For marketers, it's widely accepted that "Customers have different behaviors and preferences [and companies must] move past a 'one-size-fits-all' marketing approach." (thanks, Custora for this concise description of Customer-Centric Marketing.) There are now many strategies and tools to help marketing teams manage customer journeys end to end. Everything from CRM to analytics to content to SEO to A/B testing to social media management to drip campaigns to ad re-targeting. There's an interesting parallel to draw here between the customer-to-Marketer relationship and the employee-to-People Ops relationship (HR, Talent Acquisition, Recruiting).
Marketers think about the customer journey: how to trigger awareness, how to engage customers before they're ready to become customers, how to nurture them over time so your brand is top of mind when they start to consider buying, and how to keep them as happy customers — ultimately how to convert them from lurkers to likers to lovers. The end goal, of course, is to build a large and recurring source of low acquisition cost customers who keep coming back and ultimately become advocates.
People Ops teams must start thinking about the employee journey in the same way — create employment brand awareness, engage active and passive job seekers early, nurture them to apply, make their experience with applying, interviewing and onboarding memorable, keep them happy and retain them, etc. Looking at employees with the "lifecycle" framework can inform decisions about how to optimize the journey. It's time for People Ops teams to think like marketers.
But why now? We're living in a new era. Power in the employment marketplace is shifting radically from employers to workers. The shift is being driven by three main factors:
Together these three factors have created an unprecedented force in the employment marketplace. Power is shifting rapidly away from employers and to workers at all stages of their employee journey (from passive job seeker to applicant to active candidate to employee).
To respond to these changes, companies must start by thinking about the candidate experience, i.e. the entire journey of your employees before they become employees. This includes everything from the first encounter with your employment brand across multiple channels to the experience on your career site to ongoing nurturing to the application process to interviewing to onboarding.
While there are tactical approaches that are becoming popular for modern companies — like using data and analytics to evaluate what your candidate funnel looks like, where drop-off happens, etc. — there are also a handful of more strategic approaches for companies to be proactive about treating candidates like customers. An easy way to think about attacking this is by looking at new categories of emerging companies in talent tech or work tech: (1) recruitment marketing / chatbots, (2) video interviewing, (3) personalization & fit. Each of these encompasses multiple stages of the applicant journey and there are a few leaders emerging in each area which overlaps somewhat in their offerings.
The power shift in the employment marketplace is happening. For companies who don't acknowledge this shift — and aren't thinking about job seekers, applicants, candidates and employees like they think about customers — they expose their companies to an existential threat. People are the lifeblood of companies. Customers can't be served if the employees serving them are not taken care of.
Leaders who must contend with this are no longer just People Ops, HR, and Talent Acquisition, but CEOs, CFOs and all hiring managers. Those who ignore this shift will struggle at best and fail at worst. It's only a matter of time.
