Universum Managing Director for the Nordics, Claes Peyron discusses Employer Branding during COVID-19 and what lies ahead for talent acquisition.

While we're here, McKinsey dropped a whole lot of data on how Covid is changing... well... everything.

And in further tales of "everything is changing, so you better change too!" all the data and research you may have built your insights and strategies on are now... well, history. HBR has two pieces about the power of data, focusing on how you need to look at new post-Covid data because anything older is based on outmoded ways of looking at the world, and that you need a strong methodology with which to see the insights in the data. And one more, just to round things out.

What do job seekers care about in a pandemic? Based on multiple company's TA chatbots, it turns out that 47% of people asked what the company's response to COVID was, roughly double the number of people asking about hiring. This suggests that prospects are twice as interested in understanding who the company as they are in learning about a job. Second take: If a huge percentage of your traffic comes in via job posts (job-focused), maybe preemptively tell them about your COVID response up front?

Some nice pre- and post-lockdown (unsegmented) data points on how employees and candidates attitudes have changed. Biggest takeaway: remote is no longer a nice-to-have (so... maybe you need to have a chat with leadership and HR about making this whole WFH thing a real thing).

PathMotion took a look at all the bot-driven conversations on its platforms to see what candidates wanted to know more about. This isn't what candidates said they wanted, it's what they asked for, so if you don't know what to add to your career site and social channels, this is a solid starting point for a content map. I will caution and say that Universum's data (day job alert!) agrees with a lot of these conclusions, they aren't equally true across the board for all audiences. Just keep that in mind.

Sally Bolig (hi Sally!) took recent LinkedIn data and did a better job of pulling out the insights than LinkedIn did. Of note: Companies are posting more in 2020 than before, posts about Covid seem to be plateauing as a messaging focus, and more companies are using LI to post about hiring. (This is good stuff if you want to convince marketing to let you have a seat at the LI table). Also note how quickly we all went from “don’t talk about race and politics on your corporate site” to “well, we have to say something about BLM…” in a matter of a few weeks.

Second, culture isn’t static. In fact, it often isn’t evident until something unexpected happens. According to analysis of 1.4MM Glassdoor scores, culture weighed heavily on whether ratings went up or down during the first months of COVID. Companies that dictated culture fared worse than companies who were transparent and allowed their culture to inform communication styles and subject. If a company understands that a culture is a function of what staff say it is, they respond better than when its rigid.