Dear Claudia,

I work for a 50 year-old company with about 1,200 employees. The founder’s son is the current CEO, and it’s a wonderful, family-oriented place with very little employee turnover. I was the first real recruiter hired (about a year ago), and my online sourcing is a new concept to most of the managers. I’ve been discovering that our company doesn’t have a great online reputation, mostly due to some bad employee press a few years ago, and the fact that the company has always let managers find and manage candidates for their own hiring (that is changing now that I’m here). Still, people talk about us online like we’re a big black hole for applications, and the employee lawsuit gets brought up again and again. How do you change a reputation that is based on old information, and replace it with something more up-to-date?

New Sheriff in Town

Dear New Sheriff,

What a great question! Reputation is one of the hardest things to change once it’s established, in part because humans are wired to perceive what we expect to perceive – and once we’ve made our minds up about something, its really difficult to persuade us differently. It’s easy to dismiss bad chatter among candidates as sour grapes from malcontents, but dangerous to do so (as you’ve seen). Assuming it will go away works for a while, but we live in a viral age of immediate recall – things can get ugly again in a heartbeat.

The quickest way I know to start a perception shift from “black hole” to “Wow!” with candidates is to address four simple things:

- Is the application user-friendly?
- Are company contacts available to answer questions?
- Do you provide good communication about status and outcome in the hiring process?
- Does your company have a general attitude of courtesy and respect toward job seekers?

After that, it’s time to consider a broader strategy for managing your employer brand. Here are a few suggestions to get started; some of them you may already have in place – and my readers will no doubt jump in with important stuff I might have missed.

Manage your reputation, or someone else will.
Listen and solicit feedback at every opportunity. Not only to what is being said about your company in the marketplace, but listen also to the volume and frequency of the comments. Is one person saying the same thing again and again, or does the same feedback coming from many? If you want to change perception, it’s important that candidates see you as an active part of the discussions; and although you may not engage in every conversation about your company, you can pick and choose the ones that are important to you.

Know your target audience.
Everyone is not a candidate, you already know this. It’s important to have clarity about what fits perfectly at your company, so you can tailor your messaging to attract and engage those specific attributes. Lots of companies do a good job at this: Adidas wants candidates who are passionate about sports; Starbucks wants candidates who are passionate about coffee; Nordstrom wants candidates who are passionate about providing concierge service. If you want to change perception, figure out what your company is passionate about and talk about it constantly.

Hone your message.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as my grandmother used to say (sorry if that offends, I promise that I never once saw her actually do it). There are many ways to get the same message across though; the challenge is to make sure that your candidates hear some version of that message in every contact: advertisements, web sites, Hiring Managers, Interviewers, people at the front desk. If you want to change external perception, make the message crystal clear and virally repeatable.

Close the intention-behavior gap.
A wise person once told me, “Words are a statement of intention. If you want to know the truth, watch the behavior.” That's really good advice if you're raising teenagers, by the way. In this context, words are the expectations that we set with candidates: “I’ll call you with an update.” Behaviors (easily found in policies, process, or good old fashioned human interaction) can meet, exceed, or fall below those expectations. The gap is what gets talked about in public. If you want to change perception, examine your company’s behaviors to minimize that gap.

This is really good stuff that you’re working on, my friend. Good luck, and happy recruiting!

**

In my day job, I’m the Head of Products for Improved Experience, where we help employers use feedback to measure and manage quality in hiring and retention. Learn more about us here.

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