Do you really know who you are?

In last week’s article I asked if you really know what your target students want and I talked about the importance of focusing in on their key interests when developing your recruitment messaging. But knowing what your target candidates are looking for is only the first step to developing effective brand messaging.

Once you understand what your ideal target candidate wants, it can be tempting to put it on a sign, a website, and your Facebook page: that’s us! That’s what we offer! But unless you have been re-designing your organization around the interests and aspirations of your future young recruits for many years, this is not likely true. So the next step in developing your key brand message is to understand who you really are. More specifically: what is the value you offer to current and potential employees?

This is essentially what is meant by the terms Employer Value Proposition or, my favourite, Unique Recruitment Proposition (URP!).

As you are likely aware, today’s students are sceptical of the messages they see and hear. So if your recruitment messages are anything less than authentic (or simply even contrary to public opinion), they will fall upon deaf ears; or worse, they will be mocked online for all to see. Discovering who you really are is best revealed by conducting research with your recent hires.

This does not have to be a huge undertaking, but it does need to be done objectively and in a manner which invites honest input. (And, generally speaking, today’s students are pretty comfortable expressing their opinions and pointing out opportunities for improvement). You will want to give them an opportunity to provide both open-ended feedback, which may reveal both strengths and weaknesses you hadn’t considered, as well as ranking-type questions in which they evaluate you on the exact same criteria that was used in the research with potential hires.

Ultimately, your goal is to figure out where the interests of your potential candidates (what they want) intersect with the actual experiences of your recent hires (who you are). In the end, you may find that “interesting work” is your target candidates’ first interest but not one of your strengths. In this case, you won’t be able to base your messaging on this aspect of your employment offering. But chances are that some of your real brand (the truth revealed by your young employee survey) will overlap with the interests of your candidates. This overlap will form the basis of your brand communications.

By the way, if you don’t find some points of strong correlation between the interests of your target candidates and experiences of your current employees, then either your “target candidate” criteria is flawed or your work environment needs to change, or both.