“Recruitment IS marketing. If you’re a recruiter nowadays and you don’t see yourself as a marketer, you’re in the wrong profession.”
Your employees are your brand’s lifeblood. They have agreed to spend 8+ hours a day with you, which is a commitment much greater than almost any product sale. Cultivating an environment where they feel valued is paramount. But you can’t just flip a switch and make that happen. Every brand has an idea of who they want to be. But just because you want to be perceived in a particular light doesn’t mean you actually will be. You certainly can’t fake it till you make it.
Whereas customer brands can portray themselves in highly aspirational ways, the promises employer brands make are closely watched by powerful brand stakeholders—employees—and have little room for truth-stretching.
If you want employer branding, you need to follow through on your values and tell earnest and honest stories. Doing an employer brand audit is a helpful way to make this happen.
During an audit, we interview a range of employees to understand their experience of your employer brand. This objective look at your brand’s strengths and weaknesses helps you clarify what makes you special and what you need to improve. With these insights, you can work to nurture a healthy employer brand and, most importantly, represent your brand authentically and honestly.
That doesn’t mean this work is easy to do. Building a strong brand requires fearless self-inventory, a willingness to face criticism, and a commitment to create a happier workforce. But you don’t have to go it alone.
The entire point of this exercise is to get an honest perspective about your brand, both inside and outside the walls of your organization. The more people we talk to, the more understanding you’ll have. This means we need to look beyond the break room or the boardroom. Ideally, we should solicit the perspective of: Potential Employees (applicants), Current Employees, Past Employees
Again, our goal here is to get a holistic look at your employer branding to understand your greatest strengths, weaknesses, and differentiators. To get these insights, though, we need to ask the right people the right questions which we will be sending out to the agreed list to complete an online survey.
We will be emailing the online surveys to the agreed list to collect feedback.
Turning insights into action. Now that we’ve done our data collecting, it’s time to put it to work.
Employer branding is not a recruitment function, it’s a company function. It should engage with leadership, with HR, with sales. It should help tie all these things together. It’s the connective tissue between all the individual organs, that are very good at that one thing they do. I want to know that the heart, lungs and kidneys etc. are all connected in some way.”
BONUS: 11 Employer branding best practices
Make employer branding a central part of your HR strategy
Building a strong employer branding strategy is a long term plan and not an afterthought. Prioritize building your employer brand with your team and make recruitment marketing a key component of your overall HR strategy.
Keep your employees happy
A conflict between your organization and an employee can tarnish your employer brand.
When they feel like they are in the right, employees hesitate a lot less to go public with horrifying work stories nowadays. And whether it is through word of mouth or on social media, negative comments about your company can spread like wildfire and have the power to ruin your reputation.
The best way to avoid such a scenario, besides ensuring that all your colleagues behave appropriately in the work environment, is to keep your current employees happy and maintain good relations with your ex-employees.
Keep your candidates happy
Job seekers can also spread the word about a negative candidate experience.
For this reason, you need to ensure that your organization is able to offer a high-quality candidate experience, to all candidates, throughout the entirety of the hiring process.
Extra tip: Candidates need organizations to be transparent. Keep your candidates up to date, and share feedback to let them know what they need to improve.
Embrace storytelling
Craft a meaningful story about your company and work culture to help potential candidates connect with your brand.
You wouldn’t have a company without your people. Showcase your employees’ success stories through videos, via blog posts on your career page, or your social accounts. Instagram and the proximity it creates with the audience is ideal for this.
In other words, tell a good story to show that your organization is a great place to work at.
Show your values by doing something to benefit a cause
Volunteering or donating to a cause tells people what your company cares about.
Be present and active on social media & events
Social media is one of the most relevant channels to promote your employer brand — especially when recruiting Millennials and Gen Z.
Extra tip: people love to interact for and with their organization. Involving your current employee in strengthening your employer brand will contribute to increasing your employee retention rates.
Engage the management team
Employer branding is a team effort.
It’s essential to get your company stakeholders involved in building your employer brand. You should also be able to rely on your management team to promote your employer brand key messages on social media.
Share the responsibility
Strong brands emerge from collective efforts.
Support all your employees to be active on social media, and provide social media training if necessary, as not everyone knows how to properly use social media. What’s more, providing training will help you to make sure that employees follow strict brand guidelines when sharing content with their networks. It is key to build a strong and consistent brand.
Make friends with like-minded companies
United, we grow stronger.
We all get by with a little help from our friends. That includes other companies too. Build and nurture relationships with like-minded companies that share your values, or values you want to be associated with.
One way to do this is to amplify your friend companies’ messages on social media by engaging with them. Leave relevant comments and spur conversations! Alternatively, you can host events together if your target audiences are compatible.
Host and attend events
Always be transparent.
Arrange an open house day or an event in a relevant learning institution that will connect you with your target candidates and show your company image in a positive light.
Practice empathy
When you’re wading through hundreds of resumes, it can be easy to forget what the process feels like from the candidate’s perspective.
Keep empathy at the heart of everything you do to create meaningful connections with candidates through your various brand touchpoints, both online and offline.
Putting yourself in their shoes will significantly improve the candidate experience, help you get to know your candidates better, spot warning signs that they’re not the right fit, and ultimately find the right match.