Differentiation is Key
In modern times, company culture, corporate values, and brand positioning play a greater role in organizations than ever before. In order to hire a great workforce, businesses need to focus on differentiating themselves in the labour market.
A business is only as good as the people running it and thus, every company, big or small wants to attract the right people. The key to recruiting, retaining, and engaging smart and successful professionals lies in building a strong employer brand.
What Is Employer Branding?
If you take a closer look at the companies who are consistently attracting the best talent in the business, you’ll notice that they are doing one thing right – Employer Branding. Think of your reaction if you received a job offer from Google, Amazon, or Facebook? Wouldn’t you want to leave your current employer and work with them? It’s because these companies have invested a lot in building an impeccable employer brand. We perceive a certain culture about working with this top-notch companies and thus, we want to experience working there.
Your Unique Scent
An employer brand is your unique identity, your unique scent, as per William Tincup. It is something that makes you stand out amongst other companies in the business. Your company’s ability to promote this unique identity to the group of people you’re interested in hiring is known as employer branding. As we know, branding has been an integral tool for marketers to win over the hearts of customers. This formula is now being embraced for recruiting and has proven exceptional results. When formulating an employer branding strategy, it is important to realize that you can only attract current and future employees if your identity is credible, true, aspirational, distinctive, and relevant to your market. In order to achieve this, you must conduct thorough research and ensure that your identity addresses your top talent’s and top management’s needs.
The Importance of Employer Branding
People tend to work for cultures, and not for companies. Thus, your team’s perception of you as an employer is of great significance in this competitive market. In fact, as per Randstad’s research, 87% of people joined a company simply because of a cultural fit. On the contrary, 80% of employees have left a company because of its culture. Both employees and companies consider company culture one of the strongest determinants in choosing an employer. Every company has an employer brand in the market. Whether you want to let candidates view your company as per their understanding or make efforts to cultivate a unique brand identity is up to you.
A Futuristic Approach to Beat Competition
By 2020, employer branding strategy will be a key aspect of recruiters’ long-term strategies and rightly so. 94% of recruiters believe that hiring will become more competitive this year. If you want to be the leader in your industry, you must include some employer branding activities to draw the right people towards your business.
Randstad Employer Brand Research 2021
An Effective Guide to Your Employer Branding Process
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An Effective Guide to Your Employer Branding Process
Though you can cultivate your employer brand through different messaging techniques, you can’t really control it. Ultimately, your employer brand is what your candidates really think about your company. You can, however, influence what people say about your company and thus, we bring you some employer branding ideas to help you get started
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1. A Relevant Careers Site
Your careers website will be one of the first places prospective candidates will visit to know more about you. Your site must be easy to navigate and should have details about your company, jobs, mission, culture, etc. Also, make sure your site is mobile optimized as nearly 94% of job seekers research new jobs on their smartphones. Don’t forget to highlight your EVP – Employer Value Proposition on your website. It is a roadmap to the programs, benefits, and rewards you offer to your candidates and explains to new candidates why they should join your organization.
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2. A Simplified Application Experience
Many candidates tend to quit their application process half-way if it is too lengthy or complicated. While companies may believe that their process is in-depth and detailed, it may come across as a hurdle when you’re trying to attract the best employees who have multiple opportunities and are short on time. The people who apply to your company are on the way to becoming brand advocates for your business. If they get frustrated during the process, it can lead to major brand damage. If you want to get a first-hand experience of your application process, use a fake name and see how you feel when you apply. Are you enthusiastic to work for the company? What’s your perception of the employer brand?
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3. An Engaging Social Media Presence
Currently, this is the most commonly used platform by companies who want to build their employer brand. 62% of candidates research a company on social media before they even apply. Including social media in your employer branding campaigns will drive excellent results as candidates get a channel to directly interact with your brand. Social media is also a great platform to give prospective candidates a preview of your company’s culture, work environment, and current opportunities. Don’t forget to initiate real conversations with people on social media to leverage the benefits of employer branding.
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4. Focus on Smart Content
Content has always been on the centre stage in the marketing process and it’s rapidly becoming important to recruiting as well. In terms of recruitments, content involves any information that can be consumed by prospective candidates. It can be blog posts, whitepapers, infographics, videos, surveys, landing pages, and job descriptions. Today, nearly 85% of job searches begin with a search engine. Top talent in the world is looking for companies the same way they make any other purchasing decisions. Thus, the importance of employer branding increases multi-fold.
