Episode 17: Using Marketing to Attract Top Talent

In this episode of The SME Growth Podcast, Dave Parry and Richard Buckle discuss how businesses can use marketing as part of their recruitment process to attract top talent. The episode focusses on reviewing our own recruitment process, the benefits of creating content for your job applicants and how you can use the recruitment process to communicate your company vision.

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Please note: Whilst all transcripts are double checked for accuracy, they are transcribed via Otter.AI so may contain errors.

David Parry 02:09

Good. Well, that thought in mind, shall will do another podcast. Okay, here we go. Hello again. And welcome to The SME Growth Podcast from Wellmeadow, I'm Dave Parry. And it won't surprise you to know that I'm joined here by Richard Buckle. Hello, Rich. 

Richard Buckle 02:28

Hello.

David Parry 02:29

And here we are again. Now, this week's subject. We did refer to this sort of a few weeks ago when we were doing some recruitment. And we've also done a series of podcasts around marketing different things. Remember we did one with Seb when he came in as a guest and marketing a town a place which is a bit different. And we did one which I think is our most listened to podcast is internal marketing, marketing to your employees and other stakeholders. So their marketing things that are unusual, not your usual products or service. And we wanted to do another one of those because we're doing some recruitment. So the marketing for job applicants, you marketing your company, not for people to buy off you but to come and devote some of their career to you. Different field entirely

Richard Buckle 03:13

different field, slightly different objective maybe? Or definitely,

David Parry 03:18

we're still selling isn't our marketing and selling and persuading and communicating all these things?

Richard Buckle 03:22

And yeah, and I think actually, probably companies spend an awful lot of money on recruiting. And time. 

David Parry 03:32

But maybe they're on the wrong things? You know, I'd be interested of business owners here, look at your accounts and just see how much you spent on recruitment consultants in the last 12 months. We all have to do it. It's part of the way the world works. Or, do we? Lots of companies do it. Because they have access, they say to candidates, but actually, if you had access to your own candidates. And you had a way of filtering them. So you weren't bombarded because that is a valuable service that recruitment consultancies provide not just giving access to clients, but also doing a bit of the sifting for you. But if you could both get access and do a bit of qualifying, which is a very marketing term of candidates. Yeah, then you can maybe do a lot that yourself. 

Richard Buckle 04:15

Absolutely. I mean, we've done a bit of recruitment ourselves 

David Parry 04:19

recently, but I was in preparation for this, I was casting my mind back to how we used to do it 10 years ago, maybe longer. And you probably won't be that dissimilar to other people that haven't changed their process for a long time. It used to place a job ad, right. So you either bring a recruitment, consultancy, or if you're doing it yourself, you place a job ad. And where do you place it? Well, way, way back when you put it in the paper, but now, there's websites designed for such things, job website, so you just put one on those maybe on LinkedIn, and that's, that's a start. And then we've evolved over the years and you know, just to canter through that and it's a bit was whistlestop really but you start adding a bit more information than just the job but you start describing the person that you're after the person spec, then you talk about the company a bit more on your webpage. Rather than just listing the vacancies, you may go into a bit more detail about what a career with your company would be like if what opportunities there are for promotion, what the culture is like, what the values are, like you might do do all that sort of thing. And then one innovation we came up with as part of our response process, and when people sent us an application, including a CV, we responded with something that we called the letter from the MD, and we helped a few clients do these

Richard Buckle 05:28

And it was designed to be a bit of a warts and all. This is what this is what it's like to work here. 

David Parry 05:33

Yeah, very Frank 

Richard Buckle 05:35

This is where the company's going, just to give a little bit more flavour of the company rather than just the role

David Parry 05:43

And not come across as if everything's always perfect. And this is the brilliant company that nothing will ever go wrong.

