PeopleScout’s global RPO solutions help organizations to streamline recruitment processes and technology across regions, providing more control over global recruiting costs.
Traditionally, high-volume recruiting focuses on quantity, at the expense of quality. At PeopleScout, our high-volume recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) solution leverages unmatched scalability, the automation of our talent acquisition suite, Affinix™, and the experience of our talent advisory consultants.
As part of our suite of modular recruiting solutions, Amplifiers™, PeopleScout’s Assessment Transformation empowers you to deploy talent assessments that not only enhance the recruitment experience for candidates but also help you secure top-notch, future-ready talent with cutting-edge technology and visionary design.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured attention across nearly every industry for its seemingly boundless potential to transform how work gets done—including AI in recruiting. Yet for many talent acquisition (TA) leaders, AI remains shrouded in hype, myths and even fear that “robot recruiters” are taking over.
This handbook sets out to demystify AI tools for recruitment with facts about real-world applications across talent acquisition capabilities and provide guidance on how talent teams can start planning to use AI effectively and ethically. We’ll cut through the hype to bring AI down to earth—focusing on what works, not what’s flashy.
The message we want to reinforce upfront is that AI should not be seen as a replacement for the talent acquisition strategy you’ve already built, but rather a set of tools to make your teams better at tasks both mundane and meaningful.
📌 Before we go any further, here’s a note from our legal team:
The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal or other professional advice; instead, all information, content, and materials available in this article are for general information purposes only. Readers of this article should contact their attorney or legal advisor to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter. No reader of this article should act or refrain from acting on the basis of information in this article without first seeking legal advice from counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. All liability with respect to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this article are expressly disclaimed by PeopleScout, Inc.. The content in this article is provided “as-is”, and no representations are made by PeopleScout that the content is error-free.
What is AI?
The term artificial intelligence or AI was coined by Stanford Professor John McCarthy, who defined it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs.” AI is technology with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence. Data and algorithms enable AI to “learn” how to accomplish complex tasks without being explicitly programmed to do them. It also includes the sub-fields of machine learning, speech and natural language processing and robotic process automation.
Over the last decade, AI capabilities have advanced tremendously due to increases in computing power, the abundance of digital data and improvements in machine learning algorithms. As a result, AI solutions can now match or even outperform humans in certain tasks related to object recognition, language processing, prediction modelling and more.
The disruption delivered by generative AI in particular arrived like a bullet train. In just a few short months, AI went from an abstract concept to a tangible force radically impacting businesses—and jobs—worldwide. With Generative AI (GAI) tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini (formerly Bard) and Microsoft Copilot, AI has gone from expensive and exclusive to an everyday tool accessible by the masses.
The State of AI in Recruiting
Top talent has become increasingly scarce and competitive, while recruiting resources and budgets remain strained. This situation demands that talent acquisition teams work smarter, and AI and automation could represent an opportunity for organizations to enhance human capabilities in recruitment.
According to Gartner, a massive 81% of HR leaders have explored or implemented AI solutions to improve process efficiency within their organization. HR leaders aim to use generative AI (GAI) for improving efficiency in HR processes (63%), enhancing the employee experience (52%) and bolstering learning and development programs. Plus, 76% of HR leaders believe that if their organization does not adopt AI solutions in the next year or two, they will lag behind those that do.
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What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of AI in Recruitment?
While AI holds tremendous promise, it also comes with some real concerns which talent acquisition and HR leaders must thoughtfully address. AI is largely unregulated and has received criticism for negative impacts on things like privacy, security, bias, and transparency in its decision-making processes. However, with care and diligence, you can establish sensible guidelines at your organization, so this technology enhances your talent acquisition capabilities while respecting human values.
Benefits of AI for Recruiting
AI can help the humans behind your talent program work more efficiently and effectively when used correctly. Applying AI across the various recruiting stages introduces a host of benefits, including:
Efficiency AI-powered tools can shoulder time-consuming tasks like communications and initial screening, allowing recruiters to reach more candidates at scale. AI systems help recruiters to focus their efforts on the most promising prospects, including helping identify passive candidates. This wider reach improves quality by putting recruiters in front of more qualified candidates.
Improved Candidate Experience Tools like AI chatbots and self-scheduling create a seamless 24/7 candidate experience. By fielding frequently asked questions and coordinating interviews, they dramatically reduce time-to-hire. Candidates get quick responses instead of waiting for recruiters to come online, making the hiring process faster and frictionless.
Improved Matching Advanced AI algorithms surface qualified prospects that may have been overlooked. By analyzing candidates’ skills, experience, and other attributes and matching them to open roles, AI systems ensure better candidate-job fit. This improves quality-of-hire and unlocks hidden talent pools recruiters may have missed.
Enhanced Diversity and Inclusion With the right data to learn from, AI reduces unconscious bias from hiring by focusing decisions on data rather than gut instinct. By objectively evaluating candidates’ skills without prejudice, AI-assisted recruiting enhances diversity and creates a more equitable hiring process.
Cost Reduction AI can reduce the cost-per-applicant in some cases. Recruiters can outsource low-impact, repetitive tasks to AI, and spend more time interacting with candidates and hiring managers. This optimization of talent acquisition teams enables resources to be allocated more efficiently, reducing vacancy rates and lowering costs.
