Going Global: Creating Branded Candidate Experiences Across Multiple Countries

Many HR leaders are faced with the challenge of creating consistent branded candidate experiences across multiple offices, locations and even geographies. The challenge can be unifying different recruitment tech stacks, ensuring the same format of job listings and adverts, and ensuring that your employee value proposition and branding are conveyed uniformly, even when translated into local languages.

What are the Key Stages of the Candidate Experience

The candidate experience encompasses every aspect of a candidate’s journey with your organization and every interaction they might have with you. We’ve previously discussed the seven steps of the recruitment process and there are also seven key stages in a candidate’s journey with your business:

• Awareness – the candidate first becomes aware of your organization through a job post, social media, or a referral from a current employee.
• Consideration – the candidate is looking more deeply and researching your business, the benefits you offer and looking at reviews from previous candidates and employees.
• Application and Selection – the candidate has chosen to apply and is navigating your application process. If their application is successful, they begin to move through the selection and interview process.
• Hire – the candidate has either received an offer or has been rejected for the role. This is where the journey ends for unsuccessful candidates.
• Onboarding – successful candidates are bought into the company, how a candidate is trained in their job role and educated on the organization’s values and expectations can impact their overall experience hugely.
• Employment – areas that can impact employee experience while employed include compensation, benefits, feedback, and development.
• Exit – when an employee leaves you, how that process is handled influences how that employee will view their time with the organization.

5 Steps to Creating and Improving Candidate Experience Across Multiple Countries

Because candidate experience is such an important part of your overall employer brand, it can be tempting to standardize it. Instead, you need to find a balance between a standardized experience that conveys your employer brand consistently from location to location and customizing your approach to cater to local markets and cultural nuance.

You might think that a standardized candidate journey is not only easier to manage but adds to your appearance as a single, coherent business. However, when you are hiring across multiple countries, industries and job markets, a standardized approach to candidate experience can make it harder to reach and connect with exceptional local talent. Here are five steps you can take to improve your hiring across different global markets:

1. Know What Your Global EVP Is

The first step in developing a candidate experience that can be modified for employees in multiple job markets and locations is understanding the parts of your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that apply to your entire organization, every office, and every location.

These EVP pillars can then be adapted to tell different stories in different locations. For example, one of your unique cultural values might be growth and development. But what that looks like for employees in North America might be significantly different to what employees in Asia are looking for. Taking some time to develop the values and mission of your global business can help you build those values into the candidate experience in multiple locations.

2. Understand Local and Regional Candidate Personas

What employees want, need, and expect from their employers can vary greatly by country and by demographic. Additionally what factors drive employee engagement can vary by age and location. For example while employees in the US and UK both value opportunities for career development and training, UK employees are more concerned that benefits are comparable to other employers in the same industry whereas US employees are not.

Getting to know your ideal candidates, their motivations, their pain points, and the economic trends affecting them will help you localize your candidate experience and help you create an experience with your employer branding that is attractive to them. You can do this by conducting focus groups, speaking to those you already employ in that region or by engaging a recruitment partner with experience in the industry and countries you are hiring in.

Develop Content Tailored to Each Region

Now you know your audience a little better you can develop a candidate experience based on where the local persona overlaps with your employer EVP. Important questions to ask are:

• Do your career websites reflect your employer brand consistently?
• Are you targeting your advertising in the right places for the candidates you are trying to attract?
• Does your benefits package reflect industry trends and local expectations?
• Does your recruitment marketing content engage with regional employee concerns and interests?

3. Focus on Employee Stories

By focusing on local employee stories you can offer candidates an insider’s view of your company culture, values, mission, and overall work-life. Video content is one of the most effective ways for you to reach audiences and technology has made video media increasingly easy and economical to produce.

4. Use Technology to Streamline Localization

New technologies make it easy to streamline your localization efforts and provide customized content and candidate experiences whilst maintaining a consistent brand. AI can be used to create job descriptions that contain the right keywords for your local audiences as well as translate content.

Website editors can help you quickly set up and manage multiple web pages with local URLs that maintain your branding. Training and onboarding materials can be overdubbed or given subtitles easily. Chatbots and Applicant Tracking Systems can be configured to provide alerts and application status updates that reflect local contact information.

By partnering with an RPO provider like Pierpoint you can access the latest industry insights as well as next-generation tools and tech that can help you build a strong employer brand designed to attract the talent you need. Book a call with one of our experts to find out more.