Richard Buckle 05:48

And I think as well, well, I suppose in one sense, it made the MD think about the role, which in some cases, they just hadn't, because it wasn't on their radar, particularly. But also, it's, you know, as a, as an applicant, you are in, in a conversation of sorts with the ending

David Parry 06:11

It's a bit simulated. The line to that, really, and giving it away. Now, for some of the clients we used to help. We used to write the letter from an MD for them, or at least draft it. But like you say, not all MDs were ready to do that comfortable to do that. So we had to break that blank sheet of paper problem, because these days, you just ask ChatGPT when you're writing it. But then that that evolved from the letter to doing a video? Yeah, I think the first step was a reasonably natural evolution where instead of writing the letter and putting it in an email, you'd have a talking head shot camera, post pretty much saying the same things. But it's much harder to fake that. Whereas we can ghost write the quote unquote, letter from the MD, you can't replicate the MD actually is sitting there in front of a camera and miked up and saying the same sort of things with a degree of authenticity. And that that really propelled us a big step forward back in the age. And when people started receiving that, we got a lot of feedback, positive feedback from that.

Richard Buckle 07:05

I think, because you're starting to see things like facial expression, and you're starting to see the person who is the person working with

David Parry 07:11

And that they're slightly bothered. Normally, in bigger companies, recruitment is palmed off to somebody in the HR department, or the recruiting manager, the fact that the MD has taken the time to record something, especially if it's specific to that role, rather than just you know, once a year, we'll do an update of the recruitment video that came across really quite well. So then go on then, where did we post the pinnacle of our achievement so far?

Richard Buckle 07:36

Not sure. It's the pinnacle, but we

David Parry 07:38

If that's the top we are doomed. But you are famous though, you do have to admit.

Richard Buckle 07:45

Well, I don't know I can still go out on the streets, and

David Parry 07:47

you've not been stopped yet?

Richard Buckle 07:50

So still working on it.

David Parry 07:51

That's because of costume.

Richard Buckle 07:52

I'll have to do something a bit more dramatic next time. But now we wanted to take it I think partly it's to cut through the noise a little bit. So rather than I suppose the the email the sorry, the the MD video was already when someone was part of the in the process. Yeah, they've already had applied for the role.

David Parry 08:11

That's true, it didn't go out public.

Richard Buckle 08:13

So one of the things we wanted to do was try and just cut through the noise, a little bit of saying, hey, you know, here's a job advert, we're hiring type of thing. But to actually come up with something that is semi evergreen, in terms of content, but also that shows a little bit of what Wellmeadow is about, what the office is, like, what the values are, what it's like to work here, what kind of work we do, what your colleagues are like, you know, all those sorts of things. So we thought well, best way to do this is using a video. So we scripted something and we you know, storyboarding, etc. Did the video and yeah, I mean, that was we kind of did a three parter. Yeah, so the first part was something that would be more kind of classically

David Parry 08:59

More you and me talking to camera we had some employees Hannah was talking about was like working here 

Richard Buckle 09:05

shots at the office, shots of the type of work we do

David Parry 09:07

A bit of B roll.

Richard Buckle 09:08

So it was very much you know, play safe that one. Then I was like, Well, I just need an excuse to dress up really? So yeah, we did a different style about which was much more to camera. explaining about the role. So it was kind of, you know, probably more rather than well more focused about just attracting people into the company making talking about the company about the role is more much more role specific, with a sort of comedy element, apparently 

David Parry 09:40

it is still on our Join Us page on the website. And it's been posted 1000s of times on social media for It's comedic value.

Richard Buckle 09:47

then after that we kind of, you know, in a very creative way transitioned into a kind of montage of the type of work we're doing which again, was designed to be eye catchy, but also These are the kinds of things we're doing. These are the kinds of skills we need. So it's almost a, it's, it's a way of trying to get across what you're looking for, you know, tell me your recruiting without telling me your recruiting type of thing.

David Parry 10:11

So let's not make any bones about it, there was a lot more investment in time to produce that last one than the MD video. And in turn, that was a lot more than just scribbling something on an email. And that was a lot more than not doing anything at all. So we've gone through various stages of evolution on that to the point in there now where it's a reasonably serious undertaking, there's several man days worth of effort.