Risks of AI in Recruiting
While there are benefits, talent leaders must thoughtfully address common concerns around AI transparency, interpretation of outputs, data privacy and ethics.
PeopleScout POV
PeopleScout is committed to striking the right balance between next-generation technology and maintaining the trust we’ve built with candidates and clients. As our clients’ trusted talent advisors, we do our due diligence and work touphold our standards for quality and compliance when helping clients adopt new technologies like GenAI.
As organizations prepare to capitalize on the efficiencies of AI, they must be particularly discerning about AI when it comes to supporting people decisions. Effectively deploying and scaling AI across talent acquisition functions introduces some common challenges, including:
Biased Algorithms Despite its ability to reduce bias, if AI models are trained on biased or incomplete data sets, they can unintentionally perpetuate inequality. In many countries there are laws prohibiting discrimination in the recruitment process, and the use of AI must align with these laws. Leaders need oversight into data inputs and must remain vigilant when considering recommendations made by AI. That being said, bias in AI can be corrected much easier than bias amongst humans. Proactively monitoring and mitigating possible areas of bias is essential for driving more inclusive, equitable hiring—regardless of whether AI is involved.
Disproportionate Impact Certain demographic groups face higher exposure to the potential harms of AI in recruitment. For instance, if an AI screening system relies heavily on standardized test scores that have racial biases, it could automatically filter out qualified minority candidates. Similarly, lower income communities may lack access to the digital tools and internet connectivity required for AI screening. This digital divide could automatically exclude qualified candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds. Without proactive measures to address these systemic issues, AI recruitment tools risk amplifying real-world inequality. Organizations must consider disproportionate impact with their use of AI in order to improve diversity and reinforce equity.
Lack of Transparency Organizations may experience resistance amongst candidates and employees when there is a lack of understanding of how AI is being used in the hiring process and how AI arrives at certain outputs or recommendations. You can nurture trust through training and effective communication to help recruiters, hiring managers and applicants understand the reasons behind AI-generated outcomes and their role in the hiring decision-making process. Use clear and understandable language to describe the factors influencing decisions and put mechanisms in place to capture feedback and reporting of potential issues. Transparency promotes ethical AI use in recruitment and also reinforces organizational values and establishes a positive reputation in the industry.
Data from Pew Research Center shows that 61% of Americans are unaware that employers are currently using AI in the hiring process. A majority (71%) oppose AI making a final hiring decision, while 41% oppose AI being used to review applications. However, the more people understand about AI, the more they’re in favor of its use in the recruitment process. For example, 43% of those who’ve heard a lot about using AI in the hiring process support its use for reviewing applications, compared with 37% who’ve heard a little and 21% who’ve heard nothing at all.
Lack of Accuracy GAI is prone to making up statistics, sources and even case law—known as hallucinating. There are no safeguards in place to validate the generated content or to check the accuracy or appropriateness of the outcome. Organizations leveraging tools like ChatGPT for recruiting open themselves up to risks. Recruiters must be aware of the importance of the human touch and using their judgement when using GAI tools for creating content and communications.
Over-Automation Heavy reliance on AI also poses risks if the recruitment process becomes overly automated and fails to incorporate sound human judgment as a check. Too much automated communication can feel depersonalized to a candidate. AI should never replace the human touch—rather it should enhance human capabilities. Plus, companies using AI for recruitment must ensure compliance with all relevant regulations. For example, under GDPR, there are strict guidelines around automated decision-making, and individuals have the right to obtain human intervention and contest automated decisions that significantly affect them.
Data Privacy Issues Collecting and analyzing extensive candidate information required by AI systems can raise concerns around consent, data protection, and ethical usage. Any talent data feeding the AI systems must be compliant with regulations, like GDPR and CCPA, that are relevant to your locations. Organizations should create a framework around the usage of AI recruitment tools to provide transparency around what data you’re collecting, gain consent where applicable, and put access controls and encryption in place to protect sensitive candidate information. Your data security team should vet any AI usage to ensure candidate data is not being scraped for other uses.
Workflow Integration Implementing AI recruiting tools requires integrating them into existing systems and processes. Too often, companies adopt AI in isolation, without considering its impact on surrounding workflows. Instead, organizations should evaluate how AI technologies will interface with current infrastructure. For example, your applicant tracking system (ATS) may need API connections to import AI-screened candidates. With careful integration planning, AI can be a seamless augmentation to talent acquisition rather than an isolated add-on.
Proactively addressing these concerns through governance, oversight and continuous improvement of AI systems and processes is key to managing the risks responsibly. Overall, the use of AI in recruitment is permitted but becoming more and more tightly regulated. Systems cannot make final hiring decisions and must be transparent, fair and accountable. Adhering to data protection laws and anti-discrimination regulations is crucial for the ethical use of AI in hiring. Undergoing regular audits to assess for unintended bias and maintaining the human touch to review, override or contest automated recommendations is crucial.
📌 We recommend you consult your legal team before implementing any AI technologies at your organization.
