The Community Revolution for Hiring
The Challenges of attracting and building loyalty among Gen Z candidates
Winning the talent race means not only successful recruitment but also successful retention and development. But retention starts at recruitment. Many companies invest enormous sums in trying to retain talent once they are hired. Think of all the perks Silicon Valley made famous in the last decade. Some of the most effective investments in retaining talent, however, are the ones made earliest in the process because retention and motivation work best when built on a foundation of loyalty, not one based only on perks.
This is true for all talent, but particularly for Generation Z. How Gen Z is Driving the Future of Work, Commerce, and Living by Anna Barber and Morgan Blumberg provides a compelling account of how Gen Z cares about community when making career decisions. Those companies that can leverage a sense of community can win worker loyalty.
Like trust, loyalty is a hard resource to cultivate and an easy one to squander. First impressions are crucial. The first impression that a future employee has of a company comes before hiring, and especially during recruitment. Companies need to send an authentic signal that they have a community where employees belong and that the company will invest in their employees over the long haul.
The traditional route many companies take in recruiting – culling candidates based on intense competition. Encountering this kind of recruitment process, candidates - particularly those in Gen Z - may think of the Hunger Games and not Harvard. Moreover, fewer companies can make this brutal competition model work for them, and fewer still can make it work and create a culture that retains and develops employees.
The Hunger Games recruitment model also makes mistakes; it misses many talented candidates who don’t understand how the selection game is played but would contribute immensely to an organization.
To attract the best candidates, a company needs to ensure that the truly talented long-term contributors:
(i) are attracted enough to the company that they apply for the job;
(ii) continue moving through the interview funnel after they apply and have their actual skillsets measured;
(iii) must take care not to cast aside candidates who would make great contributors (and those contributors must feel they have a fighting chance in the process);
(iv) elect to stay in the process until they receive an offer; and
(v) accept the offer and start their career at the company with a positive sense of belonging.
This is a hard set of results to achieve for reasons we will explain. We’ll also outline how Speak_ has engineered a solution for companies to leverage community, improve hiring results, and foster loyalty, particularly among Gen Z.
The Challenges of attracting and building loyalty among Gen Z candidates
Gen Z represents the generational cohort that is most attuned to making career decisions based on loyalty and community. But they are also the most discerning. They smell inauthenticity miles away.
Gen Z is comfortable bonding online. Community-based hiring that builds and leverages an online community represents an obvious solution but one that is hard to implement for several reasons.
First, building an online community that builds sustained loyalty to a company requires sustained and meaningful engagement.
Second, sustained and meaningful community building proves hard to square with hiring because many candidates will not be chosen or matriculated at a company. How does a company signal loyalty to a group when neither the employer nor the candidate knows whether the relationship will proceed to the next step?
Third, sustained and meaningful community building is challenging to scale. Loyalty and community require a human touch that does not scale quickly.
Building Relationships at Scale
At Speak_, we have developed a solution that meets these challenges.
Here are the essential elements of our solution:
Employer-branded content: Employers draw candidates into the hiring process with inclusive content that signals that they are invested in the candidate’s success and understand the value of community. They give talent a picture of what it’s like to work at the company and how to succeed in the hiring process.
Interview guides: Employers give prospective candidates an understanding of what to expect at every step of the interview process so they can prepare and perform optimally. Transparency is key in contrast to a fear-inducing, hide-the-ball interview process.
Peer practice: Candidates connect with their peers to practice for their upcoming interview at a specific employer. Through assessments, they learn where they are strong and where they need to practice. Both hard and soft skill-sharpening resources are provided. This training helps us assure companies that candidates are ready for the company’s interview, as well as to contribute on Day One.
Real-time connection: Through engaging, live online events, candidates connect with peers going through the same process to practice and connect, creating new social bonds and gaining critical support to overcome challenges, including emotional ones such as imposter syndrome. Employers can feature their team to give talent direct access, building further loyalty.
Why our model works for Generation Z
From the candidate’s perspective, this investment in their skill sets sends a strong signal that the company would be invested in their growth. After all, the company is offering an educational benefit to candidates even if they are not ultimately selected for the job. Candidates also deeply appreciate the transparency into the kinds of skills that the company’s formal interview process will search for and how the company will conduct this search.
Training candidates in cohorts also creates a sense of community among candidates. Candidates learn together and support one another. Research shows that cohort-based learning improves learning outcomes (88% completion rate for cohort based courses vs. 22% completion of self paced courses).
We further cultivate community for companies through a variety of mechanisms, including the following:
A live weekly workshop for the entire cohort;
Live practice calls with the cohort two to three times a week; and
Connecting candidates to one another in a “curated peer connection” program;
By working hard to create a community among candidates, the Speak_ solution cultivates a sense of loyalty that transfers to the companies that employ our program.
Our program thus reverses some of the damage inflicted by the pandemic on Gen Z, including layoffs early in the pandemic and the social disconnect created by remote work.
What is in it for employers?
These investments in candidates and the community among candidates may seem like an expensive luxury for employers. But our results speak volumes. Speak_ has data documenting the ROI for employers, including how the program:
increases the funnel conversion ratios for our customers; and
increases their offer acceptance rate.
Yet these numbers only tell the beginning of the story. After all, recruitment represents only the start of a company’s human capital strategy. Retention and development remain key. Yet Speak_ helps here, too, in profound ways. Our platform help companies build relationships with future employees at scale. It not only strengthens the company’s brand, it also creates a more durable bond with talent. This bond provides the foundation for a motivated talent community invested in a company that has already invested in them.
About Speak_
Speak_ was co-founded by community and diversity leaders CEO Andrea Guendelman (Founder of BeVisible Latinx, who earned a law degree from Harvard Law and an MBA from MIT Sloan) and CTO Bryan Landers (former General Partner at Backstage Capital, the first designer at Zapier, and an engineering consultant to Pinterest founding team).
We’re working with exciting customers who value inclusion and diversity – including Amazon, GoDaddy, Robinhood, and Roblox – to deliver the hiring experience of the future today.