6 tips on how to find your future employees

Branding and culture are two separated dimensions often run by separated teams. This is problematic because many companies do not realise that branding and culture are part of the same process. So why are branding and culture part of the same process?

In most organisations branding is driven by the marketing department whereas cultural projects are driven by the People (HR) department. Often these two continuous projects (and participants) communicate little or not at all with one another, and that is because they are perceived as separate projects. This goes against our vision of what branding and culture is and how they can reinforce each other. We believe that a brand is determined by culture and that the correct display of a brand will reinforce internal culture. In this blog I will assess the two topics and show you how they intertwine.

Branding

Branding is an integral part of marketing. Branding is a way to steer how the outside world perceives your company and how they interact with your company. Brands can be very personal, very classy, very edgy, very transformative, you name it - and it is out there. The flavours of different brands are endless, which is not surprising as each company is trying to stick out from the crowd by creating their own unique identity. That is why it is not surprising that marketing departments focus on creating an own “brand identity” complete with own colours, values, story lines, slogans, and other components to make an own distinctive brand.

While creating a distinctive brand is important, it is almost similarly important to communicate this brand to the outside world. You can have a beautiful brand identity, but if nobody knows about it, then it is practically useless. In other words, you need to make consumers/potential clients aware of your brand. This part of marketing is, not surprisingly, called “brand awareness” which basically focusses on all the different channels through which you are trying to inform the world out there about your brand identity.

As you can imagine, these are enormous tasks, not only to define a strong brand which really stands out and persuades consumers/potential clients, but also to then get your message out there. It is up to your marketing department to properly formulate and distribute the message that your brand wants to convey.

Culture

Turning now to culture. In its core, culture is the combination of all individual values and behaviours of the people within your company. This is in part influenced by your organisational values, but also by individual beliefs. Culture is therefore not something that you can completely control, you can only partly steer it. With every new person that joins your team, or every person that leaves your team, your culture partly changes. So, in some sense culture is something you cannot control. However, you can stimulate certain behaviours and demotivate others. This way you can move culture in the right direction.

Your culture determines a lot on how your employees communicate and behave internally, but also how they communicate and behave towards the outside world. In part, your culture therefore determines what how the outside world perceives your company and your brand. This hints towards how culture and branding are very intertwined.

The same coin

So how are culture and branding part of the same process? Well, in simple terms branding is a process which determines how you are perceived in the outside world and culture determines how your employees interact with the outside world. In essence they are therefore both part of the same process: interactions with the outside world.

An organisation is its people. I believe that branding should start with assessing your internal culture. You need to know first what your internal culture stands for before you can create a brand accordingly. Why? Simple: consistency. For example: you can create a beautiful brand identity talking about how customer-focussed your organisation is, but let’s assume that your employees are rather more focussed on creating the best products (product-focussed). If your customer interacts with your representatives, which have a different attitude than your brand advertises, this might disappoint or upset them, or even worse; it will make your brand identity questionable, unconvincing, or even unbelievable.

On the flip side, having a brand identity which does not align with the internal culture also causes some problems. You will soon find that your employees do not believe any more about the message you convey to your customers/clients and that they become unhappy about the fact that the company seems to become more and more out of touch with their own employees and the internal culture. This can lead to unhappiness, unproductivity and even with people calling in sick or ultimately leaving the company.

So, what to do?

1. Find out what your culture is.

As with all cultural projects, the first step of assessing your current culture is key. Try to use employee surveys to question your employees what they value in their work, how they feel connected to their colleagues and what motivates them to come to work. Ask them how they communicate towards one-another, if they feel free to speak up during meetings, if they value creativity, how they experience the leadership; and many other questions. Try to find out how they work (together) and what motivates them to work (together).

(optional) 2. Motivate desired behaviours/demotivate undesired behaviours

In case you notice that there are many unwanted behaviours, then you should try and motivate desired behaviours and demotivate undesired behaviours. Use workshops, brainstorming sessions and early adopters to help people see how individual and group behaviour affect the brand in a positive (or negative) way. Bring out their desire to build a strong unique culture and brand. During these sessions you should get a better uniform image of what behaviours everybody wants to motivate. This is also the moment to take the leading role and move people in the right direction to start adopting the desired behaviours.