Use Cases for AI in Recruitment
As recruiting grows more competitive, organizations are turning to smart technologies to gain an edge in attracting and engaging candidates. From chatbots to video interviews and skills assessments, AI-powered solutions are streamlining efficiencies while enabling deeper insights across the hiring funnel. Here are some examples demonstrating AI’s immense potential to boost recruiting outcomes while improving the candidate experience.
How to Use AI for Candidate Attraction and Sourcing
Identifying, contacting and engaging prospective candidates is ripe for AI augmentation. Building a robust pipeline of talent typically involves highly manual, repetitive tasks that can divert focus away from higher-value tasks. Here are some of the ways AI can support you in filling your recruitment funnel.
Building Candidate Personas
AI can pull from the profiles of existing employees and historical hiring data for a given role to surface patterns and common characteristics. These patterns, combined with qualitative data gathered from interviews, can help you to define a persona profile of the ideal candidate for the role.
A persona is a fictional character profile that represents the different types of candidates who would be successful in a role. Personas focus on individual characteristics, behaviors, interests, goals, motivators and challenges. With these in place, you can create alignment across your recruitment and sourcing strategies. Your persona profiles should provide specific guidance about how to find candidates who fit the profile, including targeted messages that will resonate.
Since launching in late 2022, ChatGPT and other GAI chatbots, like Bing Chat, Gemini (formerly Bard) and more, quickly permeated the workplace. These tools mimic human communication and can help with everything from content creation and market analysis to simply writing emails. They can also be used to write job descriptions.
By feeding them with relevant prompts that detail the job tasks and required skills as well as employer brand elements like tone of voice, the GAI chatbot can produce a first draft job description in seconds. The hiring manager and recruiter can then massage this text to create the final posting.
For existing job descriptions, AI can be used to measure sentiment and detect biased language. There are a variety of AI-powered online tools that can highlight biased language—like “ambitious” or “expert,” which are stereotypically masculine—to ensure you’re not turning off a portion of your talent audience.
Previously a manual process, AI can sift through a huge number of online profiles to find candidates with the skills you’re looking for. For example, the AI-powered Affinix CRM tool in PeopleScout’s talent acquisition suite Affinix searches millions of online profiles to find passive candidates with the skills and competencies that match the role. The AI also assesses the likelihood of a candidate being open to a new opportunity by combining the average tenure of each job listed on their profile with the average aggregate tenure of all other candidates in that same role.
Manually identifying passive candidates who have similar titles but may not be actively searching for a job can take hours of dedicated time. AI can reduce manual efforts and massively speed up the recruitment process. Plus, it helps you concentrate on skills, rather than experience, to expand your candidate pool.
Predictive Analytics
Machine learning models can also provide predictive and prescriptive hiring recommendations based on a candidate’s profile. AI can assess genuine interest, candidate motivations, likelihood to accept an offer and even predicted tenure. This empowers recruiters to be more informed for interview prep and can help them personalize outreach messages to appeal specifically to what matters most for each candidate.
Over time as engagement data is captured, AI models continue to improve, learning what messages and channels persuade candidates with various profiles and career trajectories. This creates a positive feedback loop, compounding efficiencies over each recruiting cycle.
How to Use AI for Candidate Screening & Interview Support
Manual candidate screening based on résumés and CVs alone can be an imperfect, biased exercise. With AI lending a “second pair of eyes,” you can ensure quality candidates are not being overlooked. Here are some elements of the process that AI can enhance.
First Sift
Natural language processing tools can ingest thousands of résumés and CVs, and analyze the content, context, and trends across the talent pool within seconds. AI tools can be trained to recognize specific skills, experiences and competencies that are required for open roles and then score and rank applicants automatically against your ideal candidate profile.
Look for tools with a dashboard that highlights the “cream of the crop” candidates that demonstrate the closest alignment, enabling you to reach out or pass the most promising applicants to hiring managers quickly.
Real-Time Screening
Intelligent chatbots, like text and SMS screening tools, create a conversational experience for candidates using natural language processing. These mobile-friendly, text interview tools automatically screen candidates using predetermined questions that gauge their interest and qualifications. Based on the responses, the chatbot can instantly determine the next step for each specific candidate.
AI is also leveraged for pre-employment assessments. New tech platforms can test and measure candidates for skills mastery, personality traits, and cognitive abilities to ensure qualified candidates are advancing through the recruitment process. All results should be reviewed by a human to ensure compliance with relevant regulations around automated decision-making. Leveraging AI in skills assessment helps ensure recruiters and hiring managers can focus on priority candidates most likely to succeed in the role, increasing equity along the way.
Want to learn more about how AI can boost your recruitment processes?
AI-powered candidate engagement tools help you create seamless, personalized experiences at scale—boosting candidate satisfaction, accelerating the hiring process and freeing up recruiters to focus on relationship building—where they add the most value.
Personalized Candidate Communications
For several years now, organizations have been leveraging candidate relationship management (CRM) technology to automate communications with candidates throughout the hiring journey. Automated email drip campaigns deliver the right information at the right stage in the journey to keep candidates informed of next steps and engaged with content that is relevant to them. This helps you build personalized engagement at scale.