Richard Buckle 10:31

Yeah. So I think they it's probably worth thinking about in terms of return on investment, because we never can't put numbers on it per se, although you probably you probably could, you could probably approximate it. But what I would say is that the response that we got to actually doing a video was probably 10x, anything we did, that was just put an advert out there. And I think probably the quality of candidates that we saw was also higher.

David Parry 10:58

I think that's showed an increase through each of the stages of evolution. But there was a step change where we did the last one. So even when we did the early letter, the MD or the video from the MD, that was better, we got great feedback from a lot of people are surprised they say, Oh, you've taken the bother, you noticed that was good, you, you're almost getting people already positive about your company from you being just a stranger. They don't know how many people work for you. And suddenly, they're warming to you. And then on the back of that we used a different technique to what we had before where we got people to fill in a self assessment questionnaire online. And the questionnaire was nothing other than restating the requirements that were in the job advert really plus a little bit of how far are you from where offices are? And are you eligible to work in the UK type stuff. So it was nothing complicated about it. But we found that that form then allowed people to self select a lot more, they'd seen the video now. So rather than just having this bland choice too often for me, and I don't know what I'm going for. Now, I either want to fill a form in more because I've seen it, or I've read something in there, which means it's not for me, and they didn't. And we've got a reasonably high Fallout rate from people applying, but they're not filling the form, which we took as a good thing. Because everyone was a fallout meant we didn't waste their time reading CVs and interviewing only for it not to work out in the end. So we made it much more efficient for us and got better candidates. So that was just for that early stage, then we went to the team video. And I think, as I say, an absolutely step change. We've got much better pool of candidates got more in number without using any agencies, and we've got better quality of candidates. But there was that other benefit we got from our clients as well, which was perhaps a bit unexpected. I didn't know what you thought?

Richard Buckle 12:34

I think it's, it's, it's not novel. I mean, there's plenty of companies out there that have done recruitment videos, but they tend to be, you know, I think Barclays Bank did a classic one, that's, that's quite often lauded online, it's generally the realm, it seems of much larger companies, clearly they've got the budget, clearly, they're recruiting a lot more people, so maybe it makes sense. But like I say, in terms of return on investment, I would say that we could probably use this video, or big chunks of it for the next six to 12 months worth of recruitment easily. So add new bits in and new bits in. I'd say that it probably resulted in a seeing four or five very decent candidates.

David Parry 13:22

Well, as is borne out by the fact that we were advertising for one role. And we've made two offers and another two conditional later in the year two suggestions. So

Richard Buckle 13:30

in terms of you know, that Compare the investment in time and effort that went into the video.

David Parry 13:36

Well, and what do you spend on a recruitment consultant, you know, 15% of let's say 30, grand salary, depending on the roles you're applying for, you know that you're talking four or five grand, potentially for, for someone and 15%, maybe at the low end. So if you saved having to spend that on three or four recruits,

Richard Buckle 13:54

and you've got the content, and actually I think was what was great about it as well. And credit to everyone here for putting up with my ridiculous ideas about what to do. But we came in on a Sunday to film it, because we just needed the office empty. And so that was just part of the thing that we needed to do to film. Everyone came in, it was actually quite a good, you know, environment, everyone's enjoying it. So there's actually it's another way of actually getting your existing team involved in that process of saying, hey, look, we know we're going to grow the team we're going to have new people in, sometimes it can get very, maybe a bit more focused on the new people. Actually, this is a great way of just saying,

