Creative Recruiting Messages Begin With a compelling EVP

(The following applies to and works in ANY industry market)

Considerably more creative recruiting messages are being ignored by employers than they would like. The problem? They're using outdated, boring, and mundane methods of attracting top talent... so much so that many people simply ignore their job posts on social media or LinkedIn InMail notifications!

This can be fixed with a new message model which will allow you to craft compelling EVPs  (Employee Value Propositions).

Utilizing a compelling EVP in combination with our Digital Recruiter makes for a winning combination and will help capture the interest of more top candidates.

Some Historical Perspective About Me

For the past 25 years, I have been responsible for recruiter certification as part of Performance-based Hiring certification, part of which requires each recruiter to create an EVP (Employee Value Proposition). Here's what I discovered...

Only 4% know how to create an EVP and the other 96% don't have any idea why it's important or what makes a good one. This historical way of doing things just keeps getting passed down through time, never being questioned because everyone else is doing the same thing!

This is a huge problem when searching for new employees because many employers focus more on what they want rather than how prospective candidates feel. 

The main difference between intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivators is that intrinsic motivations come from within yourself.

Extrinsic rewards - usually financial - are the tangible rewards given employees by managers, such as pay raises, bonuses, and benefits. They are called “extrinsic” because they are external to the work itself and other people control their size and whether or not they are granted.

In contrast, intrinsic rewards are psychological rewards that employees get from doing meaningful work and performing it well. What is most challenging and interesting about the work? What will they learn? How will the job help in their career advancement?

The New Model’s Foundation: Inspiring Recruiting Messages

Everything changes when Recruiters and Talent Acquisition Professional shift their focus to the needs and desires of renewable energy top candidates using creative recruiting messages. Your EVP should quickly and easily answer questions such as:

• Why would a top person want this job?
• Does my message describe their work as interesting and challenging?
• Does my message help them see they can achieve their career aspirations, i.e. where does this job lead in terms of career growth?
• Does my recruitment message describe the job as more compelling than a competitor hiring the same person?
• Does my recruitment message clearly describe what is important to my ideal top candidate?
• Does your job post or LinkedIn Inmail/email have always have a clear CTA (call-to-action)?

From this orientation, the value we as employers receive is no longer the driving force in our recruitment. Instead, our reward of hiring top people in the Wind or Solar field is the by-product of addressing the needs of our candidates.

The value we create is the cause. The value we receive in return is the effect.

Let that sink in for a moment. It's important.

Flipping the Recruiting Script for all Jobs

Recruiting teams would do well to study how their marketing colleagues create personas for their ideal customer and from that construct their creative recruiting messages. This process can be copied and extrapolated for recruiting.

Don’t use terms like candidate, incumbent, or “the person taking this job." Instead write your ad as if it were to be read by only ONE person which means using the word ‘you’, ‘your’, ‘you’ll’, etc. That makes your message sound personal for each person.

Paint a word picture focusing on intrinsic motivator terms. Phrases like "join our world-class team" are NOT impactful UNTIL you tie a benefit to that. You do that by asking this question, "which means". This moves your message into job branding vs. company branding.

A great tool - called an Empathy Map - developed by Dave Gray, can be used to begin this transformation process. While this mapping tool was initially intended for marketing products and services, it is ideal for understanding your ideal candidate and constructing a compelling recruiting message.

I've modified this well-known and respected model to focus on recruiting top candidates that can readily be adapted to the Renewable Energy field..

Here are the 8 key elements of this Empathy model. Click on each of the steps for details.

Improve Hiring by Using Imaginative Recruiting Messages

Create creative recruiting messages that get “inside the head” of your ideal candidate and imagine how much more effective your recruiting could be, if you knew your candidate well enough to provide answers to most of the above questions.

Get together with your recruiting colleagues and hiring manager and brainstorm until you come away with a compelling EVP message. Then use this for both written and verbal communication to top candidates.

The next step is how to use the information gained from this exercise and wrap it into a well-crafted EVP. Next ensure your EVP appears in ALL recruiting messages tied to a SPECIFIC job. And worth repeating - this includes all written AND verbal discussions with your ideal candidate.

You may also want to read a related article - Candidates Not Responding. The effective use of a compelling EVP can become part of your recruitment process automation and utilization of AI recruiting software.

An ideal way to experience this difference is working with Carl Bradford conducting either a full search or a blended search in combination with our Digital Recruiter solution.