Add the element of persuasion in talent acquisition and make your hiring more personal and purposeful to your ideal applicants.
All you really need to do is:
- Change your tone of voice from business to masses into human to human in your recruiting messages and content.
- Prioritize the candidate experiences before your own comfort in the recruitment process.
- Focus on positioning your vacancy as an opportunity for an improvement in the applicant’s work life
Talent acquisition is selling.
Like all successful selling, also talent acquisition is about persuading job seekers to choose your offer instead of a competing one.
If you really want to master talent acquisition and hiring, master persuasive selling.
What is persuasion in talent acquisition?
According to Daniel Pink, implementing persuasion to sales is about making selling more personal and purposeful to the prospective buyer.
Making our hiring more personal and purposeful for our applicant audiences, we are implementing persuasion in our hiring.
Let’s look at what “personal and purposeful” mean.
Being more personal in talent acquisition
Hiring is selling. You are the sales person, your ideal applicant is your prospect, the ideal customer for your product called a job opening.
Your business needs to hire, that’s clear.
However, just because you need to fill a vacancy doesn’t mean your ideal talent wants to change jobs right now.
What are you going to do to convince them to give you a moment?
Being more persuasive starts with making it about them [the applicants], not about you [your business and your hiring need].
Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal applicant. When you are being contacted by a recruiter or a head hunter, how interested are you about their need to fill a vacancy? Probably not that interested.
- What if the head hunter approached you and made the opportunity about you?
- What if the recruiter positioned it as a possibility to improve how it feels to get up and go to work every day?
- What if this opportunity was introduced to you as a way to better life? Would you be interested in hearing out?
Making something more personal to another person is about them, not about your need to fill a vacancy. Simple as that.
Yet, if you look at how most hiring is conducted, it really is all about the hiring company and very little about the applicants.
Being more persuasive starts with making it about them, not about your business.
Check out episode #52 and this blog post: “Persuasion in professional Talent Marketing”
Being more purposeful in talent acquisition
It is probably no news to you how much talents today are looking for purpose in their lives and work.
According to a massive purpose at work -study LinkedIn conducted already in 2016, states:
People are increasingly looking for jobs that give them personal fulfillment; and companies are seeing that purpose-oriented employees are more productive and successful.
LinkedIn Global Report on Purpose at Work (2016)
Being purposeful in hiring is about clarifying your audience what is it in this role and at this workplace that enables them to do a more meaningful job.
A more meaningful jobs means doing good to other people. What is it in your business and organization that creates good to other people? It does not have to be at a global scale and about as grand (and important) as saving the world.
But it has to be about doing good to some other people. If a business is only about doing good to the owners and the management, it’s not the purpose talents of today are looking for.
Read on Forbes “Three ways to use persuasion in marketing” >>
How to be more persuasive in hiring?
Being more persuasive starts with being a better human being. Simple as that.
Persuasion starts with putting the other person first and thinking about what benefit it is for them to pay attention to your message.
So start by looking at how does your company present your career opportunities.
- What is the tone of voice like?
- What is the content about? Are the messages about your company, your needs and your achievements?
- Are you talking like a business to an application or like a human to another human?
Start with positioning your career offer as an improvement to your applicant’s current life
Being more persuasive starts with positioning your career opportunity as an improvement to your ideal applicant’s current status of career and life.
Then it continues by position yourself (and the business you represent) as someone who can help the ideal applicant to achieve this improvement.
And how it looks like in practice is being more kind, more helpful and more humane in your approach. It needs to come through your words and messages, your tone of voice, how your process flows and what you actually put in the offer.
I believe every modern organization has the necessary ingredients, but most are yet not using them in the right ways.
Stop talking like a brick wall to an application. Make it human to human!
Start looking at your organization with a pair of external eyes.
What do you see?
What should the external world know about your organization’s humane side that you are not necessarily telling them clearly enough and often enough?
Stop talking from behind the walls of a corporation! Start talking like a human to another human!
Think about yourself the last time you were the job seeker. What would have made you feel good during the hiring process?
Now, listen to the episode #53 to learn more about persuasion in talent acquisition.
Listen to Episode #53 of the Building a Modern Employer Brand Podcast
In this week’s episode of Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast I continue with the topic I started last week: how to be more persuasive in talent acquisition.
In this episode:
- Why we should think hiring as selling.
- Why we need to make our hiring more personal and purposeful to our ideal applicants.
- 4 steps to be more persuasive in talent acquisition.
Episode-length: 30:12 min
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