Are you using skills assessments to enhance your employer brand? If not, you’re missing out! In this blog post, you will discover three ideas you can implement to make the skills testing process personal and engaging for the candidates while you transmit your employer brand.
When people look for a job, they want to find a company they will be proud to be associated with and contribute to. Few people take “secret” jobs that they tell no one about. Most of us talk about the place where we work.
The image of our personal worth is often wrapped up in the job we have and the company we work for. As a result, employer brand matters. Top companies are well aware of this, which is why they work hard to create strong employer branding strategy and implement the most productive recruitment marketing strategies.
My name is Eric Friedman, and I am the CEO of a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, which I founded 15 years ago. As an employer of teams of programmers, marketers, sales and customers service representatives, I know that my people chose to work for eSkill thanks to our employer brand and organizational culture. And the first interaction they had with eSkill was through the product itself.
At eSkill, we use our own platform to test all the people who work for our company. Yes, it is the product we sell, but we also use the eSkill platform in-house for our personnel recruitment, to find and hire ideal job candidates. So, as you can imagine, we use skills testing to enhance our employer brand.
In this article, I am going to share with you, three ideas we have implemented in eSkill that you can also implement to make the skills testing process personal and engaging for the candidates while you transmit your employer brand.
Here are 3 ideas on how you can use skills assessments to enhance your employer brand:
Your brand is about your organizational culture. That’s why, first of all, you need to create tests with a cultural fit in mind if you want to hire the best talent. These tests will allow recruiters to eliminate candidates who won’t fit into the culture, saving your organization time and investment. Having employees who believe, engage and buy in to your culture will result in higher retention and less money spent on turnover.
Be sure your assessments reflect your culture. Create equitable and culturally responsive assessment tests and consider using cultural fit interview questions. The interview type you use is important. Give candidates an opportunity to share their perspective, being sure to ask questions that will guide them away from parroting back to you what you’ve already shared with them.
Brand starts with the images, logo and messages the company projects in its recruitment ads. Your brand is further bolstered by how the candidate is contacted and treated by the company. Companies that project themselves as having highly talented employees need to have a process in place that supports that assertion. And what company doesn’t want to project a high quality of talent? Quality talent attracts more quality talent.
Such a company would do well to use an assessment tool in its hiring process. Branded skills assessments reinforce the image of quality talent and make the candidates who pass your assessments feel that they have joined an exclusive group.
You want your top employees to become brand ambassadors. The first step toward this goal is to get a good reading on their overall attitudes about your company. Is the culture hot or cold? Are employees complaining more than praising? You can use assessment questions to create internal surveys to determine employee loyalty and attachment to your employer brand.
If you find that employees’ opinions are less than favorable, you then have an opportunity to make changes where you can to improve your company culture and employees’ attitudes. If their opinions are positive, you can capitalize on their enthusiasm.
All in all, your employer brand can be a competitive advantage for your organization and it can increase employee engagement if leveraged correctly. The process of skills testing during the hiring phase and the habit of creating internal tests to test employee satisfaction are the important areas to start with when expressing your employer brand.
Eric Friedman is the founder and CEO of eSkill Corporation, a leading provider of Web-based skills testing for pre-employment and training. With academic degrees in Psychology and Business and experience with both mature and expansion-stage company growth, Eric has focused on the most effective ways to hire and motivate team members to be the best they can be for their companies.
