Your company’s signature experience exemplifies what you do especially well; it’s the odd or unique process that makes your company stand out in people’s minds. Developing a signature experience and communicating it to job candidates can help you streamline your hiring process. It also helps you build an unusually engaged, excited and committed work force.

Consider Whole Foods Market in Austin, Texas, which developed its signature team-based hiring process specifically to attract and retain people who work well in teams. If you want a job at Whole Foods, you have to be willing to be on probation for your first four weeks. At the end of that period, your peers decide whether to vote you off the island or welcome you to the tribe.

Job hunters who find this kind of team environment exciting and who excel in it are willing to go through the probation period. Those who don’t will self-select out of the interview process, saving themselves and Whole Foods a lot of time.

Different people find different kinds of signature experiences exciting. Some want to work for companies that let them create something of lasting value. Others relish working with a team. Still others are more interested in a work environment that offers security and well-defined expectations.

By making it clear to people what it’s like to work at your company, you attract people who are going to feel engaged by their work and who will want to make a commitment to your organization.

How to clarify and communicate your company’s signature experience? Ask yourself three questions:

1.       What do you and your colleagues say to interviewees? What reasons do you give job candidates for wanting to join your company? Is it job flexibility? A highly collaborative environment? A chance to see one’s great ideas in action? Whatever reason you present, that’s your company’s signature experience and the value proposition you offer to potential hires.

2.       Are you and your colleagues saying the same thing to interviewees? If you’re not, your company’s signature experience isn’t being communicated.

3.       How can we make the signature experience more vivid to all employees so that they, in turn, can communicate it vividly to potential hires?

Making your company’s signature experience vivid and palpable goes way beyond a poster on a conference room wall extolling one corporate goal or another. Signature experiences come to life when employees see them embodied in business processes—such as how you make promotion decisions or how you use employees’ ideas. When the signature experience is vivid to employees, it will be vivid to job candidates.

Create a vivid signature experience, and everyone wins: Job candidates can easily determine whether you offer the kind of environment that excites them and that will win their loyalty. And hiring managers attract the types of talent the company needs to excel.               

Lauren Keller Johnson is a Massachusetts-based writer. This article is based on an interview by Harvard Business Review’s Cathy Olofson conducted with Tamara J. Erickson, coauthor of What It Means to Work Here (Harvard Business Review, March 2007) and president of The Concours Institute, the Watertown, Massachusetts-based research and education arm of BSG Concours. To listen to the interview, go to HBR IdeaCast at www.hbrideacast.com and select Episode 35.

What is your company’s ‘signature’ experience?

Your company’s signature experience exemplifies what you do especially well; it’s the odd or unique process that makes your company stand out in people’s minds. Developing a signature experience and communicating it to job candidates can help you streamline your hiring process. It also helps you build an unusually engaged, excited and committed work force.

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