A Chocolate on Their Pillow Isn't Enough
Jonathan Tisch, the Chairman and CEO of Loews Hotels, has a book out called Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough. It's a study of organizational behavior from the luxury hotel perspective. Tisch believes the key to success--whether your company is a hotelier, a clothing retailer or a fast food chain—is to turn customers into guests. That involves learning "the art of welcome," a set of principles for delivering the extraordinary customer experience. It's a concept that I believe holds equally as much promise for recruiters.
Tisch profiles a number of companies in the book, but his description of clothing retailer Urban Outfitters is particularly revealing. According to Tisch, the company is better than most when it comes to harnessing "the power of welcome to attract customers" into its stores. Attraction, of course, is a challenge for us, as well. We need the Career area on our corporate sites to attract a generous stream of great talent because alternative forms of sourcing are both expensive and time-consuming.
So, what does Urban Outfitters do to transform their stores into customer magnets? Simple as it sounds, they work hard at keeping people fascinated with the look of their stores. The company changes their clothing displays every day and executes full store redesigns twice a month. They believe they must not only attract customers, but give them a reason to come back over and over and over again. In essence, the Urban Outfitters definition of a guest is a repeat visitor.
It's also the way we should define the perfect guest in the Career area on our corporate sites. Our goal should be to get the best customers--the passive, high caliber prospects we most want to "buy" our organization's value proposition as an employer--to come back to our site over and over and over again. The way to do that, Tisch explains, is to invest the time and effort necessary to make our "store" virtually irresistible by creating "a moment of unexpected satisfaction." If Urban Outfitters can do that to sell a $65 pair of jeans, we can certainly do it to sell a $65,000 high performing prospect.
How do we create an "unexpected moment of satisfaction" in our Career areas? I think it involves four discrete steps:
• Step 1: Create channels of tailored content. No guest thinks of themselves as a generic visitor, so it's important that our online experience provide a way for them to identify personally with the information and features we provide. The best channels, therefore, are those that offer tailored content by career path so that sales professionals visit a separate part of the store and are sold with a different vocabulary and set of facts than finance and accounting or information technology or operations professionals. Equally as important, as the Urban Outfitters example makes clear, the content in each tailored channel must change regularly—at least monthly—if you want the best and brightest to return to your site frequently enough for you to sell them.
• Step 2: Offer content that builds relationships. Active job seekers are in a hurry; they'll buy quickly. Passive prospects take their time; they want to get to know your employer. They aren't looking for a job; they're looking for a career advancement opportunity. You can't, therefore, induce them to make a purchase with a traditional transactional experience. You have to build a relationship with them. That's an over-used term, to be sure, but it accurately describes the content creation process for an effective Career area online. As we all know from our own experience in life, successful relationships take both time and hard work. Convincing top talent that they should devote their career to our employer is no less of a challenge. It requires constant creativity, sensitivity and commitment. To infuse your content with those attributes, shape it so that it always answers a passive prospect's most important question: What's in it for them?
• Step 3: Communicate with a dialogue not a soliloquy. Clear and continuous communication is the foundation of successful relationships. Without it, customers simply can't be sold effectively: It's much more difficult to persuade them to buy our employer's value proposition and much more likely that a misunderstanding—what you and I call a poor person-job fit—will occur. Communication, however, is not a one-way street. And, in the best Career areas on corporate Web-sites, it's actually two two-ways streets, running in parallel. The first is the dialogue the site provides between prospects and recruiters. That two-way interaction can occur via a blog, a Q&A feature or direct e-mail. The second is the dialogue the site promotes between and among its customers. Peer-to-peer interaction can occur via a discussion forum, listserv or bulletin board. In both cases, the goal is to make visitors feel like welcomed guests by adding a personal touch to what all too frequently seems like an impersonal experience.
• Step 4: Deliver evidence that matters. The best talent are savvy consumers. They take employers' claims—about their employment brand, open positions and opportunities—with a healthy dose of skepticism. As most of us do when considering any important purchase, they look for proof that their expectation about an organization will come true once they're hired. What evidence matters most to them? The words of their peers. The single most powerful element of proof a company can offer on its site is the testimonials of its employees that describe their day-to-day work experience. As with every other form of content on the site, however, these vignettes should change frequently. Once a quarter is best as that pace ensures the evidence always seems fresh and covers more of the career fields for which your company recruits.
Recruiting departments are almost always understaffed and overworked, so it's easy to fall into corner-cutting behaviors. Putting a chocolate on someone's pillow—creating a Career area that provides a small, but tasty morsel of information about your company—ought to be enough to convince a customer that they're welcome. In the War for the Best Talent, however, it's not. The competition is doing more to sell the visitors to their site, and that means we must too. We must transform our candidates into guests by providing a moment of unexpected satisfaction over and over and over again.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Who is Peter Weddle? Peter Weddle is a recruiter, HR consultant and business CEO turned author and commentator. Described by The Washington Post as "... a man filled with ingenious ideas," he has earned an international reputation, pioneering concepts in Human Resource leadership and employment. He has authored or edited over two dozen books and been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, The National Business Employment Weekly and CNN.com. Today, he writes two newsletters that are distributed worldwide and oversees WEDDLE's LLC, a print publisher specializing in the field of human resources. WEDDLE's annual Guides and Directory to job boards are recognized for their accuracy and helpfulness, leading the American Staffing Association to call Weddle the "Zagat of the online employment industry."
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