Employer branding starts with the first conversation

We’ve spent the past month in a lot of meetings with recruiters. Retail, service, fuel stations. Different companies, different roles, but two things came up in almost every one.

First: most people who apply don’t get the job. Second: it’s hard to show what the job actually involves.

They sound like two separate problems. We think they’re the same one.

Most applicants meet you exactly once

One person gets the role. Everyone else gets a no, a template email or nothing at all. For them, the application is the whole relationship with you as an employer.

Every one of those moments is advertising for you, good or bad. Someone who applied to work at a fuel station also fills up there, shops there and tells their friends how it went. A silent rejection never shows up in a campaign report, but it travels all the same.

Employer branding usually means the careers page, the films and the job ads. All of that matters. But what stays with candidates is what happened when they actually applied.

Neither side knows enough

The recruiters we spoke to all say the same thing in different words: the job ad doesn’t show what the job is like. It’s written to attract people, and it has to fit on one page. You can’t capture a Saturday lunchtime in a bullet list.

Candidates have the same problem from the other side. They know the title and what the ad promises. What they’ll actually be doing on an ordinary day, they don’t.

So both sides guess. The recruiter guesses who fits from a CV. The candidate guesses whether the job fits from an ad. Some of those guesses are wrong, and nobody finds out until a few weeks into the job.

That’s why hiring runs in both directions. Candidates should understand the job as well as you understand them. It isn’t a courtesy. It’s half the decision.

Before the conversation

After a good first conversation

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One follow-up question works both ways

Here’s how it can look. Amina is applying to be a store associate. She’s made up, but the conversation follows the same format as on our site.

Aleida asks her about a time she solved something for a customer. She describes a customer who had bought the wrong gift in the middle of the lunch rush. She exchanged the item and offered the customer a coffee while they waited.

A good answer. But not the whole story, so a follow-up comes.

The follow-up question

It was the lunch rush. What happened to the queue at the till in the meantime?

For the recruiter How she sets priorities when everything happens at once.

For the candidate That the queue doesn’t wait while she helps a customer.

For the recruiter, it finds out something a CV never shows: how Amina sets priorities when everything happens at the same time. Her answer goes into the write-up, in her own words, under the assessment.

For Amina, the question tells her something about the job. The queue doesn’t wait while she helps a customer. Job ads rarely say so, but now she knows. The question is information too.

Everyone gets something back

When the conversation ends, Amina gets a summary in the employer’s name: what they took away from it, in her own words. So does everyone who doesn’t move on, which is most people.

That’s where employer branding actually happens. Not in the campaign she may have seen, but in the sense that someone really listened. A no feels different when you know you were heard.

Candidates seem to agree. 9 in 10 who start the conversation finish it, and 9 in 10 rate the interview 4 or 5 out of 5. They give that rating straight after the conversation, before they know whether they’re moving on, which is why we watch the completion rate just as closely.

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Next, the candidate’s side of the conversation

The follow-up question and the summary are there today. What we’re building now is about candidates leaving the conversation knowing more about the job than when they started.

We’re building it so that a question can start with a real situation from the job. Before the question comes, candidates see an ordinary Saturday: a queue at the till, a delivery waiting at the back and a customer who needs help at the pump, all at once. Then they answer about a job they can picture.

We’re also building it so that candidates can ask about the job during the conversation. What the rota looks like, what’s hardest, what the first week involves. The answers come from you.

That’s how it’s meant to work. No customer has it yet, and we’ll write about it here when one does.

A no should still be a good meeting

People who applied and didn’t get the job should still be able to say two things afterwards: I know what the job was, and they listened to me.

The person who did get it should be able to say the same, plus one more thing: it was roughly what I expected.

That’s what we mean by a first conversation with everyone who applies. So both sides know if it’s a fit.