One of the challenges with employer marketing is that it can come across as a bit try-hard. All smiley faces and loads of diversity.
Stock images seem to be one of the main causes, along with superlatives like “awesome” and “innovative”. I don’t know why but there seems to be this thing of perceived fake authenticity.
It seems that the bigger the organisation, the more glossy and beige things get. Let’s also remember that the intent of employer marketing is to either attract or repel candidates.
You don’t want to attract everyone, because now you have a massive admin burden of sifting through 1000’s of potentially irrelevant applications. What you want to do is to have some easily available content that will attract the right people and repel the wrong ones.
This could be as simple as a few paragraphs from an engineering manager about how you build and deploy software. For example; “We do our own QA, we’ll be building a dedicated QA team in Q3 next year but for now we do it ourselves. We spin up our own AWS accounts, but in time we’ll have an SRE who’ll do more of the Ops type work for us” This kind of language makes sense to the reader, makes the expectations clear, but will also repel people who don’t want to do their own QA or spin up with their own accounts.
Another simple idea, and using this Notion page from Aula as inspiration, could you put together your own page, or even a PDF that outlines your hiring process for engineers and/or your other major job families. If 50% of your hires next year will be engineers, then tackle this first – more bang for the buck.
Here’s why I love it:
Other assets you could produce are candidate FAQ’s and Q&A’s with your functional leaders (video would be great, but written blog copy is also fine). These can be static content on your careers page, and also deployable content that you can send to candidates that enter your hiring process.
This is something thats relatively simple to produce, it just needs someone to do it.
