By Loren Yaskin, The Flip Side Communications
Many companies fall short when it comes to giving prospective employees a taste of reality: what work life is like on the inside. Recruiting materials and websites often seem to try too hard to woo their prospects with hip images and the typical cheerful verbiage about challenging and rewarding opportunities in a dynamic work environment. Surprisingly, many companies still don’t even use the power of video to showcase employees and their stories about what it’s really like to work at their companies.
More time is often spent on the job description than the recruitment experience. In one of our earlier blog posts How Companies Can Better Sell Themselves When Hiring Employees, we shared our observations that some companies are almost looking for superheroes in their job descriptions, cramming in everything they can think of with jargon-filled descriptions fit for a robot. They lay out everything the candidate should do for the company but leave out what the company can do for candidates. These companies are missing a big opportunity to realistically sell themselves.
Touting the benefits and all of the positive work experiences is obviously a great thing, but what about showing a little more behind the curtain? Let’s hear from employees about what a typical day is. Let’s hear and see the realities of the job through their lenses – what it is and what it isn’t. There is a way for companies to do this while maintaining brand integrity. Perhaps if companies did this more often, they would find better employment matches and maybe even reduce turnover.
What examples do you have of companies that are doing it right? We like how Disneyland took a different approach in which a cast member chronicled a behind-the-scenes look at day in his life at work.