More recently, recruiters are using GAI platforms like ChatGPT to help them with drafting one-off emails to candidates. Leveraging the appropriate prompts, a recruiter can get a first draft from ChatGPT which they can then review and edit to fit for specific candidates. This has the potential to save hours’ worth of work each week for your talent acquisition team.
Chatbots
Chatbots leverage natural language processing to manage various high-volume, repetitive inquiries from candidates. Whether answering frequently asked questions (FAQs) about application status, the interview process, the company or the job role, chatbots provide consistent, accurate responses 24/7—especially relevant when recruiters aren’t working. This improves candidate satisfaction while enabling recruiters to focus on higher-value activities.
Intelligent messaging platforms can initiate one-way communications at scale to nurture candidates. Using data on the prospect, role, process stage and more, AI writing assistants dynamically generate personalized, thoughtful messages. This level of personalization improves candidate engagement, advances candidates quicker through the funnel and strengthens employment brand affinity.
Calendar management bots can take over the time-consuming back-and-forth of scheduling interviews, assessments, site visits and more. By integrating with hiring manager calendars, only convenient time slots are shown to candidates. Candidates automatically receive confirmations and reminders, eliminating this task for recruiters and increasing the likelihood of candidates attending interviews.
How to Get Started with AI in Recruiting
Your steps into AI should focus on exploration rather than big integrations. AI in recruitment is fast-moving and receiving more and more scrutiny from law makers, and an RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) partner can act as a strategic advisor on your AI recruiting journey. RPOs have experience implementing recruitment tech like AI software for clients and can advise on the best options for your needs, integration requirements, data needs, ethical usage, and workflow design.
By leveraging RPO expertise, companies can effectively implement AI-enhanced hiring with less disruption and a faster return on investment. Look for a partner that is moving at your speed when it comes to AI in recruiting. They’ll help you identify areas for quick wins, and help you expand this success through experimentation and testing.
Here are some ways an RPO partner can help your explore AI for recruitment:
Change Management: RPOs can ease the transition to automated processes and drive adoption through training and ongoing support. They can also develop training programs to upskill your in-house recruiters on using AI tools effectively and ethically in accordance with your internal AI policies.
Process Design: RPOs can redesign recruitment workflows to integrate AI tools. For example, PeopleScout’s Talent Diagnostic examines your talent lifecycle, evaluating your employer brand and your attraction strategy, as well as looking for ways to optimize the candidate experience through technology usage.
Ongoing Optimization: RPOs can continuously monitor and evaluate AI outputs and fine-tune processes. These insights will help you improve outcomes over time.
Compliance Monitoring: RPOs stay current on regulations affecting AI in recruiting to advise on lawful and ethical usage in conjunction with your internal legal team.
AI in Recruiting: Potential and Responsibility
AI has demonstrated tremendous potential to transform talent acquisition. As this handbook outlines, it’s no longer just hype, rather it’s delivering real impact across sourcing, screening, interviewing and candidate engagement.
The results you’ll experience from AI depend heavily on factors like data quality, transparency, integration with existing systems and processes, and governance to ensure responsible usage. AI solutions are meant to augment—not replace—the human touch in recruitment. Recruiters are invaluable when it comes to relationship building, coaching and negotiation, and AI can’t replicate what makes them uniquely human.
Looking ahead, the use of AI recruiting technology to connect people to purpose will only continue expanding. Cultivating an ethical, inclusive and values-based recruiting culture remains key when it comes to attracting employees who align with your organization’s mission. With human stewardship over AI in recruiting, the future of talent acquisition looks bright.
Not sure recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is for you? Think your organization is too small for RPO? Think outsourcing doesn’t fit your company culture?
Think again.
Our complete six-piece toolkit gives talent acquisition leaders the essential information on how RPO can boost their recruitment outcomes.
In this toolkit, you’ll get:
Our comprehensive buyer’s guide for RPO—everything you need to know
A guide for building a business case for RPO (including a free template!)
Conversation starters to help you create buy-in for RPO at your organization
Learn how RPO can unlock the full potential of your talent strategy. Download your kit now.
Church of England: Full-Scale Recruitment Process Review Through a DE&I Lens
The Church of England turned to PeopleScout to help them review and co-create a future-proof recruitment process strategy to support them in recruiting people who reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.
Situation
The Church of England (C of E) and its seven National Church Institutions (NCIs) have made great progress already in creating a diverse, fair, and unbiased recruitment processes. But, like most organizations, they face unique challenges. The main one being the barriers which come with being a faith and mission-based organization, coupled with the external perception of the Church. With the progress they had already made, the C of E were looking to accelerate the pace of change and take this to the next level, which is where PeopleScout came in.
Solution
The Church of England engaged PeopleScout to execute a recruitment process review through a diversity, equality and inclusion lens (DE&I) with the goal of uncovering further opportunities, including:
A forensic deep dive of over 80 internal documents spanning role creation, assessment policy, organizational values, and DE&I training.
DE&I data analysis of C of E’s recruitment processes focusing on progression and engagement.
Deep immersion in the organization and connection with its members to understand what is happening on the ground through discovery interviews and focus groups, winning hearts and minds along the way.
Regular consultative check-ins with the core team to ensure they are involved at each step of the way so they can own the recommendations.
