Hocus focus: engaging top talent in a haunted market 🎃

Spooky season is upon us, but while Halloween might only last one night, monstrous hiring practices can haunt your team for months. 🧟

This year, we’re helping you to tell the difference between tricks (red flags) and treats (green flags) in talent acquisition, and help put an end to cursed hiring practices once and for all.

👻 Trick: Letting ChatGPT take over your employer brand

ChatGPT is the newest hire on every Talent team. It can generate content in seconds and doesn’t complain or ask for vacation.

The bad news is that candidates can tell when you’re using ChatGPT, and if it’s peppered into EVERY job description, blog post or outreach message, then you just lose anything exciting or unique about your brand. That’s about as boring as slapping fake blood on your face and calling yourself a zombie.

🍭 Treat: Use ChatGPT sparingly. Harness it for brainstorming or structure, but always remember that candidates want to hear you in your messaging. Involve your employees in content creation, and tell authentic stories from your culture.

👻 Trick: Clunky career pages

If you really want to disengage talent, go ahead and place your ‘Careers’ tab in the most obscure corner of your company website. While you’re at it, create a careers page that forces them to navigate through a haunted maze of boring company statistics, stiff portraits of all your management team and a vague mission statement.

If they have to click six times to simply find all open roles, you’ve already lost them.

🍭 Treat: Make it so easy for them. Add a big, clear “View jobs” button that immediately directs candidates to your open roles. Fill those job descriptions with relevant role information, discuss your culture, benefits and a clear hiring process. You have one chance to spark their attention, don’t mess it up.

👻 Trick: Interviewers gone rogue

Sometimes untrained interviewers end up in the hiring process. Maybe it’s due to a lack of capacity, or harmless assumptions of “they know our culture and can hold a conversation – book them in!” With that, comes random questions, biased takes and unprofessional behaviour all round.

It’s a hiring horror scene waiting to happen, and frustrating for everyone involved.

🍭 Treat: Give your interviewers guidance before unleashing them into the wild. Interviewing isn’t improv. Train them on structured questioning, legal dos and don’t’s, and show them how to properly pitch your company. Throw in a session on how to submit feedback, and you’ll turn scary into seamless.

Want your team to feel confident, consistent and candidate-ready? Book a hiring training discovery call here.

Happy Halloween and happier hiring! 🎃