Welcome to the inaugural post on the SEI blog!
Over the past two years SEI has made some significant strides in brand awareness through some targeted initiatives fueled by the leadership and hard work of our consultants.
Brand awareness isn’t in itself a novel concept, but SEI’s approach is certainly unique: Our brand efforts focus almost entirely on showcasing SEI’s value proposition to our target candidates, not to our target clients.
We don’t sell online. We know that relationship marketing will always drive business development at SEI. We sell based on trust, word of mouth referrals, and relationships.
Recruiting and talent attraction is a whole different game. While we would love to meet our growth goals through referrals alone, we’re realistic enough to know that we will need to cast a wider net and appeal to candidates that haven’t heard of SEI.
And when we start to engage those candidates, they will go to Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and here to our website, where this blog will live and showcase our company through the eyes of our consultants.
For the past two years we’ve been deeply focused on laying the foundation for improving and implementing a best in class Candidate Experience. We just haven’t called it that.
Candidate Experience is a red-hot topic (and a huge buzzword) in HR and Recruiting circles. In November I wrote a post for Dice’s Resource Center on the heels of the HR Technology Conference where I commented on the amount of discussions around Candidate Experience:
The emergence of ‘the candidate experience’ as the primary point of discussion in any and all recruiting sessions is more proof of this [the importance of not ignoring ‘the people aspect’ of technology], as are the numerous Talent Communities that are popping up to provide resources to these candidates
The ‘Second Annual Candidate Experience Awards – The CandEs!’ session showcased this trend, with a strong emphasis on high-touch engagement with candidates, creative recruiting processes, and a constant focus on personalization.
Most people will tell you that improving the candidate experience starts with improving the application, recruitment, and onboarding processes. They aren’t wrong, and at SEI we’ve made some significant progress in that area with the implementation of the Jobvite platform and review and documentation of our current sourcing and assessment practices. Those are great initiatives that we’ll continue to focus on, but they won’t be the focus of this blog.
The focus of this blog is driving candidate engagement. Essentially, how will we provide candidates at all stages of our process the right information so that they understand what we’re about and so that they can assess their fit in the organization? How can we get them excited about the prospect of joining us?
It’s also about providing our consultants an outlet to talk about things they care about – our culture, our expertise, our approach, our community. To that end, the blog will sit at the intersection of employment branding and candidate experience.
I know that I am looking forward to seeing what kind of content the collective SEI consultant community will kick out. I know from working along these people day in and day out that it will be awesome, and I’ll be the first one to subscribe.
Will you join me?
