Employer Brand Strategist Lane Sutton Shares Best Practices for Creating a Great Employer Brand for Job Seekers
At the “Employer Brand: What Candidates Think vs. What You Think” panel at this year’s Greenhouse OPEN conference, Employer Brand Strategist Lane Sutton (who works for companies like Disney) shared his experience of creating a great employer brand for job seekers.
For one company he consulted for, his team created an email list of every person who applied for a job at the organization, and nurtured them with a monthly newsletter that highlighted the company’s culture. The emails saw a 54% open rate (for context, the average email open rate is 24.88%).
The lesson learned? Job seeker interest in your company is not one-and-done. Keeping job seekers engaged in a meaningful way can positively influence your employer brand. And your Plum applicant database can play a big role.
The Plum database is pretty revolutionary. One feature in our recently announced Ultraviolet platform is called Talent Rediscovery, which allows you to prospect every applicant in your database for every job. Not only does this majorly cut down on sourcing and recruiting costs and time, but you can now prospect from a database of people who have already expressed their desire to work for your company!
And this isn’t the only way you can leverage your Plum database.
At Plum, we are obsessed with the candidate experience. We know the metrics - 35% of applicants with a negative candidate experience intend to share their opinions on social media. 46% of job seekers with a negative candidate experience take their loyalty elsewhere - as both a customer and an applicant.
46% of job seekers with a negative candidate experience take their loyalty elsewhere - as both a customer and an applicant.
On the other hand, 74% of applicants with a positive candidate experience will increase their relationship with your brand’s products and would apply again.
In other words, an intentionally positive candidate experience is non-negotiable. That’s why we at Plum provide our customers scalable and effortless candidate experience for their job seekers. We offer all applicants a Plum Profile that outlines in detail opportunities to leverage their talents and improve their weaknesses to better market themselves. We also provide a whole lot of coaching and encouragement in our accessible Discovery Survey. That’s why we see a 92% survey completion rate from all applicants. But it doesn’t have to stop there.
Sutton’s strategy to keep job seekers engaged with the company’s brand and culture through a newsletter is a great way to use your Plum database. Because Plum’s top-of-funnel assessment consists of a pricing model that’s predicated on a company’s number of annual hires (rather than on a per-applicant basis), we essentially allow all our customers aggregate a job seeker database free of charge.
Since you have this database of job seekers who have already expressed interest in working for your company (aka the best kind of job seekers!), why not nurture them with a quarterly, or even monthly, company culture email newsletter? These emails could contain:
- Photos from company events and team outings
- An “employee-of-the-month” feature
- Descriptions of cultural values and initiatives to support them
- Current job openings
The people in your Plum database have already demonstrated interest in working for your company and are active job seekers. Wouldn’t you like to keep this group engaged with content that shines a positive light on your employer brand?
Tired of applicant shortages? Keep past job seekers engaged with a stellar employer brand. Here's how to start.