Many employers think that candidates are the only stakeholders that matter when it comes to HR recruitment. This is more or less a misconception because recruiting someone for a role at your company takes more than a job ad and an applicant to it; there ought to be a strong and competitive applicant pool to conveniently browse from, a reliable and diverse network to acquire unique applications and a set of methodologies, strategies and technology to efficiently implement a recruitment round.
Taking advantage of the company’s stakeholders is something important to do especially for foreign companies investing in Myanmar or start-ups trying to secure a market. This is because both of them are relatively new to the Burmese market and having other individuals or organizations to back them up is always a wise move. In addition, Myanmar is still a developing country and there are hundreds of community-oriented, charity-based and other kinds of non-profit organizations that are successful, influential and well-established so much so that they are willing to partner with your company for mutually beneficial yields. Besides, in Myanmar, it is not a challenging task to secure a business partnership so long as both parties are expressive of their respective goals and show an air of courtesy.
Here below are four key stakeholders of your company that you can work with to improve the way you recruit your new hires and optimize the quality of the applications you receive.
Current Employees
Your own employees are also the ones who can help you score great future recruits; there is no one better than your employees to communicate their first-hand experience about working at your company. The way they brand you through a word of mouth matters as much as your own employer branding because they can give out a candid, authentic air of what it is like to have you as an employer. So having your employees actually like you as an employer is an important part of retaining a great employer brand.
There are several ways you can get your employees to communicate a piece of positive information about your company; you can feature their testimonials and working experiences in your company’s web and social media contents. Many of the regular internet users who come across such posts can take an interest in your company and can become your recruiting leads. You can also reward the employees for their referrals for potential recruits. This way, you, as an employer, can build a more integrated relationship among your company and its current and future recruits.
Burmese people are highly sociable and amiable people; they aren’t reluctant to share information especially within friends and family on social media platforms like Facebook. The information thus disseminated can take the form of positive referrals that can boost up your company’s interested applicant pool or a negative resistance which can deflate your company’s reputation and compromise the validity of your employer brand.
Collaborators
Collaboration is an important aspect of a recruitment process. A company can acquire many suited candidates for its roles by working with other stakeholders and partners who have a network that your company may not have. Collaborating with other businesses or organizations can allow your company to share their resources and yield more optimal recruiting outcomes.
Collaboration for recruitment can happen in many ways; one of the most common is RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) which is the process of having external agents and third party recruiters to screen, interview and even select the best employees for a particular role at your company. RPO companies are usually established for-profit organizations with great networks comprising many talents who can come out as perfect matches for your company although the cost of using RPO can be significantly more expensive than other forms of collaborating like social media partnerships whereby another company with a different network assists yours by posting your recruiting opportunities on their social media platforms for little to no charge.
Collaboration for recruitment purposes is a common HR strategy in Myanmar. Employers will usually agree on the terms of the partnership and the usage of each other’s resources before engaging in a formal collaboration which can yield mutually beneficial goals for the companies. JobNet happens to be one of the most trusted names when it comes to recruitment partnership. Companies can work with JobNet and have their recruitment opportunities available online on JobNet’s opportunities portal that thousands of job seekers countrywide usually browse through on a regular basis to stay posted about job alerts.
Competitors
Learning from your competitors is also one of the ways you can strategize your company’s branding better than ever. There are several ways you can observe the way your rival companies recruit their hires and re-design your employer branding program without committing any kind of plagiarism or copyright breach.
Firstly, you can learn your competitors’ EVP (Employer Value Proposition) which is something the employer can compensate or contribute to the employees in return for their services or simply a trade-off between what the employer and the employees offer to each other. Your competitor’s EVP tell much about the incentives they use to attract the candidates and your company can come up with similar or more unique offers that can make your recruitment openings much more competitive. Nevertheless, this approach should not be confused with ‘employee poaching’ which is an unethical way of acquiring employees from another company by enticing them with more attractive job offers.
Exploring a company’s recruitment website or opportunities portal is a good way to start learning about a company’s EVP. In addition to that, Myanmar widely uses such social media platforms as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn where you can safely scroll through your rival company’s regular contents and potentially milk out some information about its EVP.
Communities
You can reach out to your target candidate segment through the community or the society your company operates in. For example, if you’re looking for fresh graduates from a particular academic background, you can connect with the faculty, alumni and the student body of a university and discuss with them about your recruitment opportunities. You can talk the department heads or university operators to promote those opportunities on your behalf or set up the recruitment drives at a special occasion like a university job fair to acquire more of your target candidates.
Or if you are aiming at communicating a particular message about your company’s recruitment opportunities to a certain community, you can try engaging in CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) programs and deliver the information about the opportunities indirectly. This can leave a positive impression on your company by the people in the society due to your goodwill contributions, at the same time, allow you to get access to numerous potential applicants who affiliate with your CSR programs somehow.
Myanmar companies are known for being enthusiastic about organizing a wide range of CSR activities. Although the purpose of doing so is multifold, many of the companies aim to forge a meaningful relationship with the society they’re running their business in. Most commonly organized CSR programs include donation and fundraising drives for a particular cause, sponsoring colleges and universities for scholarships and bursaries or environmental day celebrations. Through these wide array of events, your company can definitely score a worthy recruit for your company even if it’s as someone who unintentionally walks past your CSR booth which catches his attention, gets to know more about your company and turns in a CV immediately.