Competing on Culture: How to Win Talent Through Showcasing Who You Are

Understanding a company culture is highly complex that even before the pandemic, people mainly associate it with how a company mounts its events or how its employee benefits are structured and executed. But company culture is more than that since these are just superficial elements forcibly made us realize by the new norm brought by the pandemic. 

Now that the vast majority of Filipinos are reporting remotely, or working on-site with a skeletal workforce, the most important parts of culture are heightened. Such essential elements of culture are not events or perks, but the day-to-day reality of how team members work with one another. How do you brainstorm and generate product or service ideas or improvements? 

How do you recognize one another’s success, and conversely, give constructive feedback when needed? How do you collaborate across departments, divisions, and different levels of seniority or tenure?

These elements of culture are of course important for current employees, but they’re even more so for potential talent. Employees want to work for organizations that prioritize culture, so it’s important to highlight this in your employer branding. Like culture, employer branding can often be treated as a fluffy, branding exercise where organizations focus on showcasing smiling employees at company events. But the best employer branding holds up a lens to the organization, allowing candidates to see how they might thrive in this particular culture.

When thinking of how to position your company culture, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. This may seem like simple advice, but it’s all too often overlooked. Company leaders mistakenly assume that what’s important to them about their culture is also important to candidates, which is of course not the case. Company and candidate priorities can be mapped out over a Venn diagram, with only a small middle portion representing their shared values in culture.

So what do candidates care about? Above all, they want to work at a place that will provide them professional and personal growth. You therefore want to emphasize how your culture will enable that. You’ll thus need to convey that the nature and pace of the work will leverage the talents, while also still stretching them toward new skillsets. 

This Goldilocks zone, where we’re using our natural gifts and applying them in new ways, is where we learn the most. Relatedly, you’ll also want to show how your culture is supportive in the event that they do fail, which is bound to happen when trying anything new. Celebrating the psychological comfort you have in your culture will go a long way toward attracting the best talent, who undoubtedly want to take intrapreneurial risks.

As company leaders, you will be the best stewards for your employer branding as it comes to marketing and publicity materials. But those represent a small portion of the total channels you’ll want to promote your culture. The most common and also the most influential are the in-person touchpoints where you’re interacting with talent on the ground. This part can often be tricky for some companies to handle, as they specialize in their own products or services, not the nuances of recruitment marketing.

Q2 can help on this front. Our talent-facing services - recruitment process outsourcing, executive search, and talent assessments - are designed to not only fill up your recruiting pipeline but also highlight your culture. Because in the end, the best way to attract talent is and will always be who you are, what you do, and where you can take your talent.