One of the best ways to attract talent to your company is increasing your employer brand awareness. The main reason for this is that people won’t apply to companies if they don’t know they exist. Awareness in itself however is not enough, your brand needs to appeal to people. In the B2B market this becomes even more difficult, as the plus of having a publicly recognizable product is not as easily attainable. It therefore becomes paramount to create a unique identity, strong culture and great employer brand to ensure that you attract the best talent out there.
Serena Tansil, Sr Technical Recruiter at ePages, shared how ePages manages to find the most suitable talent for their roles. According to Serena the passive activities are just as important as active activities when looking for strong talent. “We attend career fairs, to attract university students. We also have our own Developer’s Blog, where our developers publish articles about the technologies they are working on. We also interviewed some of our colleagues, where they shared what they do and their experience at ePages.” explains Serena. This is of course an excellent way of showing external job seekers what kind of interesting projects developers are working on inhouse. This helps attract people who are passionate about about the technology stacks we are using and at the same time increasing awareness of your company’s brand.
“The challenge” according to Serena “can be attracting diverse talent, especially for technical roles, as this is something which every company is currently looking for”. Serena shared an example of a Developer’s Event, where ePages was one of the sponsors.. “We were hopeful to promote our employer brand as there were around 1500 participants, consisting of developers and IT experts. We were quite surprised to see that out of the 1500 participants, only around 10% were females.!”. This is not an uncommon occurrence however and it is something that most tech companies are working on fixing.
There are however external factors at play which affect the efforts which companies, in the IT sector, are undertaking in order to diversify their internal talent. “Asia has a higher population of women studying IT” states Serena as an indirect reference to the lower number of female IT college graduates in Europe. This is a common issue, which many companies are raising, in a sector which has been heavily male populated in the past.
Many companies are employing different strategies to increase their female talent pools. “We need to strategize our recruitment campaign to suit the female IT professionals by collaborating not only with HR colleagues, but also with our marketing and development teams, as well as the management.
Serena, who is Indonesian herself, shared that ePages has around 180 employees, from 22 different nationalities, spread across; Hamburg, London, Jena, Barcelona and New York. “The most important factor which I look for, when speaking to potential future colleagues, is that they have passion for what they do, motivation to learn, commitment to their work, and at the same time they feel comfortable working at ePages and have fun working with their colleagues.”
If you’re interested in how your company could benefit from greater diversity in your IT team, or you feel like sharing your story on how diversity plays an important role in your company, feel free to contact me at carlos@zartis.com.