From these sessions you should also be able to bring organisational values to life. Working bottom-up: individual behaviours can be generalized in a couple of shared attitudes, which in turn can be generalized and highlighted in organizational values.

Don’t forget that organisational values prescribe behaviours. These are things you do. Therefore, your organizational values should be actionable.

3. Create a brand identity that aligns with your culture and promote it.

Now that you have found out what your internal culture stands for, it is time to create a brand identity around it. This is the job of your marketing department, but they need to keep connecting their messaging with the internal culture. If that does not align, then you are saying one thing while doing another. Once your brand identity is established and aligned with your internal culture, feel free to promote it any way you see fit.

4. Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate!

I do not understand why companies keep forgetting this step. Once you have created the right culture, the right brand identity, and you have started promoting it, then celebrate this with everybody involved! Present the results, show of the new polished brand, and how you are promoting it towards the outside world. While you are presenting this to your employees, remind them of how essential their contribution was into the cultural assessment and how they too have created their brand. It is just as much their achievement as it is the achievement of your marketing department. After all, your brand is your company, and your company is your brand. Everyone contributes to that, so every individual is key. Make your employees feel part of this journey and make them feel that they have contributed to this process. This will improve your overall culture, internal atmosphere, and connectivity amongst your employees.

In conclusion

Branding and culture are part of the same process. Culture is an integral part of branding, and you cannot create a solid brand without understanding your culture first. Therefore, I would argue that every brand project should align itself with the internal culture. If your brand does not align with your culture, then it becomes unconvincing and uncredible in the long run. Do you want to change your brand? Or do you want to fine-tune your brand identity? Start looking towards your internal culture and you will find your guidance towards how to change your brand and the overall perception of your company for the better.

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When we think about culture, we think about HR departments who coordinate culture related projects and value determining group activities. However, culture adds more value than it is often credited for, also for the marketing department.

Let’s say you believe that there is some value in culture, but that it is not that important for your company. Let’s even say that you do not care about internal atmosphere or how productive your employees are. Let’s even go so far to say that you believe that, as long as everybody just does their job, there is no need to really worry about culture. Even then, even if you do not care about these internal factors, then there is another reason why you should worry about your culture: it directly affects your branding as a company, and could either be beneficial or detrimental.

Wait, what?

Yes, you’ve read it correctly. Culture, an internal challenge, will determined how you will be perceived externally. Let’s do a thought exercise. Think about a random company you’ve ever been in touch with. How did you perceive your interaction with that company? Positive? Negative? And what shaped that interaction? Was it the designed marketing message on their website? Their advertisements? Or was it the interaction with their customer service-, helpdesk-, or sales representative? More often than not, our opinions of companies are shaped with how we interacted with individual employees. How those respective individuals interacted with us is heavily dependent on how the internal culture and values are set up. For example, a company whose culture is shaped around serving customers will most likely have employees who are more pleasant to interact with, as consumer, as opposed to a company whose culture is shaped around following rules. This is, in a nutshell, why culture also matters for your branding.

But how does this work in practice? How can you set it up and what do you need to do to improve your branding?

The foundation

In core culture is a mixture of individual behaviours and values. These behaviours and values get translated into how people act and the sum of all these actions is what we call culture: how people behave and interact with each other. It seems therefore that culture is pretty much determined and that there is little that you can change. This is partly true; you cannot fully control culture and it sometimes grows organically. However, good behaviours and values can be stimulated and bad behaviours and values can be discouraged. So, you cannot steer culture as much, but you can nudge it in the right direction (Do you want to read more about the power of nudging? Read this article). This means that you can mould your culture towards the desired internal driver which aligns with your external message. For example, the marketing message: “we are service champions” should align with the internal value “being service minded”. Easy right? Wrong. Adjusting culture is hard. It is a time-consuming process and the people involved are often stubborn and hard to convince.