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5. A Secret Weapon – Your Employees
In the age where transparency and honesty rule because of the internet, employer branding is shaped by the real-life stories and perspectives of your alumni and current employees. New candidates often look at your employees as a window into the real world of your company. Thus, candidates will believe your employees much more than your corporate messaging. You can encourage your employees to share their experiences of working with your company in the form of a video, blog, tagline, or picture. This can be posted on social media as part of your employer branding activities.
Top Employer Branding Activities & Techniques
- All of your employees should know the company’s elevator pitch as it can help them become successful brand ambassadors for your employer branding campaign whenever they talk to anyone.
- Shift your focus towards retaining your current employees and show the world that you genuinely practice the saying, ‘People are our priority’.
- If you have some great people with great stories, make sure they get outside the walls of your company. You can specifically set aside time and money for your top performing employees so that they invest in blogging for your employer branding process.
- Don’t forget to give your employees a voice. You can start a live chat wherein employees are allowed to talk to prospective candidates. Also, encourage your team to demonstrate how they really live the brand through various communication channels.
- Use photos extensively to promote your brand on various social media profiles as photos are the powerhouse for social engagements. Posts with pictures or albums have an increased engagement by 120-180 percent respectively on Facebook. Isn’t this motivation enough to click and post maximum pictures of your company’s culture?
- Work on mobile. The most common time people search for jobs is between 11 am to 2 pm on a Monday. This means, that they are searching for jobs while they are work, on their mobile phones. Your return on investment from social recruitment can easily be doubled if your brand is optimized for mobile usage.
- Encourage rewards to your employees to boost participation. Whether it is with giveaways or incentives and prizes, you can conduct some games to make your employees feel empowered enough to share their stories with their friends.
- Reward innovative ideas as experimentation can be a great motivator for new employees to join your company. Don’t forget to give your employees a public pat on the back when they do a good job.
Some Proven Employer Branding Best Practices
- Make sure you consider an employer branding strategy that runs across the employment lifecycle and doesn’t just limit it to recruitment or talent acquisition.
- Be clear about what you stand for across all media and employer branding activities. The mission, vision, and values of your company must be well-defined and followed through.
- Embrace a community concept in your employer branding techniques for sustainable business practices. When you focus on the ethical use of resources of water, energy, and human resources, you will attract better talent.
- Embrace technological advancements to streamline engagement for candidates and make the job search easier. Whether it is assessment, selection, interview, or feedback, technology can help in offering a great candidate experience, thus reinforcing your employer brand.
- Use storytelling to keep top candidates engaged regularly as it offers an opportunity to make your brand personal.
- Connect your employer branding campaigns with your corporate brand. Many times, job seekers tend to stop buying from a company if they have a negative candidate experience. As the world is more connected than ever before, it’s vital to have a consistent message, whether you’re opting for employer branding ideas or corporate branding.
How to Design Your Best Employer Branding Campaigns?
By now, you would have agreed with the importance of employer branding if you want to work with the best people in the business. As you begin brainstorming employer branding ideas, here are few tips to help you design a result-driven campaign:
Define Your Reason for Being
Many companies either forget along the way or never really knew their real reason for being. This isn’t about the money, but about why you are doing what you do and what is your real cause and beliefs?
Discover Your Cultural Pillars
As discussed earlier, your company’s culture plays a significant role in your talent acquisition process. You can discover your cultural pillars by conducting a workshop wherein all of your employees are present and willing to contribute.
Communicate Your Strengths
Once you know your reason for being and your cultural pillars, you need to start communicating your employer branding ideas while being clear, consistent, and personal. Your key facets need to go outside your company walls and reach out to prospective candidates if you’re looking to hire and retain top talent.
Key Takeaways
Undoubtedly, HR practices and the culture of business are undergoing a paradigm shift. Companies need to up their game to stay afloat in this competitive market and attract and retain top talent. Employer branding is not something you can do once or twice and then let it fall behind. Instead, as a leading organization, you need a consistent and effective plan with the right employer branding activities.
When you’re implementing your employer branding techniques, consider changing your hiring procedures too. Rather than hiring simply on the basis of qualification or experience, hire on the basis of a cultural fit. The top 3 EVP drivers in India include companies that use the latest technology, have a good financial health, and maintain a good reputation in the industry. So, if your company, too, is in the race of recruiting leaders, you must be able to smartly communicate your EVPs and reach out to prospective candidates with a striking employer branding campaign. Consider the examples of top companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, or Facebook and you’ll have a good direction for your employer branding ideas.
