Candidates take 5 months before applying for jobs: Survey
As part of its new recruitment strategy, The Ottawa Hospital decided to go beyond traditional job postings to show potential employees what it’s like to work at the hospital.
“Traditional job postings have relied on the duties of the job but we are realizing that people are looking to have a connection with where they work,” said Sarah Clements, director of human resources at The Ottawa Hospital.
The hospital signed up with Workopolis’ new employer brand optimizer, where organizations can highlight what makes them unique. Jobseekers can find organizations’ individual pages by clicking on the “Love where you work” tab on Workopolis’ home page.
The hospital, which has 12,000 employees at three hospital campuses in Ottawa, used its page to highlight its employment brand: Compassionate people, world-class care, said Clements. The hospital does a lot of research and takes pride in the level of care it provides patients and wanted to attract candidates who share those values, she said.
The hospital also showcased its on-site fitness centres, leadership development, life-long learning programs, pension plan with early retirement and green initiatives.
All of this information helps potential candidates assess whether or not the hospital will be a good fit for them, which makes the screening process that much easier, said Clements.
It’s also a way to reach out to people who are currently employed but may be willing to consider a career change if they find the right employer, she said.
“Providing some of this information gives people a little bit of a chance to learn about the institution. So, even though they may not be wanting a job tomorrow, if they learn more about the institution today, when they are more actively seeking, they’ll remember us,” said Clements.
These potential job candidates used to be called passive jobseekers because they weren’t actively looking for jobs but intended to change jobs in the near future, said Gabriel Bouchard, president and chief brand officer at Workopolis in Toronto.
But using the old categories of passive and active jobseekers was a disservice to employers, he said. There are actually four classes of candidates, found Workopolis when it surveyed 700 candidates.
The largest class, 53 per cent, are candidates who are employed but open to new opportunities. While they are happy and comfortable in their current jobs they are slightly bored. Workopolis calls these candidates “window shoppers.” These candidates are in the early stages of their decision-making process and starting to gather information and make a short list of employers but aren’t yet ready to apply for jobs, said Bouchard.
Previously, these candidates would have been lumped into the passive jobseeker category along with the new “loyal” class of jobseekers identified by Workopolis. Loyal candidates aren’t looking for a new job. They are busy, happy and engaged with their current employer. Their attitude is completely different from that of window shoppers.
Workopolis’ report, Time for a New View of Job Candidates, also splits the former active jobseeker category into two: avid unemployed and avid employed.
Avid unemployed candidates are out of work and actively looking for a job. They are anxious and want to find a job fast. Avid employed candidates are employed and feel an urgent need to find a new job to get them out of their current situation. These classes represent 14 per cent and 10 per cent of candidates, respectively.
For organizations with hard-to-fill or mission-critical positions, proactively recruiting window shoppers is imperative because they represent such a large proportion of candidates, said Bouchard.
“That means you start positioning your company in the minds of qualified individuals before they become avid, because when they become avid, it’s way too late for you to make an impression on them and generate interest for your company,” he said.
Organizations need to understand where these candidates are finding their information and what they’re looking for in an employer, he said. And organizations only have about five months to woo these candidates before they start applying for jobs, found the survey.
The desire for a better working environment is the number one trigger to make someone consider a new job, according to the survey, followed by not feeling valued or appreciated and desiring better benefits.
The number one place window shoppers turn for information on employers is online job boards, at 49 per cent, followed by a company website and friends, family and networking, said Bouchard.
This is good news because most employers are already on job boards. Unfortunately, most employers only use job boards to post job openings and the information in the ads focuses on what an organization is looking for rather than showing what it has to offer an employee, said Bouchard.
“This is the wrong communication strategy to go after people who are employed,” he said.
Organizations should focus communication efforts to highlight what makes them unique and how they meet employees’ expectations around things such as work-life balance, benefits, recognition and career development, stated the report.
Organizations should also highlight any top employer awards they’ve won, said Maria Girimonte, director of classifieds and print at Postmedia Network, which owns online job board Working.com.
They also need to put their employer brand in as many different media as possible, she said. This means job boards, social media and logo ads on industry- or profession-related websites that lead jobseekers to a detailed description of the employer brand.
“The job board is great but more and more we need something more,” said Girimonte. “Putting all your eggs in one basket is not usually a good thing.”
Many organizations haven’t taken a strategic approach to developing the employer brand, said Catharine Ducharme, a partner and brand strategist at OutsideIn Communications, a brand and communications company in Vancouver.
To be able to build a brand, an organization first needs to understand how employees actually view the organization as an employer, what kind of reputation it has and if that perception matches the kind of employer the organization wants to be, she said.
Once an organization understands what makes it unique and the value proposition it has to offer employees, it can begin to market itself, said Ducharme. This can be done through job ads, best employer lists and existing employees.
“If they’re engaged and jazzed about you, they’re your best ambassadors,” she said.
