Candidate Recognition: Acknowledging Job Seekers Matters Today

Exclusive interview with Travis Dommert, Senior Vice President of Talent, OneDigital

In an exclusive interview with HR.com, Travis discusses the current expectations of job candidates from their potential employers. He also highlights the essential factors that companies need to consider to become an employer of choice, as well as advertising strategies that can aid in developing a strong talent pipeline, among others.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q: What do candidates seek from employers today? 

Travis: Most data suggests that people are, first and foremost, looking for opportunities to learn and grow, and that is true here. But my gut tells me that candidates want something even more: to be seen. Whether unemployed or feeling the stressors of an employment situation that is causing them to look elsewhere, candidates want respect and attention.

I love the work that Delta Air Lines did recently to address the fact that they turn away vast numbers of applicants every year, many of whom have put time and effort into applying for a position, never to make it to the interview stage. Delta realized that this left many people feeling shortchanged and unseen. As a token of gratitude, they simplified the application experience to make it easier. Then they began sharing the results of their talent assessment with every candidate, using a Talent Card.

This gesture showed that they cared about their candidates as people and gave them something extraordinarily valuable in return for the time invested, a window into their strengths and the value they bring to the world. I recall receiving a Talent Card when I was a leader at a staffing company based in Michigan called Workforce Strategies Inc. I felt affirmed and valued.

What candidates do not want is to be pushed into a nameless, faceless process that offers little or no hope of ever being seen, which is unfortunately what many companies offer during this process. We struggle with this too. The more success OneDigital has had in the market with building a reputable brand and best place to work culture, the worse it gets. We have had requisitions in the last year and had received over 1,000 candidates… too many to respond to personally.

Instead, we are looking for solutions as Delta did, to provide value, be it helpful suggestions for polishing their personal brand, interviewing tips, or guidance on how to do their best work and live their best lives.

Q: What are the factors that play a key role in becoming an 'employer of choice?'

Travis: Building an intentional culture has become table stakes in the war for talent. Still, there is so much room for improvement, even among the best places to work companies. Ask any of them. Once you set your sights on becoming a destination employer and seek to continuously improve… the opportunities seem endless.

At a minimum, it is critical that employers establish a cadence of soliciting and acting upon the feedback of their people. Most people share common needs and motives around feeling cared for and set up to succeed. They want to belong and feel safe to be their fullest and truest selves. They want to do work that matters and be part of something larger than themselves. They want leaders who are worth following and who know how to lead themselves. They want their experience to be increasingly effortless, so they spend less of their days and nights waiting or navigating administrivia. How you do all of that, however, depends.

We routinely talk about the research findings and motivation theory from Frederick Herzberg, who studied the drivers of extreme satisfaction and dissatisfaction at work for decades. We realize we have to constantly ask about what is frustrating people and holding them back, “The gravel in their shoe.“ And we must accept that fixing those things still will not make them happy; it will only make them “not mad.”

Extreme satisfaction comes from achievement and recognition, doing work that matters and growing. This, too, requires continual improvement. If people never receive feedback or guidance on their performance, they grow frustrated and leave. If the process for gathering and administering feedback on performance is too onerous, they grow frustrated and leave. Refinement comes from making things simple, actionable, and sustainable.

Q: What are the advertising strategies you adopt to develop a talent pipeline? 

Travis: There are several components of our recruitment marketing efforts. At the top of the funnel, we are seeking to build our employer brand among high-performing professionals nationwide. We know that they are engaged employees, highly valued, and at least likely to be looking or responding to recruiters.

For them, we merely want them to know that OneDigital is a place that values, supports, and challenges people to do their best work and live their best lives. To do this, we do not talk to them about job opportunities (they already have a job). We talk to them about strategies and tactics for doing their best work and living their best lives. We share tips and articles on topics like elevating performance, building a great culture, elevating the relationship with your boss, and doing work that matters to you.

For those who are actively searching for a job, we leverage platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor to help people understand what it would be like to work here. We want them to see, hear and feel our culture.

The greatest recruiting tool in the world, however, is someone who loves their job. Our culture, total wellbeing programs, and people and culture strategy, as well as a huge part of our value proposition to clients, come to life when they see someone talk about what it means to them personally, not the company making promises.

No one on the planet can out-recruit a leader who is authentically sharing how her life has improved or how they have improved the lives of others through their job. If you spend a few minutes on LinkedIn and search OneDigital, I believe you will find exponentially more content shared by our people than our marketing team. That is no slight to our amazing marketing team, which is excellent and prolific. You just cannot compete with people who are truly happy and want to share it.

Q: What technologies play a role in your recruiting advertising? 

Travis: Technology undoubtedly plays an increasingly important role in reaching people who would benefit from employment opportunities at our company. We use one system for our applicant tracking system. We use another system for our OneDigital Professional Network. We use another system for candidate assessments. Having all those systems talk, which is beginning to happen this year, will take us leaps forward in reaching the right people at the right time with the right message.

That said, I am grateful for companies like LinkedIn and Glassdoor, who are continually investing in the intelligence of their platforms. For example, Glassdoor awarded us a best place to work designation based solely on the analysis of employee comments. Not only did that not require effort to apply for such an award, but it also carried more credibility because it was organically derived rather than the result of a paid or submission process.

Other innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) may speed the creation and curation of content and candidates. Still, no amount of technology or marketing will outperform happy employees talking to their families and friends about the gratitude they feel toward their teammates and companies.

Employee engagement is the gold standard there, so we would be remiss if we did not talk about technology in that context. Technology helps us listen and act at scale. Our engagement pulses are simple, but the analysis is sophisticated in its ability to help us identify pain points and differentiate our culture.

Q: How will recruitment advertising evolve in the coming years?

Travis: The advances in AI are spooky. I suspect our technology will allow us to increasingly understand the high performers among our ranks and identify people with similar strengths and desires. I also suspect it will better understand and respond to the behaviors that suggest someone is frustrated in their current role and open to change. Finally, I hope our tech will allow us to continue to personalize the candidate experience so they get the attention and guidance they deserve. 

Q: What are the challenges you face with traditional recruitment advertising methods? How do you overcome them?

Travis: Our greatest challenges with recruitment lie within. There are already more tools and solutions than we have the time and capacity to implement. Rather, we must continue to focus on how to help our people do more of their best work and live more of their best lives. If people love coming to work, they will not keep those feelings to themselves. I would love to leverage our time, our tech, and our resources there… and then learn to amplify those stories to reach people whose skills, experience, and aspirations align with our culture and growth.
 

---