Design a talent attraction survey campaign to deliver insights.

A global building materials firm engaged us to help design a talent attraction survey campaign.  

During a larger engagement, a large building materials firm came to the conclusion that they needed to use an attraction survey to get to the heart of why people joined and stayed working at their organization.

Specifically, they wanted to use the attraction survey to:

• identify what was holding them back from attracting even more of the people they wanted to hire most.
• strengthen their employer brand and value proposition and make sure they were promoting an “authentic inside-out” view and messages.
• use new insights to help them understand how to find and keep the people who could help them deliver on their brand promise.
• and get to the root and solve other underlying problems (if there were any).

Their talent acquisition team was busy working to deliver other projects and so we were tasked with designing an approach that would help them collect a wide range of preferences, opinions, attitudes, and interests of employees.

We decided to set up a blended survey using a structured approach (to collect the data, including: email/web-based surveys, phone or in-person interviews, and focus groups) and added an unstructured, research-driven effort (to collect additional data, including: employee-initiated feedback, employee reviews on third-party websites (Glassdoor), unsolicited comments across social media to run while the primary, structured effort was underway.

This two-part approach was designed to collect and combine useful data from even more sources and touch points. With all of the merged data – from both structured and unstructured data survey-related approaches – the firm would be in a much better position to understand and act on the preferences of their best employees and the candidates they want to hire.

We designed the survey documentation to provide insights to the following areas:

• Employer brand perception when compared to other companies in the field.
• Specific attributes, behaviors, and characteristics that make the organization attractive to candidates.
• Aspects of the employer brand (as it related to attraction and engagement) that were functioning at a high/low level.
• Sources used by candidates to find and learn about the organization.
• How to leverage employer-of-choice status to deliver more successful outcomes across attraction, engagement, recruitment, hiring and retention.
• How to improve communication within teams and as a collective.

We organized the attraction survey so collection would begin with qualitative and quantitative data survey-based data and reporting, and then move to employee interviews, then one-on-one interviews, and then focus group(s), with web-based data collection happening all along the way.

For this project, we delivered full design documentation, complete with outcomes/goals, survey objectives and deliverables. We outlined and specified the area of survey, attributes/values and question format (5 types), survey timelines (with hour/range), survey format (with respondents, populations, confidence levels, and more), and survey technology options. We even included an eight (8) step survey/interview/analysis process to follow.

The insights gained from the exercise not only help the organization learn more about what their employees really think and feel. It acts as foundational or structural support to all future efforts, such as:

• rethinking/optimizing processes and structures all across the talent acquisition landscape.
• creating a forward-looking roadmap of projects to optimize their operating model.
• delivering a best practice playbook for recruiters and hiring managers to (pre-hire to on-boarding).

With the new attraction survey material in hand, the firm was primed and ready to begin to set up, test and launch the campaign.