Your company’s external narrative has never been more important.

Today’s top candidates want you to ‘sell’ them on your opportunities.

This is understandable. Applying for a job is a purchasing decision that has a dramatic effect on your life.

Today's candidates are happy to put in the time to thoroughly research a company – if they don’t like what they see they’re not going to hit that ‘apply’ button.

The way people talk about you when you’re not in the room is making a huge difference to the number of high quality of applicants that you get.

So, given how important this is, what are the key things you have to remember when working out your own company story?

Make sure your story is authentic

This is relatively simple: don’t lie!

It’s important that candidates understand what they’re getting themselves into. If you are a big proponent of giving every new hire bags of responsibility great, tell everyone about it.

If you’re not that’s totally fine, just don’t promise it.

All that’s going to happen if you ‘sell’ applicants on a lie is increased turnover – recent research suggests that this is actually the biggest reason for people quitting in the first 6 months!

31% of people leave their new job in the first 6 months, so this is...

Ultimately, no one likes being lied to – make sure you’re not doing it and you should be ok.

Use engaging content

Candidates are pretty used to companies telling them how great they are, and as a result it’s becoming increasingly tricky to attract their attention.

Maybe it’s time to change the way we try and attract them.

Recent research suggests that video content encourages browsers to spend 5.33x longer on a website than simply text!

Instead of writing a long post about your company values and mission, why not put together a video communicating your company culture.

Not only is video content far more likely to be shared by candidates, but it will give them a far better understanding of your organisation (especially if you include employee testimonials).

If you’re not using recruitment videos, it may well be time to start.

Use your employees

Remember that it’s far easier for candidates to relate to people than brand messages.

It’s essential that your ‘candidate-facing’ employees understand this. Your recruiting department are your brand ambassadors, the portal through which would-be applicants see your company.

They’re the ones tasked with keeping all your lofty promises about company culture, they’re the ones that bring your employer brand to life!

Bearing all this in mind, you can see how important it is to have your recruitment team on point!

So how do you do this?

1. Customer Service Style Training

Try and encourage your recruiters to be as patient and helpful as your customer service team is to customers. This will make a huge difference to candidate experience, so think about adding customer service style training to recruiter onboarding.

2. Brief your team on Branding

I’m sure your Sales and Marketing teams are both thoroughly briefed on branding and company message. Well, your recruitment team has to ‘sell’ and ‘market’ your company to prospective employees. Make sure that you’re all on the same page when it comes to your employer brand.

Get serious about internal communication

Your team are only going to be effective brand ambassadors if they feel engaged.

With great internal social network tools like Slack now part and parcel of most companies internal communication programmes, there’s really no excuse for not getting everyone on the same page.

Think about using internal webinars or creating internal blog posts and documents that can be shared amongst your staff.

In an age of remote workers, creating alignment around your desired message isn’t easy. It’s definitely a worthwhile investment though.

If you can get employees excited about your ‘story’ they will share it far more effectively.