How Lending Club's Employer Branded Job Descriptions Attracted Their Top Engineer
In the super competitive space of recruiting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) talent, Lending Club's tech recruiter Brian Samson said his new process of attracting and hiring software developer Stephen Albin with Ongig was "one of the easiest sells that we've ever done", and saved 300+ hours of recruiting time.
"[...] one of the easiest sells that we've ever done"
Brian Samson, tech recruiter at Lending Club
The Challenge: The Need to Hire Engineers in Silicon Valley
Brian joined Lending Club at the beginning of 2013, attracted by the opportunity to have a big impact on the Financial Services marketplace. He knew Lending Club had a great story to tell, but how do you tell that to the busy software engineers of Silicon Valley who are recruited by everyone.
"Candidates didn't know who we were. They were obviously familiar with brands like Google and Facebook, but knew very little about Lending Club. I found myself having to tell our story early and often."
Brian Samson, tech recruiter at Lending Club
Like many recruiters, Brian would craft the perfect email to get through to engineering candidates. However, the message would blend in with the masses of emails from other companies seeking the same top talent. It was difficult to tell the story of the company and articulate the uniqueness of their employer brand in a brief, to-the-point recruiting email. Not to mention, it was coming from the recruiter and not the hiring team. This caused a low response rate.
"It used to take our recruiters 30 minutes to tell our story to each candidate—now our video job description does it in 3 minutes."
When candidates did respond, Brian found himself having to walk through their whole story over and over. While excited to talk with prospects, it still took at least 30 minutes to accomplish each time, taking time and expedience away from the hiring process.
Brian started to look for a way to build an Employer Brand to get Lending Club to stand out, that could also help him generate more inbound responses, and save time in educating candidates about what the opportunity was about.
Here's a summary video of Brian's problem and the steps he took towards solving it:
The Method: Your Employees Are Your Best Recruiters
When Brian joined Lending Club, he was impressed by the willingness of the team to participate in the hiring process. They were willing to attend meetups, talk with candidates, and do what they could to attract people.
This made building an Employer Brand a much easier proposition. The brand already existed, it was simply Brian's opportunity to figure out how to show it. Brian connected with Ongig to discuss using video job descriptions as a way to capitalize on his people's motivation to help recruit top Engineers.
Lending Club was able to turn "telling" into "showing" through the creation of their video job descriptions. Their hiring videos centered on the people that candidates would work for and with. They also gave candidates an "inside look" at the environment they would be working in.
By involving employees, the voice of the recruiting team at Lending Club was amplified.
"A 3-minute recruiting video that could be spread across the Web!"
They now had a 3-minute message that could be emailed to candidates, placed on their website and job descriptions, shared across social networks, and was SEO-ready for candidates researching the company on Google.
The result of putting Lending Club's employees on the front line was time savings and increased candidate engagement.
Here is the video Lending Club featured on their Java Developer job description:
The Results: Matching Expectations With Reality
The link between Employer Branding and a successful hire is the ability to match the right candidate's expectations with reality.
This was made possible because Stephen had already seen what the office was like, saw what the leaders and team were like, and had a good idea of the what kinds of problems he would be solving (just from watching the video!). And the key to that is the message was coming straight from the people he would be working with.
On the candidate side, Stephen Albin stated that:
"Ongig's video job description made Lending Club clearly stand out from other employers. After seeing the videos I knew that Lending Club was an organization committed to excellence and that it would be an exciting place at which to work."
Stephen Albin of Lending Club
Success in hiring Stephen was more efficient for both parties as the expectations for the job were made clear in the video, and matched what he witnessed when he came to interview in-person.
Again, that's the way an Employer Brand is supposed to work.
The Numbers:
Here we have shared the performance data of Lending Club's Software Engineer video job description on Ongig.
- Average time on page: 7:40
- Total video views: 2,668
- Clicks on apply: 19
- Hires: 1 (so far...)
Viewers have spent 341 Hours (and counting) on Lending Club's Software Engineer video job description. If each recruiting call for Brian and his team takes an average of 30 minutes, that's 682 phone calls.
Lending Club saved 341 hours of recruiting time.
This allows Brian and his team to focus on priority items, while inbound interest is generated out on the web. Some candidates may have increased interest, others may decide not to engage.