Reading Time: 6 minutes

This winter’s TA Week  — EBrandCon, SRSC, and Talent Sourcing Strategies — wrapped last week and Stories Inc. attended to learn, and per tradition, provide you with a substantive Talent Acquisition Week recap. We attended as many sessions as possible and took copious notes on ways to tackle talent attraction challenges and communicate employer brand. 

The days of “post and pray” job listings are over, as Ashleigh Anderson and Brandon Schneider of Credit Karma noted. They kicked off #TA_Week22 with a breakdown of the strategies we all must prioritize to attract top talent in the Great Resignation: 

• Investing in talent brand and actively telling your story
• Focusing on mission and vision
• Prioritizing the candidate experience 
• Implementing great technology, systems, and tools 
• Working for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion 

The sessions that followed outlined ways to put these priorities into practice and land outstanding talent. 

Tracking and measuring recruitment marketing 

Lori Sylvia of Rally showed how practitioners can measure the effectiveness of recruitment marketing and use analytics to tell a professional data story. This data story will demonstrate the significance of your work in attracting, engaging, and recruiting top talent for the company. Lori shared the three steps of the process. 

1. See your Data
2. Know your Effectiveness
3. Show your Impact

Lori detailed the data we should be tracking and measuring to ensure that our recruitment marketing and employer brand strategies are effective: 

In order to Know your Effectiveness (#2 of the three steps), Lori told us we must look at the data and find out which strategies are working. Data to consider for efficacy includes clicks by channel, clicks by content topic, and candidate engagement over time. Finally, Show your Impact by sharing your work and its results with your organization and leaders. 

Company leadership will take notice of data-driven impacts to employer brand, as Jörgen Sundberg of Link Humans and Shana Andrews, Senior Manager of Global Employer Brand at PepsiCo, discussed in their “fireside chat.” Shana shared how PepsiCo senior leaders are very engaged with their employer brand, thanks to detailed employer brand data. Shana says that when her employer brand reports show data impact, moving from subjective to objective, that’s when she gets senior level buy-in. 

Diversity, equity and inclusion in 2022 

Melissa Thompson, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Ford, inspired attendees to increase diverse talent and challenge status quo requirements. She suggested broadening candidate search pools beyond LinkedIn and Indeed to sources like the National Black MBA Association or Society of Women Engineers, and recruiting from a wider range of universities. 

General Motors’ Stacey Zeller, Sourcing Programs Lead, and Kyle Lagunas, Manager of Talent Sourcing, Attraction and Insights, presented a case study of how the world’s largest automotive company plans to be fully electric in 10 years. GM sees DEI as the most important element of their ambitious transformation. All employees of GM are necessary for meeting their goal, it requires “everybody in,” as well as increased hiring. They see DEI and TA as where GM’s aspirations and realities meet. 

And, Stacey Gordon of Rework Work and Author of Unbiased, spoke about the road to diversity and inclusion and building relationships with underrepresented groups. Stacey shared that we all need to look internally in our organizations and ask ourselves these tough questions: 

• Who is in your workforce now? 
• How do you attract diverse candidates? 
• Are you increasing diversity year over year? 

Stacey challenged us all to identify and dismantle the barriers in our hiring processes. 

Employer brand activation 

Jillian Einck and Bruce Carey of Recruitics started the #EBCon day with a discussion on building authentic employer brands across distributed teams and remote workplaces. They called for us to prioritize communication, inclusion, and engagement in a remote-first workforce. 

Chloe Rada, Director of Global Recruitment Marketing and Branding at Syneos Health, and Allison Kruse, Head of Global Employer Brand at Baxter, teamed up to present “must have” tools for activating employer brand content. They sourced the tools their employer brand leader peers use across all industries and company sizes. These include:

• Design software that allows for collaboration such as Canva and Papirfly
• Writing tools such as Gender Decoder, Textio, Otter.ai, Grammarly, Hemingway App, Wordtune, and Power Thesaurus 
• LinkedIn post suggestions: Provide culture- and purpose-driven content for employees to share 

Career site redesign and relaunch

Vanessa Sain-Dieguez, Senior Director of Employer Brand and Social Media at Spectrum, shared lessons learned from their careers site redesign and relaunch. 

Firstly, they ditched stock photography, and replaced them with original photos and videos of employees. Vanessa shared that they wanted to put their people at the heart of employer brand storytelling because people trust people, not logos (and we heartily agree). 

Through research, they found that 40 percent of candidates who applied on their career site watched videos featuring employees. So, in their redesign they led with employee storytelling. They added hiring manager videos, stories showcasing teams, category pages, a “Life at” careers blog, and content featuring employee stories. 

Get going in 2022

We hope you’re inspired by these recommendations and calls to action for talent acquisition in 2022. And, if you’re interested in more great ideas for leveling-up in 2022, download our guide.