Employer Branding & Future Proof Candidate Journeys.
Career Control is a large staffing & recruitment agency and the employer brand of The InControl Group. The brand combines six labels, each focusing on a different sector e.g. Finance, HR and Credit Management. All labels experience that the labor market is getting more and more candidate driven. Online journeys play a significant role in attracting and engaging candidates. Therefore, Career Control wanted to evaluate their online presence and create a future proof recruitment marketing strategy.
Defining and fostering the employer brand
A relevant and authentic employer brand is of great importance for attracting the right employees. It signals the essence of the employer and it shows how the company adds value to (potential) employees. It also helps to align all employer communication based on the common values.
Career Control asked Talent Peaks to help with defining and developing an overarching employer brand across the different labels. We helped uncovering the needs and wishes of the different target audiences. Together, we developed a content strategy based on the Career Control DNA and targeted it at the wishes of the audience.
Identify core values
During our workshops, we showed Career Control how they could identify their core values. We had a great session using many sticky notes and we played a card game based on Jung’s Archetypes. This resulted in three core values that formed the basis of all InControl Group labels: trust, happiness, and entrepreneurship. We strongly believe DNA has to be fostered and therefore we also created an employer branding roadmap to keep the company’s core values alive.
Creating candidate personas
For each label, we interviewed multiple employees in-depth to uncover their interests, traits, and the job related topics they are interested in. Per label, we combined the qualitative results of the interviews to form a comprehensive picture of one candidate (for example the persona Raymond from Credit Management).
These personas were not only based on qualitative data, but also on quantitative data through an analysis on the complete ATS database. We mapped out which channels each candidate visits during his or her journey and with that information we could develop a solid and practical content strategy.
We summarized the results in an appealing visual, so that employees could easily see the persona as a real person of flesh and blood. This helps focussing and it inspires people to step into the shoes of the persona.
Website analysis and Google analytics
With the newly created personas, we could now analyse the website and advise on how to optimize it according the identified candidate journeys. Based on the Google Analytics dashboard and our analysis, we suggested website optimizations that would lead to a higher conversion rate. We created a Google Analytics dashboard that offers the Career Control job marketer the fundamentals to be able to work in a data driven way. He now can easily see which channels, which content and what campaigns perform best and which require adjustments.
The results
Talent Peaks guided Career Control in defining a unified employer branding proposition that serves as a basis for the communications and marketing of all 6 labels. We unlocked insights from their candidate database and discovered the potential gaps regarding their target personas. Together, we formulated vivid personas and clear candidate journeys, based on qualitative and quantitative data. This resulted in a hands-on content strategy format and a practical marketing roadmap. In order to easily monitor all actions, Talent Peaks created a powerful Google Analytics dashboard. Thanks to this challenging, fun, and rewarding project, Career Control now can successfully control their own (job) marketing.
Looking back …
Boudewijn Ingwersen, Owner Career Control Finance:
Working with Talent Peaks has been an experience our whole organization looks back on with a smile. For this project, they involved not just management, but also our sales and recruitment consultants. We were challenged to carefully think about WHO WE REALLY ARE, who we WANT to be, and what our daily business is. Their strategy to verify our opinions with our customers was very impactful. The complete scope of the project was managed by various experts at Talent Peaks which led to a fruitful collaboration, all completed within time and budget. The outcome offers us a great starting-point to take our employer branding and candidate journey to the next level.
Ruut-Jan Bakkenes, Owner Career Control Finance:
Working with Talent Peaks has given us the right tools to create our online proposition. In this changing world of recruitment we succeed in following and contacting talented candidates. Young professionals choose their own path and they require a different approach as far as content and employer branding is concerned. The common sessions with Talent Peaks gave us a better understanding of our target groups. We now know which tools, media and channels are successful for our specific goals, so we no longer waste time and money on less effective tactics. Talent Peaks’ data driven, pragmatic approach combined with our no nonsense vision on the labor market resulted in a promising strategy.
During the workshops, we mapped out all potential qualities of the talent within our organization. This enables us to allow our colleagues to grow within their own professional areas of interest. Thanks to the partnership with Talent Peaks, and especially Daniëlle, we now can clearly express our ambitions and integrate them in our employer branding strategy and the candidate journey.
Daniëlle de Ruwe, consultant Talent Peaks:
It was fun and challenging to do this project, not knowing beforehand if we could find enough values to unite all six labels as one employer brand. During this project we discussed several strategic matters like which target audiences would be focussed on in the next years, what do we need to set in place to be able to connect which these groups and how do we make our organization ready for the future. This project was a good example of how the combination of Talent Peak’s disciplines Design, Implement and Analytics creates a powerful solution for our customers.
