This week on T3 I’m reviewing Employment Branding technology Life Guides. Life Guides philosophy is that pretty much all candidates are Googling you to find out more about your company. In fact, there research shows that 73% of candidates report that they first Googled an employer before applying for a job.
Add in sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn, and you can imagine that 100% of candidates are probably checking up on you in some sort of fashion. So, the big question is how do you get a transparent, real version of who you are out to potential candidates? They won’t believe the marketing you put on your own career site, and you might not want them to listen to disgruntled employees on Yelp type site. This is where Life Guides fill in the blanks.
A Life Guide is information about certain position you choose in your company that can be displayed on your career sites, social media feeds, etc. The employees who actually in the job are the ones who fill out the information about the actual job, environment, interview tips, true career path, what it’s like working day to day, etc. You can have individual Life Guides for the same job in different locations as well, knowing this sometimes changes based on location.
5 Things I really like about Life Guides:
1. Life Guides give your candidates some real information to help them decide if you’re the right fit for them, and if so, more information on how to actually succeed at getting the job.
2. Filling out Life Guides has a secondary benefit for your employees in the way of positive engagement. When your employees write about their actual experiences, it gives them a positive outlook on their job, their company and their career.
3. Life Guides help you control your brand. Unlike other ‘transparent’ sites Life Guides does keep the control of the message in the hands of the organization and HR. HR has edit capability. Is this fully transparent? No, but I like that! I want transparent light! Like the aging movie star who uses fuzzy filters to make themselves look younger. I want the truth, just the best looking version of truth I can get! To Life Guides credit, they recommend to their clients not to edit, but sometimes, especially for English as a second language employees, it might be necessary.
4. There is some gamification components with badges and such to help encourage your employees to get active with Life Guides, and also use their Life Guides as a portfolio for their own career advancement. Life Guides sees their client employees linking their Life Guide responses in their LinkedIn profiles.
5. It’s really inexpensive, and super easy to use, and takes just minutes to complete on both the HR end, and the employee end.
If you’re concerned about your employment brand and want to leverage your great employees to help share your true brand, give Life Guides a look. The demo takes thirty minutes or less, and they can show you some great examples of how some of their current clients are using their solution.
T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market. None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion. There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find. If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.