Attracting top executives to your organization is a lot like attracting clients to your brand. Marketing strategies are needed to convince the best candidates that they should come to work for you. In other words, you need to “sell” your organization to potential candidates. Here are some tips you can steal from the marketing department to recruit at the executive level. Start With Employer Branding It is important that executive candidates know about your organization and have a favorable impression of it, preferably before they are ever formally recruited by your organization. People want to be part of something meaningful and bigger than themselves, so your employer branding should show what your organization stands for and give potential executive candidates a sense of what they can be a part of. Appealing to emotion is always a good strategy for branding, and tying that into a vision and mission will go a long way toward making your organization look attractive to executives. Any way you can differentiate yourself from the competition is also a plus. Employer branding should include, at minimum, an employment-specific website or easily identifiable segment of the brand website, an active social media presence on all major and industry-specific channels, and print materials that can be presented during an initial interview. Understanding Executives and Job Acceptance Criteria Recruiting executives needs to be a candidate-centric activity, which requires the hiring team to understand where candidates are coming from and what it will take to get them to accept a job with your organization. Of course, everyone is different, but knowing what a candidate requires in order to accept a position with your organization is necessary if your recruiting is to be successful. HR thought leader Dr. John Sullivan has suggested developing an assessment that recruiters can use early on to determine what an interviewee’s job acceptance criteria are so that the hiring team can either meet those criteria or remove an executive from consideration if the criteria are not realistic for your organization. This approach is akin to a car salesman asking what he has to do to get you to buy a particular car, and it is an extremely effective sales technique that can be co-opted for executive recruiting purposes. Because acceptance criteria will have considerable overlap, the hiring team can prepare ahead of time for the common criteria in order to best persuade candidates to give your organization consideration. As the hiring team learns about common acceptance criteria, they may also be able to convince management and HR to adapt the job or position to better attract the type of employees they are looking to hire. Thrive TRM is ideal for tracking candidates and keeping track of their similarities and differences throughout the hiring process, as well as tracking what information was offered to candidates about your organization and other executive recruiting strategies. Explore all Thrive TRM features today.