The key to recruiting and retention may be hiding in plain sight: your marketing team. The same marketing strategies and tools often deployed to bring in new business can also be used to attract and retain new employees.
Today's professionals are looking for employers that align with their interests, lifestyles and long-term goals. Getting the right message in the right places will help prospective employees gain a sense of what it's like to work with you. Then, having a plan for staying engaged with new employees will bolster retention and the culture your firm hopes to cultivate. Here are four reasons to include your marketing team in your recruiting strategy.
1. Mitigating risk. Did you know CPA firms have been sued for misrepresenting the facts in their recruitment process? Even if it doesn't lead to a lawsuit, the gap between what's promised and the reality can lead to gossip and morale problems, reputation issues, negative reviews in online forums, and turnover.
Instead of falling into the traps of hyperbole and over-promising when talking with professionals who are considering joining your firm, turn to your expert communicators, your marketers, to craft and convey an honest, rich and multifaceted portrayal of your firm's culture, benefits and the impact your work has with clients.
You know that anything you put in writing can be used in court. Creating HR-approved templates with answers to common questions or candidate outreach means your team members will avoid misrepresenting your policies in emails. You get bonus points for pre-loading these responses in a CRM system like HubSpot that will make it easy to insert those templates right from their email composer. Work with your marketing team to ensure the language is brand-aligned and added to the CRM.
2. Differentiating your workplace from the pack. Your brand as an employer plays a similar role as your brand in the marketplace in that it describes what to expect from interacting with you in order to attract those who are a good match and politely repel those who are not. The same applies to the way your recruiting brand communicates your firm culture to potential team members.
Remember, you already have a firm culture. Defining your recruiting brand means being able to clearly articulate who you are, how you work, and your impact for clients. One powerful way to do this is for your marketers to interview your happy employees and clients. Synthesize this data into common themes and identify frequently used adjectives to define your culture. The interviews will also help you cultivate stories that help express complex sentiments in a meaningful way.
After all, a firm whose team members consistently describe the culture as fast-paced with incentives to perform should have different messaging than a firm whose team members say they value flexibility, collaborative problem-solving and the firm's flat hierarchy, with the stories to match.
3. Knowing your audiences. Knowing who you are trying to attract will help you target your messaging. College students and experienced professionals can be found in different places, need different information to help them decide to apply, and expect to be communicated with in different ways.
If your firm wants to attract college students, you probably already know you need to go to campus. But this can mean more than the annual career fair. Professors familiar with your firm's culture act as trusted referral sources and can help you gain access to classrooms for presenting case studies or mini-competitions to help form relationships with students.
This will help demystify what they can expect at their first job in public accounting to pique their interest in your firm. Creating specific recruiting materials and events that clearly describe your firm's mentorship, training and support for recent grads is essential.
On the other hand, experienced professionals will be comparing you to their current or former employer(s), and they will have questions. They will want to understand specifics regarding the type of work they will be doing, how the teams or groups are structured, policies around vacation, benefits, parental leave, opportunities for growth and paths to partnership. Burying this information in your materials or late in your hiring process won't win you any points. Your marketing team can help develop and deploy the necessary materials and messages to make these details easily accessible.
4. Onboarding done right. When you bring on a new client, you probably have a process for making sure they feel taken care of, are communicated with regularly, and are satisfied with the relationship. The same should go for employees! Developing a thoughtful employee onboarding plan will help employees feel supported over time. It can even help head off any struggle or discontent that would lead to attrition. Your marketing team already has the tools in place to implement a strategic digital onboarding plan — the firm's CRM.
It can take up to a year for someone to feel adjusted in a new role. That's a long time to be intentionally engaged with onboarding. Your CRM can be used to automate, test and refine your onboarding communications and take some of the burden off your HR, recruiting and leadership teams. Features such as drip email sequences, custom tagging, pipelines and automation can help ensure new hires receive valuable information, thoughtful outreach and planned check-ins in digestible bits at the right time.
Engage your marketing team
Marketing is one word that means a lot of things, and it can help firms address their greatest challenges. When it comes to recruiting and retention, turn to your marketing team to bring your firm's culture to life to get the attention of professionals who will be successful at your firm and enrich your team. Recruiting is one of the biggest challenges facing firms today, and your marketing team can be instrumental in addressing it.