Co-creating a vision of what the future can look like with an actionable roadmap decided by current C of E employees.
Results
Examples of some of our recommendations include:
Create a competency/behavior library and corresponding bank of interview questions to support hiring managers when designing role profiles, job descriptions and interviews for their roles.
Revisit the Church of England’s brand visibility, marketing strategy and transparency based on feedback from their new joiners in order to better attract candidates from all backgrounds and religious orientations.
Create clarity around instructions for filling out application forms to allow more consistency in response quality from candidates (e.g., using example responses).
Keeping interview panels to a maximum of two or three members from C of E to reduce candidate anxiety.
Create a central onboarding checklist to ensure everyone receives the same support when joining their role in any of the NCIs.
With the support of PeopleScout, Church of England’s National Church Institutions now have:
Clarity over their current strengths in diverse recruitment to roll out wider, as well as opportunities for improvement
Actionable, realistic, tailored recommendations for creating change in their unique organization
A co-created roadmap with both quick wins and long-term strategy to mobilize change immediately whilst maintaining momentum
Out-of-the-box ideas for talent attraction and candidate experience to boost the diversity of new joiners
Support and buy in from key stakeholders and employee resource groups so that any actions can have a lasting embedded impact
At a Glance
COMPANY: Church of England
INDUSTRY: Public Sector
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS: Recruitment Process Outsourcing
ABOUT CHURCH OF ENGLAND: The seven National Church Institutions (NCIs) work together at an international and national level, supporting the ministries of the Church.
The Recruitment Handbook for Financial Services Talent
The financial services industry faces immense recruitment challenges. With skills gaps persisting, economic uncertainties complicating hiring, and cultural perceptions pushing away young talent, talent leaders need solutions.
That’s why we created The Recruitment Handbook for Financial Services Talent.
In this information-packed guide, you’ll discover:
The latest global trends impacting financial services hiring so you can plan accordingly
4 key recruitment strategies to solve your biggest hiring obstacles
Real-world examples and case studies of these strategies in action with RPO
Whether you need to build your employer brand, enhance your candidate experience, upskill employees or leverage better sourcing techniques, this handbook has tactics you can implement right away.
By Simon Wright, Global Head of Talent Advisory Consulting
As businesses have stabilized post-pandemic, the conversation in the C-suite has shifted to balancing productivity and empathy—how to drive business performance while addressing the evolving needs of the workforce.
The secret lies in your employer value proposition (EVP).
Your EVP must place individual employees firmly at the heart of their own experience. This new approach to EVP—a Personal Value Proposition or PVP—is designed to resonate with employees as unique individuals with distinct motivations and aspirations.
Job seekers can see right through generic employer brands nowadays. Candidates crave authenticity and want to connect with a company’s true culture before joining. So, how can you craft an employer brand that both resonates with individual job seekers and showcases what your organization is authentically all about?
Here are six key areas today’s talent looks for when evaluating an employer brand’s authenticity.
6 Signs of an Authentic Employer Brand & EVP
Keep these priorities front and center as you shape your EVP to align both with your organizational priorities and employee needs.
1. Meaningful Connections
What Candidates Want:
In today’s job market, candidates aren’t just looking for a job—they want a workplace that helps them feel truly engaged and connected. A leading employer brand should attract top talent by cultivating genuine connection with peers, leaders and the overarching mission.
What Employers Should Show:
In our research report, Inside the Candidate Experience, we found that mission and purpose is a top three consideration for job seekers looking for a new job. Yet, less than half of employer show information about this on their career site.
By highlighting your organizational mission, you help candidates make an emotional connection to your employer brand. Amp up the authenticity through storytelling—how individual employees live your mission through their work, how your organizational policies reflect your brand purpose, how new hires can expect to make an impact when they join.
Employees are seeking work experiences that help them realize their potential beyond just job tasks. Workers are taking more control of their own professional trajectories, seeking opportunities that offer autonomy and alignment with their skills, passions and personal circumstances.
Work is no longer confined to a single job or career path. Instead, it is seen as a series of opportunities that facilitate personal and professional growth.
What Employers Show:
Development opportunities like mentorship programs, leadership workshops and reskilling bootcamps to support internal mobility are top of mind for employees—especially Gen Z. Training should address both hard skills (like coding, certifications or licenses and statistical analysis) and soft skills (like resilience, relationship building and empathy). However, we find that organizations don’t do enough to show the impact of this training on individuals and their personal and professional growth.
You can show this impact authentically by bringing it to life through telling the career stories of your employees. Watching a video of an employee sharing how they were able to go through a reskilling program and join a different department is far more powerful for a candidate than just reading about the program.
Here’s an example from Adobe showcasing their employees’ career paths on social with a global #AdobeForAll celebration.
Flexibility should no longer be the domain of people with children. Everyone wants more flexibility in where, when and how they work. It could be about caring responsibilities for parents, or it could just be having the time and space to pursue passions outside of work. Ultimately, this issue is about organizations demonstrating they trust their people and providing autonomy where possible.
What Employers Show:
Employees who are granted time and space to pursue their passions bring fresh energy, insight and creativity to the job. Yet, for our Inside the Candidate Experience report we audited the career sites of over 215 organizations and found that information on flexible working and work/life balance is mentioned just over half the time.
