By GoodCall
As of August 2022, the Czech Republic’s unemployment rate was 3.4% and is estimated in 2023 to rest at around 3.5% (https://tradingeconomics.com/czech-republic/unemployment-rate). This means recruiting candidates, especially quality candidates, to fill vacant positions is extremely difficult and will remain this way for some time. To learn more about how to combat these challenges, a survey was conducted in collaboration with Edenred, a provider of specific-purpose payment solutions for food (such as meal benefits), incentives (such as gift cards, employee engagement platforms), mobility (such as multi-energy, maintenance, toll, parking and commuter solutions) and corporate payments (such as virtual cards).
The responses, collected in May of 2022 in the Czech Republic, uncovered various methods and best practices of HR marketing along with employee benefits preferences and trends. This survey showed that HR marketing practices, specifically specific channels and platforms, are vital to building an organization that will grow in size, capacity, and quality. In the survey, there were 122 companies giving their inputs of sizes mainly of either 21 - 50 or 100+ employees, primarily located in Prague (30,3%).
In this survey, 53,3% of companies responded that HR marketing needs to become a key priority in 2022. Based on their responses, business leaders are more than aware of the current extreme lack of high-quality applicants. They also see the advantages of HR marketing to attract the best candidates, increase the number of applicants, and cooperate more with graduates from both high schools and universities.
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Furthermore, respondents see the unwillingness of people wanting to change their job due to the current situation - high inflation, increased prices of gas and electricity, and a general lack of stability. Based on the survey, respondents recognize that people are too afraid to make any changes, but they also see the potential advantages in attracting them via HR marketing activities.
On the other hand, 46,7% of respondents DON'T consider HR marketing a priority. Mainly because they are a government organisation (which brings some restrictions to doing HR marketing), they are not looking for new employees at the moment, or they don’t even know what exactly HR marketing means.
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Additionally, 73% of companies have marketing efforts as less than 10% of their operational activities.
If companies have any marketing, 85% do these marketing campaigns in-house, compared to outsourcing a specialized third party.
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The survey results showed that companies have experienced the best candidate applications primarily coming from two sources: website and career pages; and job portals. These two sources were highly preferred over sources such as social media, podcasts, professional groups, and local recruiting events.
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This may come as a surprise since a lot of current advice such as an article published MyComputerCareer, suggests the exact opposite. Simply put, LinkedIn and similar platforms are failing to reach the right candidates and potential applicants for companies like yours. To further illustrate this, per Adway, 87% of recruiters use LinkedIn compared to only 40% of the potential applicants; you are potentially missing 60% of applicants this way.
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While the data above shows that job portals along with websites and career pages seem to result in the highest quality applications, there are mixed thoughts about the channels/platforms of recruiting events and employee referral programs.
Employee referral programs bring about 13% of candidates with the needed proficiency. However, an article in Business News Daily states 35% of employees should result from referrals. Compared to the survey results, it can be concluded that referral programs are either lacking in incentive, structure, or promotion. Recruiting events, especially student-focused, is an area respondents of the survey could develop in terms of HR marketing. Looking at Deloitte Prague, catch students’ attention during career fairs by having a variety of incentives relevant to their desires post-graduation.
Even if companies are not seeing the full potential of HR marketing, it still doesn't change the fact that it has been a more difficult challenge to find, attract and hire high-quality employees. HR marketing is one of the ways to eliminate this problem however there could also appear new ways for attracting them such as huge employer branding campaigns, community building, global contests and games for collecting leads and many more.
