You care about your staff, you invest in their wellbeing, you encourage flexible working practice and you help them progress. In fact you're the near perfect employer and if people knew they'd be crying out to work for you, your response rates would go through the roof and the quality of your candidates would skyrocket. So how do you get that across in a job advert?
With limited space and a whole list of priorities, emphasising your status as an employer of choice isn't easy. If you take the whole advert to describe your team-building retreats in the country, or your lavish Christmas party, you'll lose applicants in droves.
But there are ways to show potential employees that you're the right kind of company to work for, eye-catching techniques that mark you out as an employer of choice.
Here are three of the best:
- A good salary
Put your money where your mouth is. Nothing says you value your employees like an actual number that is well above the current market rate. You can say what you want, but talk can be cheap and smart recruits have learned to look past kind words.
The salary is a concrete fact that will speak volumes about the way you treat your staff. A clearly mentioned bonus or stock option scheme will also say it loud and proud, as will a real pension scheme.
Even if money is not the absolute driving force for a particular recruit, their worth to the company is so closely tied to their pay that it's intrinsically linked to the elusive employer of choice status.
- Clear Perks and Benefits
Do you offer flexible working hours? Can your employees work from home on occasion? Do you offer structured training schemes that will help your employees advance and develop personally and professionally? Spell it out, tell your potential recruits what you have to offer.
Don't go overboard. Don't list everything. But you know the kind of benefits that will stand out. If you offer them, let your potential recruits know with a series of bullet points.
Studies have shown that different types of staff have different driving forces. A potential salesman or broker will almost certainly be driven by money, but a more general survey from Capital One recently proved that job satisfaction, perks, benefits and chance to develop are far more important than the bottom line.
3 Investors in People logo.
There are few better ways of showing you're an employer of choice than the official accreditation of an independent body. Of course it isn't free, but it isn't as expensive as you'd think, with typical accreditation for small companies with less than 250 employees costing less about £1100.
Business grants can help you recover some of this outlay and it will almost certainly help you attract higher calibre staff. So it's an expense, but one you should consider as placing this logo on your job adverts will guarantee a better response
The Investors in People logo will tell savvy jobseekers everything about your commitment to training, your management structure and your benefits. It's worth spending the money and jumping through the required hoops for the assessment programme.