Help candidates experience this authentically by profiling employees who are embracing flexible work patterns. This helps them see how a role can fit into their own life. By understanding life outside work directly fuels innovative excellence within it, organizations can architect roles that let people show up as their best and truest selves every day.
4. Well-Being & Psychological Safety
What Candidates Want:
If this past era has taught us anything, it’s that employees require our care as much as any business strategy. The Great Resignation was fueled by individuals reprioritizing their well-being over their next promotion or paycheck. And Quiet Quitting is often the result of employees losing psychological safety and no longer seeing a return on their engagement.
To communicate to candidates that your focus on well-being is more than lip service, include information on specific actions your organization is taking to support employees whether that’s wellness benefits or financial support programs. Don’t just state you have work-life balance programs—showcase how you empower people to utilize them through things like extra PTO days around major life events and even showing leaders modeling using your well-being perks to set the tone.
5. Diverse & Inclusive Environments
What Candidates Want:
Employees want to be a part of an organizations that celebrates true diversity, promotes cultural intelligence and fosters a workplace where multiple traditions, rituals and ways of thinking lead to innovation. These conscious cultures go beyond attracting candidates from underrepresented groups. They amplify their voices and put them into positions to reshape industry norms altogether. When asked how hearing from actual employees would influence their job search 86% of job seekers said they value stories from employees.
What Employers Show:
We found that 35% of organizations don’t feature a diverse group of real employees on their career sites. In addition, 60% of career sites don’t contain any video content in which employees share their personal journeys and stories. Often, we see that organizations mention their employee resource groups (ERGs) but fail to share the work these groups are doing and the impact they make within the organization and community. Employees want to see action, not virtue signalling.
Candidates find the voice of an average employee more credible than what companies say about themselves, so featuring real employee stories throughout the candidate experience is a proven way to engage candidates on an emotional level, building authenticity and brand trust.
Employees are becoming more socially conscious and looking for employers that provide avenues for engagement with environment social governance (ESG) issues, with as many as 80% of workers in some industries saying that community and sustainability concerns play a role in whether they will resign from or remain at certain organizations. Two-thirds of candidates use social media to research companies during their job search, and they will look to your posts to see how your organization is backing up its promises.
74% of employees say their job is more fulfilling when they’re given the chance to make a positive impact on social and environmental issues
What Employers Show:
Employers must take purpose beyond platitudes. Yet, we found that a one in three organizations are not posting employer brand related content to their social channels at least on a week.
A great example is Ben & Jerry’s. The company actively engages in social justice campaigns like Advancement Project, including on their social media channels, and gives employees time off to volunteer in community projects.
Include social media posts of photos and videos of corporate volunteer activities or ERG-sponsored events. Seeing images of real employees giving back makes your purpose-driven culture tangible for candidates. Even a corporate post of an individual employee who ran a marathon in support a charity close to their heart can show what purposeful empowerment looks like at the individual level.
The Power of Storytelling for an Authentic Employer Brand
Injecting authenticity into your employer brand is about moving past broad statements of intent, to the actions that back it up. Follow the old adage—show, don’t tell.
Your brand should remain as dynamic as your people. Don’t shy away from evolution when new priorities emerge. So be bold, stay real, and let your employer brand reflect what truly makes your organization shine.
City of London: Supporting Specialist Recruitment for Niche Roles
For several years, City of London Corporation have partnered with PeopleScout to support on a number of recruitment campaigns for hard-to-fill roles.
Situation
PeopleScout have worked as the City of London Corporation’s recruitment marketing media partner for over five years, and during that time, our sourcing team have supported a number of specialist recruitment projects. City of London have used our specialist solutions to find candidates for various unique and hard-to-fill positions, including:
Assistant Director – Animal Health and Welfare Service
Port Health Assistant Director
Port Health Manager
Security Manager – Smithfield Market
Head of Commissioning
Assistant Director – Cemetery and Crematorium
Technical Manager
Head of Operations – Central Criminal Court
Solution
Our solutions are sourcing-led, acting as an extension of the client’s own team and focusing on amplifying the client’s brand to make passive candidates aware of great opportunities. Our bespoke solution was based on the client’s needs and budget.
Over the years, our recruitment projects have included:
Signposting
Advertising and marketing on LinkedIn with recruiter-led profile matching and messaging to raise awareness and encourage quality applications by signposting talent to your vacancy, advertised on your website. Applications are tracked and all engagement is recorded for an end-of-campaign report.
Search and Selection
Full end-to-end recruitment support including briefing call, sourcing, screening, candidate management, shortlist submission, interview scheduling and offer management. Vacancies are posted on the client site, alongside other media and candidate’s are directed into our ATS for our recruiters to manage. As part of this solution, the client receives regular work-in-progress reports as well as an end-of-campaign report.
Results
Our partnership over the years with City of London has resulted in:
Consultative relationships built with hiring managers
High response rates from candidate outreach
Shortlists of a minimum of five qualified candidates presented for each campaign
Market insights compiled and presented back
At a Glance
COMPANY: City of London
INDUSTRY: Government & Public Sector
PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS: Recruitment Process Outsourcing
ABOUT CITY OF LONDON: The City of London, also known as the Square Mile, is the financial district of London. As the governing body of the Square Mile, City of London provides a range of services, from policing to green space maintenance. They offer varied career opportunities to a diverse range of Londoners.