David Parry 14:35

and if any other companies thinking about doing anything similar to this, that concept involves evolving your current employees to say, look, whoever we recruit, they're going to be your colleagues too, right? So if you want to hand in getting the best ones, this is how to influence the process. You can help advertise it to tell them what it's really like. So okay, that's the video. That's our process and how it's evolved and it's culminated This latest version anywhere in the team video. But clearly if the subject here is marketing, generally of the company to attract new applicants or applicants for jobs, there are various other channels and other things we can do as well. Some of these may be more familiar to other people, you know, like we said earlier about placing a job ad online somewhere. But it's worth just mentioning each of these because there's an angle on them that I think does need to be to be taken quite carefully. And the first one I wanted to touch on that maybe people are starting to look at a bit more. And it's what in the trade they call earned media. It's that exposure you get where people write reviews, online and share stuff. So a review of an employer is now becoming a go to place for anybody applying for a job. And you may think the small companies, we don't have big reviews. Well, you might be surprised, you know, if you search for stuff, I mean, there are dedicated sites out there aren't there just for people to view their employer like Glassdoor, for example. And some of the job websites do as well, you know, I think indeed does and total jobs do and so on. So, have a look at those and see what people are saying. I know on Glassdoor, for example, they don't just ask for reviews about what it's like to work at a company from employees, they've been there. But also what was the interview process? Like? Okay, how long did it take? Do they get back to me quickly? Were the questions particularly difficult, where they fare in the treatment and so on. And I think that's a reasonable standard to hold yourself up to.

Richard Buckle 16:22

Yeah, and I would say that we have always tried to humanise it, no matter how much automation do you kind of put into just making your recruitment process efficient, you still want to make sure it's human, that you are talking to people about a job hopes, aspirations, all of that type of thing,

David Parry 16:38

They've gone out of their way to spend some time maybe sometimes it's easier than others. But to apply for you, you know, we always think people don't we really heartfelt thank you for showing an interest in our company, you know, being even prepared to consider lending a part of your career to us. That's a privilege, you know, we shouldn't take that for, okay, there's a transaction that goes on and someone pays for services provided and so on. But you can choose lots of different places to work for. So I think that's quite humbling. And you need to recognise that. And similarly, when people all bar one is probably going to be rejected. And maybe even all if you go again, there's a lot more rejections there are acceptances. And it's so easy to treat that very badly, or leave people feeling deflated. And one of the key things we've always made it as one of our sort of watchwords is we're never rejecting the person, were just telling them that their application didn't come across as well as someone else's application came across. So we still give people that feedback that you could still have been the best person for the job. But can we give you these few tips, because this is how it came across from either your CV or your interview, or whatever you did. And the amount of feedback we've had from has blown us away as well.

Richard Buckle 17:45

It's just I think the fact that it's just contact people makes a huge difference. So many people come back and say, we've applied for loads of jobs, and we never hear anything from them. We never get any, you know, contact that we've had the application received or just anything like that. And again, this comes back to I mean, I suppose it's Employer Branding, in a sense, you know, it. Clearly, these are not customers in terms of marketing, but they are people that are going to talk about your company, they are people that are going to talk about your brand. So it's every single touch point. So if you can actually run a process that's not only kind of humanising in the sense that, you know, work is an important part of the human experience that lets you know, honour people in that, but at the same time, help give feedback to people where appropriate about how they did, people really, really want it very helpful. But also, I think it does, it can't is really does elevate your, your business in their minds. We've seen it, we've seen it hundreds and hundreds of times,

David Parry 18:51

Every touchpoint, they don't have to have been an employee, you'd have a view on your company, and that could be badly treated through it's worth remembering as well that from an employment law point of view, an employee or sorry, a person is protected by employment law, when they start applying for your job, not when they start working for you. And a lot of business owners don't realise that. So there are some provisions of employment law that could you could come unstuck with if you don't handle the application process? Well. So there's that and you mentioned just now about those people that maybe didn't get a job here. And then still being a valuable touch point for for someone to get reputation from it. Don't forget on LinkedIn, you can look up who used to work at a company, not just going and see who's there. Now you can say past companies and do that search. And you can see on there, how long did they spend? Did they get promoted? Were there any recommendations for their work and that sort of thing. So to a very diligent job applicant and you see this more at the senior levels of roles. We'll go through LinkedIn profiles of current and past employees, not just the employers, you know, the most used to be and maybe even the other social media accounts, if they combined them of existing employees find out what sort of people do we think they are? They're going to be my colleagues. I've got to put up with these is no longer is it just a question of, I need to get a job, you know, I'll take anything that's going employee ease candidates can be very choosy. 1.3 million vacancies in the country is an employee's market.

