactional to begin with. A company building an app needs an iOS developer, and so the hunt goes out for one. Many teams will engage with recruiters to do so. And to a degree a transactional relationship with a recruiter can be effective. A great recruiter will spend time with you, learn about your vision for the company, and be a good sales person on your behalf. But finding great recruiters is a rare and costly exercise. Not only is this approach to hiring short term thinking, but it also means you are relying on a recruiter to be your company’s ambassador.

There are very few employees in the early days to sing your company’s praises, so here’s a few tips to help get you going on building your talent brand:

1. Show off and be present

Make sure to show off what it is like to work at your company: show off your team, your internal culture, discuss how employees in your organisation are making a noticeable contribution to a game changing innovative company, discuss the benefits & flexible working conditions, and the network benefits, any missionary components to your business, the tech stack, the challenging work you undertake (Note: developers are problem solvers … are you stating what problems you will have for them to solve?) Brands like L’Oréal have a website dedicated to talking about their brand to attract talent, including videos of inspiring team members. Microsoft use twitter to show off about #MicrosoftLife.

Have a talent page on Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, your own website, as well as other platforms that make sense for your company, whether that’s Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest etc.

And be strategic in your presence: create a Glassdoor account before a bad leaver does. There are people who love working at your company, so encourage them, and former employees, to share their experiences. The chances are that there will be 50 happy employees for every 1 unhappy one. Make sure your happy ones are talking about you first!

2. Write blogs

Encourage others in your team to do so too. Talk about the core problems that you are solving and how. People like to know how the best companies do stuff behind the scenes, so share some of your secrets that people will love. Highlight if you are using a cool new bit of technology or if you have built some great hacks make sure you talk about it: are you using React Native or Elixir? Have you built an analytics bot in Slack?

3. Partner with industry leaders

Running events, or working alongside strong and trusted brands within a given industry can add great credibility to your company.

4. Build team profiles

Have each person in the team build their own brand and be known in the industry as thought leaders. This will naturally attract talent to them when out in the market.

If people in your company love working there, they will be your best talent brand ambassador, which should lead to more referrals from employees. Most people out there trust peer-to-peer recommendations!

5. Be present offline

Host meetups, or at the very least, talk at established ones. These are great for finding people that are passionate about an industry, given that they are spending their free time networking and learning. Meetups are a great time to speak about open roles in a personal way to a room full of interested people.

If you host a meetup, potential candidates are already in your office and have firsthand experience of how well you plug in to the community.

6. Treat candidates like customers

Which means that every interaction with prospective employees matters. When embarking on an interview process, make sure that you have a positive, consistent and engaging journey for those involved.

7. And most importantly: Strive for a great culture

Teams that focus on the happiness of existing employees will build the kind of advocacy required to attract top talent.