By Simon Wright, Global Head of Talent Advisory Consulting
Consumer marketers have honed their brand strategies through decades of tracking detailed customer analytics, optimizing digital experiences and crafting emotionally compelling messages. When it comes to leveraging data and analytics, consumer marketing is ahead of employer branding. But it doesn’t have to be that way!
Talent acquisition pros can adapt these same tactics to understand candidates, polish touchpoints and build strong employer brands. Your employer brand can steal a page from the consumer brand playbook to step up talent attraction and retention.
Hacking the Employer Brand: 10 Tricks from Consumer Marketing
To help you think outside the recruitment box, we’ve outlined 10 employer brand hacks below to infuse your candidate attraction strategy with consumer-savvy flair. From mystery shoppers to NPS surveys, these creative approaches will revolutionize your talent attraction strategy.
1. Engagement Analytics
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Measure engagement metrics on ecommerce and social platforms to gauge product resonance.
Employer Brand Hack: Consumer marketing is as much science as it is art these days. Take page from your marketing peers and leverage analytics tools to monitor engagement levels with your content across digital platforms and third-party sites. You can gain valuable insights into how potential candidates perceive your employee value proposition (EVP) by monitoring the types of content that talent interacts with on sites like LinkedIn and your career pages.
For example, heavy traffic and shares of content spotlighting your company’s flexible work options, learning and development programs or commitment to DE&I indicates these subjects are important to candidates. Likewise, you can identify red flags where pieces of your EVP are falling flat or even turning candidates away.
By analyzing these engagement metrics, talent acquisition teams can refine outward-facing messaging to better reflect and emphasize the cultural elements already igniting passions.
2. Sentiment Analysis
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Analyze customer conversations on social media to gauge sentiment around products.
Employer Brand Hack: Job forums and social media channels have become backchannel focus groups, where in-the-know candidates exchange intel and impressions of potential employers. The everyday dialogue happening online shapes perceptions of your organization and EVP outside your control. Are you listening?
Immerse yourself in these dynamic discussions by using social listening tools to assess the narratives being woven about your company culture and their sentiment. Pay special attention to the emotional tone. What feelings are sparked at the mention of your organization? Is it warmth, intrigue and affinity? Or perhaps skepticism, frustration or even antagonism?
These unfiltered insights should inform your talent marketing strategy in real-time. Where positivity and praise emerge, double down on those messages. When you uncover misconceptions, course correct. Talent will continue to chatter, but plugged-in talent leaders can help guide the tone.
3. Feedback and Review Platforms
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Closely monitor customer reviews on sites like Amazon or Trustpilot.
Employer Brand Hack: Employer review platforms like Glassdoor, Indeed or kununu have become gold mines for candid insights directly from current and former employees. Monitoring these key sites should be a standard pulse-check for talent acquisition leaders and CHROs alike. But be warned—this is where you’ll find the unvarnished truth.
One way to improve your employer brand is through employer review sites. We recommend a quarterly audit digging into themes and analyzing sentiment over time. Are certain departments or practices called out repeatedly? Do some locations have better scores than others?
Used strategically, these insights provide CEOs, talent acquisition leaders and hiring managers at every level with an unfiltered mirror into the inner workings of company culture as employees are actively experiencing it. With this invaluable intelligence in hand, you can address problem spots through policy change or manager coaching. You can also double down on what’s working—the perks, flexibility, and cultural elements making employees stay.
4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Use NPS to gauge product loyalty and word-of-mouth potential.
Employer Brand Hack: Implementing employee NPS (eNPS) and candidate NPS (cNPS) surveys offers a valuable pulse check for recruitment and retention alike.
With existing employees, these surveys quantify the likelihood of recommending your organization as a workplace. Low scores signal disengagement. Likewise, surveying candidates during the recruitment journey provides an understanding where expectations aren’t matching up with realities, helping you to refine your talent screening practices. Candidate NPS surveys can be sent post-interview and again post-onboarding for insights into both the recruitment and induction process.
Your employer brand health hinges on aligning the candidate experience with the employee experience and delivering on your brand promises throughout the talent lifecycle. Both eNPS and cNPS metrics offer evidence-based insights to inform your talent program strategy.
How does your Candidate Experience Quotient stack up? Learn all about our new method of calculating candidate experience as well as the hard truth about candidate expectations versus reality in our report, Inside the Candidate Experience.
5. Focus Group Discussions
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Dive deep into consumer preferences using focus groups.
Employer Brand Hack: When was the last time you picked the brains of candidates who have recently been through your recruitment process? As you refine your employer branding strategy and before you evolve your candidate experience, these individuals offer invaluable, straight-from-the-source insights.
In addition to surveys, organize quarterly listening sessions with a mix of talent segments: recent new hires, employees in their first year, candidates who made it to advanced stages but ultimately declined offers, and even short-listers you opted not to hire. In a judgment-free environment, empower them to share candid impressions about their journey with your organization pre- and post-hire.
