By: Matt Moore, CoolWorks
We’re just a few months away from Summer 2023, which means (hopefully!) many of you are well into the process of recruiting your teams for the upcoming season. Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the set of benefits that are unique to your organization that an employee receives in return for the skills, experience, and enthusiasm that they bring to your company.
Read on to learn how you can implement your EVP into your recruiting process to make sure you’re connecting with the candidates that will be the best fit for your organization.
Revamp Your Recruitment Marketing
Your recruitment marketing materials are the combined efforts that you employ to attract candidates to your positions. These can include classified ads, online job postings, dedicated employment websites or CoolWorks Enhanced Employer Profiles, social media posts, etc..
Because your EVP should always be evolving as you implement new feedback and objectives into your organizational priorities, your recruitment marketing materials should regularly be updated as well.
Let’s start with our golden rule of recruitment marketing: go beyond the static job description. Avoid wasting valuable advertising dollars just to paste and publish your bulleted lists of requirements and experience needed. Companies that sell goods and services don’t craft advertisements that merely list off product specifications - the advertising message is built around why you as a consumer will benefit from purchasing their product. The advertisement tells a story, and it allows potential consumers to envision themselves using the product or experiencing the service.
Similarly, your recruitment marketing message should first speak to your EVP, illustrating the value that a future employee will gain from joining your company. How do you value your staff? What do your employees most value about working for your organization? Why is a particular role critical to the success of your company? What do you hope an employee will personally gain from joining your team? These are questions that you should try to answer throughout your recruitment efforts. The job description and requirements need to be available once a candidate is interested, but they should not be the first pieces of information a job seeker discovers.
Build Interview Questions Around Your EVP
One commonly overlooked tool in the recruiting and hiring process for narrowing down the best-fit candidates is the questions employers ask prospective candidates. If you’ve identified some valuable candidates that connect your organizational goals with the personal values of your staff (for example, Respect, Excellence, Innovation, etc), create interview questions that will help you identify candidates that share those values and are therefore likely to be a strong fit for your team.
For example, say your team identifies “Connection” as a value that bonds an organizational goal (We want every customer to experience a personal connection to our team and to our place) with a value your employees identify (I value feeling like I’m part of a tight-knit team, that I feel connected to my work, and that I have an opportunity to personally impact the quality of our guests’ experience). You may consider creating some questions that ask candidates to speak to their personalities and interpersonal skills. “Tell me what you enjoy about working with customers.” “Do you like collaborating and being part of a team, or do you prefer more autonomy and independence in your work environment?” If someone is a bit more introverted or prefers solo work, they may still be a good fit for your values, but they might not realize their fullest potential in a role that requires constant customer interaction.
Create and ask those interview questions to really get candidates thinking and evoke responses that speak to their values. This will help you navigate whether they’re a good fit for your organization, and also where they may best contribute, which isn’t always necessarily in the position they’ve applied for.
After the Job Offer
Do you stay connected with new hires between the time they accept an offer and the time they’re scheduled to arrive for their first day? If not, you’re likely missing an opportunity to reduce pre-season attrition (increasing your turnover expense) and to build stronger connections with your team before they even arrive on property.
Create a plan for building connections with your incoming staff. This doesn’t have to be a huge administrative lift: you could create an email drip campaign to your new hire mailing list, which covers topics like what to expect between now and opening day, pre-arrival checklists (paperwork they need to complete, packing list, etc.), top must-do activities they should plan on for their days off, what the year-round crew is up to right now, and of course, continuing to speak to your EVP: why you’re excited for them to arrive and be a part of the team in the coming season, and what you hope they’ll gain from your time working together.
If you communicate your EVP and speak to the value that employees will obtain both professionally and personally - from the moment you begin your search for them to the time they arrive for their first day of work - you can start building a strong relationship built on mutual respect from that first point of contact. Happy hiring!
About CoolWorks
Since 1995, CoolWorks has been a leader in connecting people seeking meaningful and exciting work with employers who are looking for their enthusiasm, energy, and knowledge. We believe that you can and should love your life, and we want to help make that happen! We feature job opportunities in great places — from national parks to ski resorts, dude ranches to summer camps, and everything in between.