Richard Buckle 20:11

And I think people, particularly younger generation are looking for different things in the company now. It's not something in the news about that this morning around whole kind of Gen Z are looking for a different looking for more purpose in their work looking for, you know, do does management, you know, stand by what it says about environmental issues or policy 

David Parry 20:34

Exactly, and I'll refer people back to the podcast we did on vision, which talks about the Collins Porras model, where purpose is a kind of a mainstay, and we talked in there didn't we about the fact that purpose is very much needed in, in recruitment, because people are looking for the company to have a reason for existence, just like the values into the value should be used everywhere from recruitment, right through to appraisals and making decisions at the board level. So yeah, I think having that purpose, right, and culture as well, it's very difficult to write down a culture. But the video has really helped with that, you know, hopefully, people have got the idea now about us that we're sort of serious with a bit of a laugh about edge as well. You know, we we tend to mention the pint of beer in our podcasts, we do a silly comedic video to recruit people with, you know, we're not, it's not, it's not quite your stage, straight laced professional office that people may think of as other professional service firms. It's a bit of something about it 

Richard Buckle 21:25

You want to excellence, but you want creativity and you want you want all those things wrapped up in something.

David Parry 21:30

But we're human as well. Yeah, we're not just a big machine that chews up people and expects you to get your eight hours or whatever it is of work a day and then go home and forget it. So see what you got to cover things like the purpose and the culture. And in terms of just generally talking about, you know, the the general points about doing this, going back to the video, what do you think about the idea that if somebody is looking to get into producing a video, but they haven't got the skills in house, necessarily, or they've got nothing more than an iPhone? Maybe not even an external mic? Do you think that matters? Do you think it's okay, to put yourself out there in a reasonably low budget way? As long as it's authentic? Or do you think that's almost worse than not doing it at all? And you should? should hold back? 

Richard Buckle 22:11

I think, yeah, I think it's all this is all the cop out answer, but it is it is all context sensitive. So if, if your brand is not, if your brand has certain look and feel and you know that the recruitment is going to match up to that, right, because otherwise you're going to potentially be attracting people then who don't value the brand values. So so that's, you know, you got to think about that. Low budget version depends on what you know, what is low budget, just going around doing something like an iPhone?

David Parry 22:46

Well, even our early versions was an iPhone on a tripod, it was probably miked up. So the audio quality was good, you know, brushed your hair and ironed your shirt and that sort of thing. Had a bit of a script to go through 30 seconds, a minute, nothing more. But there were no scene changes. There was no storyboarding, there was no other people involved. It was it was a very simple to produce thing, the lighting wasn't particularly managed, it was okay, you know, you, you can produce an acceptable ish version.

Richard Buckle 23:12

I mean, I think that nowadays, people are so conditioned to seeing content that is it ever an increasingly higher quality, quality, that it's probably harder to get away with doing

David Parry 23:27

That's my, my gut feelings are harder, it depends on your brand and where you want to put it. But as you say, expectations now even of the stuff we get to see on Instagram, as you swipe through, or TikTok if that's your thing, or, or wherever it's reasonably well produced, isn't it, you don't see much 

Richard Buckle 23:43

depends on who you're trying to attract as well. So if you're trying to attract creative people that you're used to seeing all this stuff, then you're going to want something that's reasonably well produced and high end, they don't think what's this?

David Parry 23:53

Yeah, unless you're going to come in and fix this for us. Because we need someone to do this.

