The Candidate Journey: your most effective brand marketing!

Helen Lees, Group CEO and Founder of FindMyPub.com reflects on the impact of the candidate's journey to our brand and future sector success.

The candidate journey is very close to my heart, and I am determined for it to rise to the top of the agenda in recruitment for the leased, tenanted, and SEM pub sector - now more than ever.

As businesses, we focus much on our brand marketing, investing significant capital into logos, videos, banners, and various marketing campaigns. A snappy slogan and a modern font may be eye-catching and will undoubtedly create an appealing image, but word of mouth is one of the most crucial (and often overlooked) brand-enhancing tools we have at our disposal.

…And word of mouth matters!

In this day and age, everyone is a critic. As a result, our potential candidates have direct access to social media pages, forums, online review sites and chat groups dedicated to sharing their collective experiences (and opinions) of our businesses. We may not like it or even shy away from it, but these opinions count – these voices in isolation may not be perceived as a threat – but in the collective, the influence and power of these collated views stretch far and wide.

I am a secret lemonade drinker on various of the aforementioned industry-specific Facebook pages, some of which have been set up by Industry peers and regulators; some are a product of a growing desire for candidates to get together and source their pub opportunities and share experiences. But, unfortunately, what they all have in common (currently) is overriding negativity, a demoralising and corrosive underlying mutual despondency aimed at pubs, pub owners, pub recruitment, and the sector in general.

As a pub recruiter and business owner, I know too well that some opinions can be unfair, unjustified, and exaggerated. However, it would be remiss of me to sit in my ivory tower and not recognize that we, as the foremost lead provider to the sector, do not have a part to play and some responsibility to shoulder regarding these experiences - and question what we could do better. As an Industry, we also have a collective responsibility to acknowledge that these groups, some of which have thousands of members (collectively tens of thousands), are in some parts a by-product of us not doing better.

Most recently, FindMyPub.com hosted the first-ever L&T Recruitment Collective, an event that brought together a large segment of the recruiters in our sector. With delegates from leading pub companies and breweries coming together to share insights, learn, develop, and engage collectively. We presented a candidate during this event and took our pub company delegates through a real-time/real-life candidate journey. This insightful and honest account gave us all food for thought and was an eye-opening first-hand account of how vital that first contact is in shaping a candidate's perceptions of the industry.

We screened and processed over 800 accepted candidates for our clients in April. In many cases, these clients are under-resourced, and there will be other leads coming from various sources. In a period where we are facing such enormous challenges and seeing vacancy rates rise by almost 40%, there has never been a more critical time to focus on getting our candidate experience right.

Our challenges are significant; 40% more vacancies on our website alone only show the likely strain this must be taking on resource teams, alongside the economic pressures our businesses are all facing. While we can't fix everything, what we can do is ensure that, as a collective, we are communicating, sharing valuable and critical information promptly, and making our candidates feel valued. Our talent pools will also become crucial in the coming months, and nurturing them needs to be an area of priority for us all.

First impressions count, and contact will always be critical. Our research shows that almost 60% of candidates did not know the pub's owner when applying for a pub, suggesting that they had no bias or opinion on who owned the opportunity and therefore presented a blank canvas for the pub company to entice further. Consequently, we must then deliver the level of service, contact timeframes, and expected information at this stage. That first recruitment contact is the most important, delicate, and persuasive bit of self-marketing your company has to impact this candidate positively. It is better than any slogan or logo – and, as we know, will have a cascading effect when the candidate returns to their Facebook group to expand on their experiences! From our research, I am led to believe that this first impression is often the point of make or break from a candidate's perspective; as recruiters, we can make the minor differences that offer significant impact, which combined will then snowball into a more positive overall outcome for the sector.