For employers, it’s important to find a good employee. Someone hard-working, willing to learn, and ambitious helps your business grow.
But while it’s important to find the right employee, it’s equally vital that they find the right employer for them.
If you want to earn great candidates, you need to be a great employer first. Read on to learn three important markers of a desirable employer that your candidates are looking for.
1. A positive workplace culture creates happy employees
The happiest employees are those who work for their company, not for their paycheque. As such, positive workplace culture is high on the list of markers for a desirable employer.
A good employer readily offers and actively encourages praise. They encourage collaboration and mutual empowerment, creating an environment in which productivity and creativity flourishes.
While they acknowledge failures and mistakes, a desirable employer looks at it as a learning opportunity. Rather than chastising you, a good manager identifies where you went wrong and what problem areas need to be addressed in order for you to overcome them.
Above all, a good employer gives their employees a sense of purpose. They show staff the value their work is doing, celebrating it as a company.
Praising an employee and their team for the work they do reminds them that their work is valued. This creates a positive work culture in which employees have a purpose. They work not for the profit of investors or CEOs — they work for themselves.
Make a point of discussing your workplace culture during the interview, but take heed: some candidates might be coy when it comes to asking about work culture, concerned that they might appear to be focusing on the ‘wrong’ aspects of a job. Consequently, they might look elsewhere for a taster of your culture.
Candidates frequently turn to online reviews of your organisation on sites like Glassdoor to see what current or previous employees say about a business. As such, it’s worth auditing your online review pages to ensure they reflect your business in a positive light.
Encourage your current employees to share positive experiences of workplace culture — obviously, don’t make it compulsory though. Reply to negative reviews lightly but honestly — your responses reflect on your workplace too.
2. Good internal systems provide peace of mind
Strong business infrastructure is a defining sign of a great employer. Human resources, finance, IT — these are all crucial for the day-to-day running of a business, so it’s important that they do the job.
With the wide array of affordable and effective technology available, there’s no excuse for a modern company not to have coherent systems in place to foster employee engagement.
Technology also places control back in an employee’s hands. Self-service HR portals like CezanneHR, for instance, let you manage your holidays, sick days, and so on easily and intuitively. You have the same dashboard view as your manager, giving you oversight and confidence in your role.
But it’s not just employee-facing software that you need to consider.
Take payroll, for example. The ability to pay employees is an important one, essential to any modern functioning business. And yet many businesses still either pay the wrong amount, apply incorrect tax rates, or fail to pay them completely.
But these errors can be avoided with simple, cloud-based solutions. Online payroll software such as Wave, for example, automates these processes for you. This removes the risk of human error, providing an affordable and scalable option for smaller businesses too.
On the topic of human error, time tracking apps like Harvest are vital for helping employees record their time on specific projects. As well as ensuring time is recorded and billed accordingly, it also empowers your staff to monitor and manage their own time. This encourages them to allocate time and resources to projects and spot problem areas should they arise.
Make it clear to your prospective employee about the internal business infrastructure you use. While you don’t need to list them all, highlighting them in your job description shows candidates that you can provide a smooth and comprehensive employee experience from the moment of on-boarding.
3. Plenty of growth opportunities provide progress and purpose
There aren’t many people that are content to stay in the same role for the rest of their lives. Even CEOs making millions at huge enterprises seek new challenges.
Having room for growth is important for every employee, but this is especially true if you’re applying for an entry-level job. There’s not many who want to be stuck at the bottom of the pile — progress means new challenges, more responsibilities and, of course, better pay.
If you’re considering a new employer, you want to know that there’s room for you to grow and progress. You want to develop and excel in your career, and a positive growth environment is crucial for that.
Indeed, this isn’t just good for you — it’s also a smart move for your prospective employer as well. Investing in staff increases employee retention and benefits the business as a whole, streamlining processes and saving money by closing knowledge gaps into the bargain.
Highlight your growth opportunities or training programs in your job description and during the interview phase. Even if you don’t have certified courses, unofficial mentorship programs, through which a senior manager provides onsite teaching to help employees progress within a company, are a good start.
A great employer is many things. Training opportunities, positive workplace culture, and strong employee systems make for a great place to work. Take note of the points above and create a great place to work — it is this that attracts strong candidates again and again.