Richard Buckle 23:56

I mean, I did see and I'm struggling to remember the name of the company. But they made storage they they had storage, service storage racks and things but they they had this great company video that they did, they filmed it in a day, it was all pretty Lo Fi ish in terms of the quality but what they were trying to get across was just come and look around the office come in at a reasonable size company couple of 100 employees by the looks of it. But it was like this is a really fun place to work. We do excellent work, but it's fun and you go into the you know, the IT department there's a big draw bridge and Castle and everyone's desks were you know, personalised and everyone seemed to get on and you really got that feel

David Parry 24:41

You know what you're expecting before you even apply. I mean, how many times you've applied for you're here with people applying for jobs if you haven't and, and you really don't know what you're turning up until you start work, especially if the interview has been done in a management office or maybe even remote from the site where you're working if you're taking your life in your hands

Richard Buckle 24:56

you know that's that was a great example. Now you know, shot In a day, they clearly it was clearly Well, it was well produced in the sense that but it still maintain that kind of authenticity of being something that was about the people in the business. It wasn't very corporate, it wasn't corporate at all. But it still came across as professional, I think that's the difference.

David Parry 25:16

And it probably wasn't done on an iPhone, or it did have good audio and good lighting and scripted, these things mattered,

Richard Buckle 25:21

You've got to, otherwise you just end up with randomness, you've got to have a start with a script, you've got to work out exactly what it is you want to say the message, and then and then work out what shots you need, work out what you're trying to get across.

David Parry 25:32

So I would encourage for business owners listening if you've not been familiar with it, and it may be that businesses you know, haven't done this, and you haven't done it yourself before. Just Google it. It's Google recruitment video, and there's a truckload out there. You know, there's that

Richard Buckle 25:45

great one wasn't that engineering company? The German engineering company, it's absolute classic, maybe put a link to it somewhere

David Parry 25:53

Was that where they all, they all came to some unfortunate end in engineering test. So it said we need some more engineers. That's very clever. Okay, good. So the other thing I wanted to touch on just before we finish is the website itself and career pages, and got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this, because it really doesn't cost much at all, to have a decent careers page, or whatever you want to call it on your website. Isn't that especially these days really quite important. And, and employees and prospective employees are going to go to your website, not just to see all the other stuff you've got, but also what are you gonna say about me. So I looked at a couple of obvious ones that I wanted to look at out of the PLCs do it versus just local to us some companies that I know here and compare that to what we're doing. And sure enough, the PLC is have got it well taped, as you can imagine. So if you go to Tesco, or Google or anyone else, they've probably got a microsite, just for employee or for applicants, not employees, but for applicants, careers.or, whatever it may be. And they've done it very well. They've put their values on there, they put the application process, they've got videos of existing employees, we've got typical career paths, information about apprenticeships and graduate training schemes, as you can imagine, that they're going to do well, that's pretty good.

Then I went to just a couple of local firms, one manufacturer, and one professional services firm, and I'll spare their blushes by not naming. But the manufacturer did have a couple of vacancies live. And it had the job descriptions on their website. It wasn't particularly well formatted. It was basically the careers page and couple of chunks of text, which was the job descriptions for each of them. And then an email at the bottom, if you're interested, email this person. Now, okay, they've got the job, advert, job, job vacancies, alignment, it wouldn't have taken much, maybe put a form on there, gather some more information about the person, let them upload a CV, maybe tell them a bit more about the company's values, or the application process or the hours of work or I don't know, just could have made a bit more of an effort to recognise that the application process is a two way street, and that that applicant is choosing you as much as you're choosing them. Absolutely. It's a view very old fashioned view, isn't it that we'll put a job advert up? Yeah. And they'll just like it or lump it. So how would you say that compares knowing what Wellmeadow version is like it originally, we sit on that scale. With a lot of hand in developing that.

Richard Buckle 25:54

Yeah. I mean, I'd like to think that we're at the more enlightened end of the scale.

David Parry 28:20

I think we've gone for the microsite level No, but then we're a small company.

Richard Buckle 28:23

Yeah, it's not, it's not quite microsite, we have split it out from our main navigation in a sense that it's, you know, trying to just say this is to a different audience that we're going for here. I mean, one of the things that we did was to try and we got a professional photographer to come in, take photos of the team, take photos of the office, so that we can put those on the site. So it just looks like this is what it's like to look at it right? No one wants to go.

