On June 21^st, I tuned in to SmashFly’s virtual conference, TransfoRM. The event featured diversity, being proactive, the 2050 project, data analytics, hiring for retention, and being a CTRM grad. These recruitment marketing superstars are transforming the industry! There were plenty of key ideas that we loved, and plenty of insightful concepts for everyone…even for our employer branding friends.

People Want Purpose

We hear all the time that employer branding is crucial to attracting the best employees and to higher retention rates. Rosie Martinson explains it best. A job is a job. But, a job can be more than just a job when the worker believes in the company. How? Purpose. We all prioritize different things, but getting to work for and support something you strongly believe in can change the nature of your work.

Michael Bollinger drove this home. Your mission and your values should be in every part of recruiting. From every single point of contact, all the way through the onboarding process, to being lived every day of the job – values should be engrained into everything done at a company. Just like purpose, your mission and your values are what guide your company’s decisions and the work that is done. Current employees, future employees, and potential employees, want to know about the overall values within a company.

This transforms a job at Dell from just a job, into something that’s providing tools for someone to make a change. The physical work done between the same job position can be the same at many different companies, but the purpose of the work can have the biggest impact on the candidate.

Create a Culture-Connection

The culture of a company can be the difference in creating a long-lasting, sustainable company. Allison Lyons asked, ‘What does Toyota want to look like in the next 50 years?’ For Toyota specifically, Allison and team realized that if they needed to change.

This is the ‘One Toyota Journey’.  While Toyota’s journey may focus on bringing it all together; the team member experience, and the candidate experience, the overall goal was to create a collaborative and supportive culture for employees to succeed.

Then we learned from Shannon Gaydos’s presentation, that the workforce is changing. As Gen X and Y become 75% of the workforce, gigs replace full-time jobs, telecommuting makes offices smaller, and urbanization grows larger, companies need to re-evaluate their workplace culture like Allison did. Why is this change important? Shannon shares this disconcerting information about company lifespans: in the last 15 years, 52% of S&P 500 companies have disappeared.

Connecting your culture today for tomorrow is important for creating a long-lasting success for the future.

And of course, my favorite part was when Julia Levy and Alex Brown spoke about her sticky candidate experience. Julia said that they updated Fiserv’s candidate experience with better storytelling and real employee pictures (not stock images). Who doesn’t love to hear a good success story?

While I might not have fully transformed into a recruitment marketing butterfly, I might have made it to the cocoon phase. To watch any of the speakers on demand, go to Transformrecruitmentmarketing.com.