Desirable Outcomes: Ways to Leverage an Employee Competitive Analysis

Three-quarters of potential employees think about an employer’s brand identity when applying for a role. Knowing how people see your company, both with its public image and potential as an employer, can thus help you when recruiting. With this in mind, have you engaged in competitive analysis to understand how possible hires might be swayed toward or away from you?

The following information lists the many ways you can leverage such a tool to help with recruiting both local and remote workers. Use each entry to boost your efforts when it comes to promoting your employer brand, to give yourself the best chances of hiring top-rated talent.

What Is an Employee Competitive Analysis

When looking into your hiring strategies, you need to ensure you are performing the right steps to bring in workers who would benefit you. Employee competitive analysis is a series of processes by which you can both gather and analyze data related to these methods.

In general, employee competitive analysis looks at the following areas of interest:

• Employer consumer branding
• Employer workplace branding
• Hiring practices
• Recruitment methods
• Internal workforce motivation

During the analysis process, a company will start to determine the expected cost to hire people and the RoI from any such hire. They will also look at competing companies to find out whether others fare better in their recruitment journey and drill down into those who do.

Find Talent Acquisition Competition

During the analysis, you will look into other organizations in your industry. This is to try to find which companies might offer you the greatest recruiting competition.

Generally, the results you get will be businesses with similar talent needs that aim for the same target audience. Despite this, you may find several companies that do not compete for customers but might still be looking for similar talent.

By knowing more about these businesses, you can learn where you are not communicating your employee value proposition (EVP). Analyze these other companies and find out how they position themselves in the same spaces as you, and determine where they succeed and you do not.

You should also keep an eye on up-and-coming businesses that might expand into your recruiting space. See what they do differently and try to promote yourself in that way before them.

Discover Better Recruiting Strategies

When researching how people recruit, you are likely to uncover more channels in which to find potential workers. These might be job boards you were not aware of or new networking events, for example.

You might also learn new ways to leverage social media or other online platforms to express the nature of your business. By using these areas to show your internal company culture, you can do a lot to advertise yourself as a positive place to work.

It is also a good idea to watch how other companies actively recruit talent. You may find they use methods you would not have otherwise thought of, or communicate in a way that you did not feel would work before.

Match Your Talent Gaps to the Talent Pool

When you are hiring, it is usually to fill up a talent gap you either have now or that you expect to have soon. By researching competitors, you can learn where they are succeeding or failing at building similar talent pools. You can then either direct your headhunting at their company or try to snipe potential hires from them, stunting their growth.

If neither you nor your competitors can find useful skills from the local market, you will then know that you need to look further afield. You can even investigate global recruitment or the possibility of hiring remote workers to fill up a skills vacuum.

Long-term, you could even discuss your issues with educational institutions in your local area or further afield. They can promote your company to upcoming graduates and also advise you on the skill pool you can expect from their students moving forward.

Use Data Analytics to be More Competitive

As you research both yourself and competitors, it is worth using the data you have on both to discover trends in how the industry is moving. This will give you very clear information on what leads to success or failure in seeking out talent. You can also use it to predict future behaviors based on previous patterns.

As you continue to hire, consider pivoting your recruitment methods to match the conclusions you draw from gathered data. This can help you anticipate talent shortages as well as plan future hiring ahead of difficulties. If you find the data suggests your new methods do not work as hypothesized, you can pivot once more until the results match your needs.

You might not have the tools, time, or skills to instigate any form of data analytics, though. If this is true, you can always approach a third party to attract talent. Such businesses can often help with both employer branding as well as offering advice on how to market yourself to the wider world.

Learn From Competitor Hiring Strategies

Remember that your hiring processes do not exist in a vacuum. Candidates will discuss their experiences with others, so try to learn more about what they appreciated in your methods. Then, ask about competitors’ hiring practices and learn what they did that candidates appreciated.

Even if the process is not successful, if a worker felt well-respected during their recruitment they are likely to tell others about it. At the very least, they will discuss the bad experiences they had. By enacting positive hiring processes, you can gain a better brand identity not only among customers but with potential hires.

Work With Competitive Analysis Experts

Now you are likely to have a much better understanding of how an employee competitive analysis can help you. Despite all this information, though, it might be too much work to make major changes in how you recruit. As such, you might want to think about working with a PEO like us.

We can boost your global recruitment strategy and ensure you have the best talent available to you at any time. All you need do is let us know your needs and we can then discuss the next steps to ensure you appeal to workers the world over.