In this day and age, recruiting top talent has become highly competitive. Getting the best people to apply to the jobs your company posts is one of the biggest challenges that HR departments face.
Quality candidates look for more than just a fitting job – they want their work to be valued and an employer that they can trust. If a company wants to attract the upper echelons of talent within their industry, their HR leaders need to understand how to build an employer brand successfully.
For this reason, this article will go through the basics of employer branding. To this end, we will explain the importance of employer branding and guide you through the initial steps to build a strong employer brand.
Let’s get started.
What is employer branding?
Your employer brand refers to the reputation of your company and your identity as an employer. But this branding goes much further than your performance as a fair employer. It’s a general perception of your company by would-be candidates and how they view you on the job market.
In a nutshell, it’s the company’s popularity among job seekers.
Why is employer branding important?
Having a strong employer brand opens incredible opportunities for companies.
In the modern business world of talent acquisition, employer branding is used to introduce the company as a great place to work. It’s used for communicating with both current employees as well as attracting and retaining a new workforce.
Companies with better reputations and reputable branding have higher-quality and more satisfied employees. Consequently, candidate experience is significantly improved and they tend to retain employees longer.
Because top talent tends to apply to the strongest employer brands on the market, a strong branding strategy is critical to attracting your ideal candidates.
How to build your employer brand
Below are some of the essential steps you should take to start building a successful employer brand strategy.
Assess your company culture
First and foremost, you need to take a deep look within your company before you start building your employer brand. If you want candidates to perceive your company as a great place to work, you must first make sure that it really is a great place to work.
Thanks to social media, word travels fast nowadays. And if your branding efforts promise a work experience you don’t actually offer, your candidates will find out quickly.
To find out how your employees view the company, you actually need to talk to them. You can employ various assessment methods, such as anonymous surveys or face-to-face meetings. You need to be extremely honest with yourself and find out what they love about your company and what they don’t.
This way you will find the weaknesses you need to work on, but also which are the strengths you need to showcase to stand out from the competition.
Invest in learning and development initiatives
Today’s and tomorrow’s workforce is dominated by millennials, and this number is supposed to climb to around 75% by 2025. This demographic has an expectation to be provided with opportunities to learn new skills and develop existing ones.
In fact, when surveyed, millennials place the learning and improvement part of their job as important as their salary expectations.
By offering your workforce ways to improve their knowledge, and moreover, transferable professional certifications, you are certain to become a more attractive employer than the competition.
Personalize the candidate and employee experience
An important part of having a successful employer brand is nurturing every employee and candidate experience in your company. This can be done in various ways, such as:
- Career roadmaps – by mapping out your employees’ careers, you will effectively give them a clear and documented process that will help them advance through the company.
- Talent recognition and rewards – by recognizing effort, you will manage to boost both individual and staff morale. It will inspire employee motivation, which increases retention and positive word-of-mouth.
- Personalized interviews – automated recruitment platforms such as RecruitMe help your HR managers to cut down on tedious tasks such as resume screenings. This newfound time can be used to create more personalized interviews and increase the candidate experience tremendously.
Establish an Employee Advocacy Program
Your employees are the best way to spread the word that you are a great employer. They are seen as trustful advocates of your brand, with hands-on experience with your company.
Creating an effective advocacy program is all about the culture of the company and how it treats and values its employees. This can be done effectively through internal communication and by letting staff know of innovations or developments in the company.
While not all of your workers will be able to recruit, making them an integral part of the process will help you immensely. To do this, incentivize them in sharing content by rewarding them for their efforts.
Develop a content strategy to promote your employer brand
To build a strong employer brand, you must craft a comprehensive, multi-channel content strategy to engage your target candidates. Once you have your employees on board to spread the good word on your company as an outstanding employer, you need to get them to share relevant information that will boost your image in the eyes of upcoming candidates.
Same as you would be selling a product, you need to assess your candidate personas. Thi s means that the content you will be sharing must resonate with the ideal candidates that you are trying to reach.
Furthermore, make sure you tell a story through content. Building your employer brand through storytelling adds a personal element that differentiates your employer brand from similar companies.
Talk about the journey of your brand, specific employees, and the challenges you faced together. These stories will resonate with candidates and show your company as a collection of real human beings rather than faceless employees.
Conclusion
Today, job candidates have more power over the hiring process than ever. Companies can’t just post a job offer and hope to see talent flocking in. You need to prove your worth to these individuals and show them that working for you is a step in the right direction in their careers.
To do this, building a strong employer brand is essential, and hopefully, this short post will help you get started.