Employer branding is a way for companies to market themselves in the eyes of job seekers and their internal employees. It is defined as “a coherent employer or employment brand, comprising a package of financial, economic, psychological, and symbolic elements that in combination improve the ability to recruit and retain staff”. In other words, a company reputation which will attract and retain the top talent on the market. And the better you are at creating a positive employer brand, the more talent you’ll get. So how do you put this into practise? How to build a beneficial employer branding strategy? Well, you will need to plan, build, and implement a strategy. Once created, it is important that the strategy is continuously managed. Here are the 3 most important steps on how to create a beneficial employer branding strategy, which we at Moyyn think will be the most helpful.
1. Define your value proposition, goals, and objectives
The first thing you have to do is to define your employee value proposition. This is all that your company stands for. From core values, to mission, vision and your company culture. Take a second to think about what makes you stand out from your competitors, and what you think is attracting talent to your organization. Is it your outstanding values or is it the friendly company culture which makes collaboration between your employees easier? Whatever it is, write it down.
Once you have done that, try to define what challenges your company in regards to talent acquisition. What is it that makes recruiting people difficult? And what are your future needs in hiring talent? To give an example: you are having a hard time attracting talent for the marketing department. And if this is the case, then your employer branding efforts should focus on attracting this kind of talent. Perhaps by making your company more active on social media.
Now you need to define your goals and objectives of these efforts. This will provide the company with incentives as to why you should focus on employer branding, and what you wish to achieve. This will later make it easier for you to measure the results of your employer branding strategy. Examples of employer branding goals could be:
- Increase the engagement on your social media channels
- Increase employee ratings
- Increase top-talent applicants on job postings
2. Create a candidate persona
What is a candidate persona you might ask yourself? Well, I’ll tell you what it is. A candidate persona is what your perfect candidate would look like to join your company. This will make your employer branding campaigns more customized, and candidates will have a better idea of what it is that you are looking for. This will result in better matches applying to your company, and candidates will feel more confident in that this is the place they belong. The best is to create a persona based on your own employees.
Let me give you an example of a persona for your marketing department. The perfect candidate would be someone belonging to Gen Z or close to it. Someone who values a career where learning and development is provided, along with a great company culture and work flexibility. They will most likely look for a job on social media channels, and they think their presence on social media is the most valuable employer branding content. Furthermore, they are themselves active on social media, displaying a creative mind.
Once you have defined your perfect candidate persona, you will have a much easier time defining the kind of content you need to create. By creating employer branding content which will attract your perfect candidate, and promoting it on the right channels, you will have a much higher chance of receiving applications which fit your persona. By defining and optimizing channels used by your personas, you can promote and get in touch with your candidates. The top three channels organizations use to promote their employer brand are company websites (69%), online professional networks (61%), and social media (47%).
3. Employee engagement
There is only so much a company can do to promote their employer brand. And yet, self-promoting it is still not the most effective way. What most companies tend to miss out on is the employee engagement, which is actually the most effective employer branding promotion there is. According to LinkedIn, companies whose employees share their brand’s social content experience an increase in views on their job postings. Which makes employee engagement crucial in the employer branding strategy. By encouraging your employees to be an ambassador for the company, by sharing their positive experiences, your brand will become more credible. And a credible brand is an attractive brand in the eyes of job seekers.
Great employee engagement could be reposting your social media postings, writing blog posts about your employees, or having social media competitions amongst your employees. For example, writing employee success stories, having your own company hashtag, or having a “selfie in front of the new office building” competition, with a nice prize for the winner.
Not only will employee engagement boost their company experience, but it will also improve the candidate experience. Seeing a company with high employee satisfaction will automatically improve their view of the company. Organizations with high employee satisfaction outperform low employee satisfaction companies by 202%, and this is something candidates will value too. 78% of job candidates say the overall candidate experience they get is an indicator of how a company values its people, and by showing how good your people value their work, this number will only increase!
We hope these 3 steps will help you in your efforts of creating a positive employer brand! After implementing the strategy, don’t forget to measure the impact it had. That way, you will be able to further improve it in the future. You can measure the results by going back to your goals and objectives, and see if you reached the results you were hoping for.
Moyyn is an AI based recruiting platform that will match your company to highly skilled professionals across the globe. Access our talent pool of more than 30000 candidates or let us and our AI do the matchmaking for you! Companies pay only after a successful hire or in subscription basis. Moyyn also has flexible pricing models for young startups struggling to get the right talent for their growth. Know more about how you can get candidates easily for the most in-demand positions here.