Turning the idea upside down, you can also see how internal culture will affect your marketing message. If you have toxic values within your culture, this will also translate in how your image will be conducted outwards. For example, if rules come first and customers always come second, then your customers will notice this when they interact with the people within your company. So, although culture and marketing seem worlds apart from each other, they are actually closely related and interconnected.

If you still believe that this is all ridiculous, then think back about the thought exercise. Think about how your perception was shaped, who was involved and what they did. You can deduct their actions back to motivations which are shaped by behaviours and values. That is culture.

Getting it right

What happens when your culture is actually aligned with your marketing message? Well when culture and marketing interlock and supplement each other, that is when you utilize culture to its fullest extent. The result is often noticeable in increased customer satisfaction. Depending on your culture, marketing and goals, it can either: drive sales and/or improve service and/or expand operations and much more. Culture can motivate your employees to go above and beyond and to reach goals which seem unachievable. As your employees feel part of something that is bigger than themselves and the message that your brand displays, they can create something bigger than just the sum of their efforts. Does this still sound a bit vague and fuzzy? Forbes has ranked 50 companies with a great culture (read more here). What do we see? In the top 4 there are 3 companies (Microsoft, Zoom & Google) which are extremely successful in their industry. This is, in large respect, thanks to their outstanding culture which motivates their employees in a positive way. Their stimulating culture increases collaboration, customer satisfaction, service, but most importantly: the growth of the company they are working for.  

In conclusion

So where do we stand? Well, firstly it is important to repeat the mantra: culture eats strategy for breakfast. The importance of culture cannot be overstated enough, not only for your internal atmosphere but also for your external brand. HR herein has to play a more central and steering role within a company and not just “that office where they do the administration and stuff”. CEO’s and directors have to be made aware of this as they need to give HR a more central role. You see that this already happened at companies with a thriving culture. Now how to set it up is more difficult to explain, mainly because it is entirely dependent on the situation and environment of your company.

If you want more information on how to unlock the power of culture for your company, then get in touch with us and see what we can do for you!

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Most people see recruitment as a necessary means to an end and perceive the process with a clear starting point (the internal hiring need) and a clear end (the hired candidate). However, in contrary to popular believe, recruitment is a never-ending process. In previous blog I have already explained why recruitment does not stop after you have found the right candidate. But what if you are already stuck before that stage? What if the perfect candidate never seems to show up? In this blog I will discuss 6 tips which help you to find your future candidate and transform your recruitment operations into a continuously developing process.  

Knowing yourself is important to know what you want

Firstly, we are going to start with the basics. Whenever you are looking out for people, you need to make sure that you know what you as a company stand for. In this sense you need to have a thought-out vision and mission of what you aim to achieve with your company. Furthermore, you need to know what kind of internal culture you have and what values are shared in this culture. This is important because most people nowadays are not convinced by just a pure salary raise anymore. Most people are motivated by companies with whom they can identify with and who share their personal values. Now that you have identified your vision, mission, culture and values, it is time to work with them, which brings us to the second tip.  

Translate and communicate your message

Now that your vision, mission, culture and values are set up, it is important to display them. First and foremost, you should of course display this on your website and LinkedIn, but besides that there are also other target group focussed forums. You can think of websites, conventions or breakfast seminars which your potential candidates often visit. Don’t be afraid to be creative, in this sense it is better to be too active than too passive. Have you ever heard of guerrilla marketing? Well, that just might catch the attention of your future employee, against often budget friendly costs. Besides this, your recruiters also need to be well-trained in understanding, translating and identifying your own vision, mission, culture and values. It is therefore important that they work together with staff from your marketing department to gain those skills and to set up the right messaging towards your potential candidates. Furthermore, they are also the ones that need to identify the candidates whose values align with your own.  