Use this time to dig deep. What excited or deterred them about your employer brand initially? How did the interview or communication style align with their expectations of company culture? What workplace elements inspire their loyalty or doubts now as employees? Are perceptions consistent or disparate across genders, generations and ethnic groups?
These focus groups go beyond what a survey can fully capture. As a result, you can pinpoint what’s resonating or missing the mark in talent attraction, selection and retention. Bonus—it also demonstrates that employee input spurs action.
6. Mystery Shopping
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Deploy individuals to assess the customer experience—incognito.
Employer Brand Hack: Another way to get the insider perspective on your candidate experience is to use an old trick from consumer marketing—mystery shoppers. This involves engaging individuals to navigate the recruitment process undercover, reporting on their experience from start to finish.
Equip your “mystery shopper” to navigate the application, screening and interviews as authentically as possible, jotting detailed notes along the way. Instruct them to assess logistics around communication cadence, process efficiency and technology glitches. But more importantly, they should capture the emotional highs and lows they felt when interacting with your employees, content and brand at each step.
When you debrief, try to uncover interactions where your employer brand deviates from the actual experience across key variables like location, department, seniority level and demographic background. These behind-the-scenes findings will prove invaluable as you seek to optimize recruitment ROI and evolve the candidate journey.
7. Competitive Analysis
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Assess the brand vis-à-vis competitors.
Employer Brand Hack: Benchmark your employer brand against competitors to grasp areas of strength and improvement.
In today’s transparent talent marketplace, candidates have unprecedented visibility into everything from compensation to culture at your organization as well as your closest rivals. They are comparing you on everything from your work environment to DE&I commitments.
This means your employer brand strategy can no longer happen in a silo. Formal competitive intelligence monitoring can help you benchmark your employer brand against competitors to understand strengths and opportunities.
Audit the career sites, social media channels, job boards, industry reports and review site profiles of competitors to understand what messages and claims they’re leaning into with their employer brand. The goal here is not copying others’ employer brands but to understand how you can stand out and where you can bring sharper focus to what makes your culture uniquely attractive.
8. Deep Dives into Unstructured Feedback
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Sift through customer service calls and chats to identify common themes.
Employer Brand Hack: In their focus on surveys, employer review sites and focus groups, talent acquisition leaders often overlook the wealth of qualitative feedback hiding in plain sight internally.
Sources like exit interviews, town hall meetings and other internal platforms can offer genuine glimpses into how employees view your employer brand. You’ll uncover grounded narratives around things like which leaders inspire employee pride or skepticism, or real-talk on workloads affecting mental health and work-life balance.
This intelligence takes your employer brand strategy from reactive to proactive. It empowers you to intervene early before issues become viral Glassdoor threads. But just as importantly, you can also double down on what’s working, giving you an informed perspective to guide messaging, policy and experience in sync with employee values and expectations.
9. Audience Segmentation
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Segment the customer base to tailor messaging and understand perception among different audiences.
Employer Brand Hack: Employee perceptions within departments, roles, locations and tenure lengths often vary more than we realize. What engages your engineers may disengage your creatives. What excites recent college hires may fall flat for senior leaders.
In today’s fragmented but transparent talent marketplace, one-size-fits all employer branding is no longer effective. By investing time and effort into audience segmentation, CHROs take big step in evolving their EVP to PVP, personal value proposition.
Like customer personas, developing talent personas are a great way to engage in a targeted, personalized approach to talent attraction. These nuanced profiles allow you to sharpen your employer brand and talent attraction content for niche talent pools beyond one generic EVP message. Plus, you can tailor by regional expectations, whether in different cities in the same country or across continents.
Getting segmentation right ensures candidates see your employer brand as a match for people like them from the start.
10. User Behavior Analytics
Consumer Brand Best Practice: Understand how customers interact with their website or app by using user analytics tools like heatmaps.
Employer Brand Hack: Consumer marketing teams are increasingly adopting digital analytics tools to better understand customer preferences and behavior. Talent acquisition leaders can borrow this tactic too. Tools like heatmaps and click maps offer visual snapshots tracking precisely how users navigate and scroll career pages. These visual activity maps identify which content generates the most interest or engagement on your career site.
Lingering on the mission statement? Scrolling past office photos? Double-tapping into stories on career mobility but glossing over benefits? These granular insights reveal which candidate attraction content holds the greatest appeal for your candidates.
By understanding where your high-traffic areas and natural user flows are, you can guide candidates with attention-grabbing messages or entry points to more in-depth information. Likewise, you can weave in more stories around topics that are proving popular to leverage that momentum. These tools can also flag areas of friction, like errors or “rage clicks,” that could lead to candidates abandoning their application or leaving your career site.
Employer Brand Strategy: The Value of Data
Data and insights should always be the bedrock beneath an employer brand. Take time to gather feedback, analyze findings and track the impact of new initiatives. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new perspectives and unconventional approaches to stand out from the crowd.
With the right balance of boldness and research, you can craft a magnetic employer brand that both resonates with candidates and drives critical recruitment metrics. So, take a cue from your marketing peers—be brave, think big, and transform employer branding into a discipline as sophisticated as consumer marketing.
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