David Parry 28:49

I quite like actually. It's not head and shoulder shots, just like you get on the About Us page it shots of people working sitting around talking in the environment they're working in

Richard Buckle 28:58

So at least people can orientate themselves get a mental map of Okay, where am I going to be sitting, walking, and whatever. Again, you know, we've obviously got the video on there that we talked about previously.

David Parry 29:09

But the values section, where you split out from each of the values, it gives you a little bit of a description

Richard Buckle 29:16

We also go into reasonable depth on a job description, talking about, you know, what's the, what's the purpose of it? What's the what's the, what are we looking for, what are the benefits of working at Wellmeadow, those sort of things. 

David Parry 29:31

We don't just put an email address on there. Yes, we do a form and then 

Richard Buckle 29:34

But one of the things we did was to try and really automate the back end of the process when someone has has applied partly because people are applying 24 hours a day. So you know, and partly because you just want to make sure that when someone's applied really touching all the bases. So we had a number of different emails that came off the back of that that were branded in line with a job description. So you know if you've seen the video that we put together the the email reflected some of the scenes from the video, just to kind of tie the two things together. This is what you're applying for. We also filled with information about Wellmeadow, about the podcasts about HubSpot. And all of those links are trackable. So we can actually see what people are clicking on before, have they been on the website, have they looked at, you know, HubSpot training videos, have they clicked on the podcast? And it just gives you another little dimension, particularly if you're looking for people who are a bit like, hey, we, you know, we want people who are curious about, you know, what does, you know, not going to break the internet for click this link, but what does it show me? What have I learned? Then you can you can build on that into your process, you 

David Parry 29:35

need to filter out the people who've all they've done is submit the CV because they're playing some sort of numbers game themselves, they've got to invest a little bit, look around and

Richard Buckle 30:34

then wait, you know, you will leave it a couple of days. And then they get sent another email with a questionnaire to fill it in. And that's all you know. And again, it's all branded, it's all making sure it's like, consistent all the way through that someone looks at this and thinks Yes, 

David Parry 31:11

And you were the architects a lot of that you said if this was going to be the the ideal process that an applicant would see that I want to know that as soon as I've applied, I want an immediate response, then I want to know within a couple of days, what's happening next and every stage of the process. And where am I at it now, right? You've got through this stage, we're now at that stage. If you don't hear by Friday, then that's something I'm yet so we'll get back to you and tell you why what's happening there. And, and that worked. It was great. It was just it automatically turned out all the right responses all the right time everybody was communicated. And then right at the end, there's a much more personal touch where we contacted everybody individually and asked them if they wanted feedback if they weren't successful. And of course, there's a link to the Glassdoor profile for Wellmeadow. And we're not bashful about that, you know, we haven't got five out of five all the time. But we have got a contract out and the person who gave us four, I mean, we clearly we wouldn't put it on there if we weren't very proud of it. But we do find that employees have moved on and gone somewhere else for the next step of their career after here that generally they speak they speak very nicely in the past

Richard Buckle 32:09

So I think yeah, like the whole thing, just you've got to be creative. People looking for that now more than ever, applicants want to work somewhere where they can express themselves

David Parry 32:18

You got to be open, you got to be talking about your purpose and your values and your vision and where you are going with it

Richard Buckle 32:23

Consistent with it all throughout the process. Yeah. So you know if your value is you know, authenticity, be authentic throughout the process. If it's you know, creative, be creative in the process like it's just yeah, be true to you.

David Parry 32:39

And on that note, we draw yet another podcast we closed so thank you very much for listening to The SME Growth Podcast from Wellmeadow. Please like and share your podcasts wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all of your business colleagues and friends who run businesses that were here and that were worth a listen. And today we've been talking about marketing your business to potential job applicants. There's loads more resources on our web page and of course, the famous video that Richard referred to where he does dress up in fancy dress. Leave the rest of your imagination until you've seen the video. Until next week. Good luck with your businesses.

Further resources

Take a look at our Careers page here.

We have a great range of free recruitment related sources, available here.

Take a look at our behind the scenes blog on creating our own recruitment video.