Expand your network and nurture candidates

Another thing that you can start to do tomorrow is to get in touch with different recruiters or HR employees from other companies and start making them part of your network to increase the possibilities of a referral. Go to conventions, breakfast seminars and conferences to get in touch with them. In this sense it is important to know that a strong way to expand your network is to do favours for others before you can reap the rewards. This might sound like you are getting more work on your hands, but who knows; what may seem like an impossible profile for somebody else, might just be floating around in your talent pool. When talking about talent pools it is also important to remember to nurture the candidates who you have not hired. An applicant with the wrong profile for a previous vacancy might be the perfect candidate for a new vacancy. You should therefore regularly nurture their excitement for your company and go through your talent pool to see if you can find that hidden gem that you might forgot about. One way to continuously increase your talent pool is to open up ongoing vacancies where people can list their open application.  

Promotion and internal hiring boards

Did you just lose an incredible manager/team leader/senior team member and are you wondering how you will ever fill his or her position? Perhaps an internal promotion is a possibility. Maybe one of the team members is ready to step up and, if he or she is provided with training, be your new amazing superstar. Internal promotion has three advantages over external hiring: it’s cheaper, it’s faster, and the candidate already knows your company/product. Of course, the fact remains that there will be a gap in the team if you promote one of its members, but this, in most cases, is an easier recruitment than the incredible superstar that you lost. If the team members are not an option or if there is not even a team to speak of in the first place, then internal hiring boards could be an option. Internal hiring boards are basically vacancy boards of internal vacancies that not have been externally published yet and where only internal employees can apply for. A lot of managers are cautious for this, because they fear that their best employees might leave their department and they say that this is just a way of moving the problem. I would argue that this is the wrong way of thinking. Firstly, yes, your employee might move from your department, and yes, that moves the problem to your department. However, you should always realize that people are looking for ways to develop themselves, so letting them develop themselves within the company benefits the company as a whole. Again, it might be easier to find somebody for the new gap in your department as it is to find for the gap your company is experiencing right now (there is most likely a very valid reason that somebody is reading this blog right now). Furthermore, I would argue that this shows your employees that there will always be possibilities to develop themselves, which can motivate them to stay instead of leaving for a possibility to develop themselves at another company.  

Internal training and development

Continuing on the previous note, it is important to plan out what your employees are capable of right now and where they want to be in five to ten years. In this sense development plans should be one of the key priorities for any HR department. Firstly, because it simply keeps your employees happy and loyal if they have a sense of development and, secondly, because you can prepare and train them for the more specific and hard-to-fill vacancies which are upcoming in the future. This again intertwines with the first point, that you should know who you are as a company and strategically plan ahead for the future. So organisational charts need to be drawn up, both from the present and where you expect to be. Then you need to identify who can fill the potential upcoming (senior) positions and what he or she needs, in terms of training, to be able to fulfil that position. Actively be engaged with your employees and take them with you on this journey of development. The backend developer of today can be your architect of tomorrow.  

There is a truth in numbers

As with most things in life, there is a certain truth in numbers. The bigger your pool of candidates, the larger the odds that the right candidate is in there. In this sense it might be a good idea to try quantity over quality and expand the parameters that you’ve got from the hiring manager. When you are searching for people the pool of potential candidates increases if you decrease the hiring manager’s requirements. Maybe the candidate does not require a full five years of experience? Maybe experience in a related industry can be equivalent to experience in your own industry? Maybe managing twenty people requires the same type of management skills as it does when managing ten? Try to send through some candidates and resumes with the expanded parameters and see what works for your individual vacancy. It is in this sense also the recruiter’s job to push back a bit on the requirements of the hiring manager, because too often we see that hiring managers are looking for a unicorn that is fluent in five languages, has four degrees, and more than twenty years of experience in the industry. The reality is that unicorns do not exist, but it is our job to show them that and to come with a viable alternative.  

In conclusion

When looking out for your future candidates you should start with the basics and have a good story on who you are as a company and what you are trying to achieve. Then you need to get your message out there, both through online and conventional ways; be creative! After that you need to work with your network, most predominantly: expand it. Find ways to get in touch with fellow HR colleagues in the field and see if you can use their network. Furthermore, don’t forget about internal hiring and promoting your employees, and last, but not least, try to push back on the requirements for the profile and expand the parameters of your search to get a bigger pool of potential candidates.    

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