CX + EX: How to ‘Entice’ the best talent to your organisation

In our previous CX + EX blog we looked at how the customer experience (CX) affects your organisation. We discussed why it is important to develop not only a CX strategy for customers but also an EX or employee experience strategy using a similar framework. 

As a reminder, we use the 5E framework: Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, and Extend. And to paraphrase Richard Branson again, “Happy employees, make for happy clients”.

So this month let’s focus on the first E – Entice. When recruiting, we need to ask ourselves, ‘How can we attract the best talent to our organisation? How strong is our brand reputation? Why would anyone want to work for us? 

People want to work for an organisation that is well respected and to do work that is meaningful. Our own industry, Aged care, should be attracting people who are empathic to the needs of others, especially older people in their most vulnerable phase of life. 

Likewise, every organisation wants to attract the best talent and have them undertake work that is highly valuable. So appearances are important. Chances are, most organisations will either embellish what they can offer to a prospective employee to attract them, or focus on the wrong aspects of the role eg. salary, location, perks and benefits etc and forget about the purpose of the role.

We know that being a strong and well respected brand has huge benefits. And the same emotional reasons people buy from well respected brands are also the same as why they would want to work for one. So you want to portray your organisation in the best possible light.

It isn’t uncommon for major brands to hide their identity when searching for the best candidates. These organisations know that the ‘halo effect’ can act as a beacon, and result in an influx of the wrong candidates applying for the role. After all, who doesn’t want to work for a strong and well respected brand? 

The practice of hiding your brand identity proves how important brand reputation is to the recruitment process. The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person, in this case a brand/organisation, influences how we feel and think about them. 

Therefore, the key to attracting great people is to build your brand reputation. This is achieved by firstly having a clear (brand) purpose for the organisation, and secondly a sound strategy to deliver. Thirdly, runs on the board aka real results excites people.

A great example of the halo effect in action is our overall impression of celebrities. We tend to be more forgiving of their quirks and behaviour than we would be of other people we know. We quickly dismiss or overlook their flaws.

So, attracting the best talent to your organisation starts with your brand reputation but keeping the best talent takes a lot more work.

We think Change may suck, so we aren’t going anywhere, so next month we will review the second E – Enter, i.e. or the onboarding process. This is where you either set your employees up for success. Or you set them up for failure.

Anthony Carroll,  Senior Marketing Manager  at Mirus Australia is an expert in human-centred design.  Anthony regularly teaches at the University of Sydney, Centre of Continuing Education (CCE) on this very subject and is an Expert-in-Residence on behalf of Mirus Australia, a Gold Partner  of innovAGEING. Please connect with Anthony on LinkedIn.