Are you struggling to attract and retain top talent for your business? It's time to take a closer look at your employer's branding strategy.
In today's fast-paced job market, building an employer brand strategy can make all the difference in recruiting the best job candidates and creating a loyal, engaged workforce. But where do you start?
Don't worry, we've got you covered. In this article, we'll show you 8 easy steps to develop an employer branding strategy that will make your company stand out from the crowd and attract the top talent you need to succeed.
Get ready to unleash your company's full potential with this employer branding strategy best practices.
What Is Employer Branding Strategy?
When it comes to building a successful business, it's not just about having a great product or service. You need a strong team of talented and engaged employees to bring your vision to life. That's where an employer branding strategy comes in.
Simply put, an employer branding strategy is a plan to create and promote a positive image of your company as an employer. It's a way to showcase your company culture, values, and mission, and attract top talent to your organization.
A well-executed employer branding strategy can help differentiate your company from competitors, build a loyal and engaged workforce, and improve overall employee retention and productivity. It can also position your brand as a desirable place to work in the eyes of potential customers and clients.
But developing an employer brand is not just about slapping a catchy slogan on your website or social media profiles. It requires a deep understanding of your company's values, culture, and employee experience, as well as a targeted approach to reaching and engaging with your desired audience.
By investing in your employer branding strategy, you're not just building a stronger and more successful organization - you're also creating a better workplace for your current and future employees. So if you're ready to take your business to the next level, it's time to start developing your employer branding strategy today.
Good To Know: 7 Employer Branding Trends Every Employer Should Know
Importance Of Having A Strong Employer Brand
Imagine you're a job seeker, scrolling through job listings online. You come across two listings for similar positions at two different companies. One company's listing is vague and unappealing, with no information about the company culture or employee experience.
The other company's listing is detailed, and engaging, and showcases a strong employer brand with testimonials from happy employees and a clear mission statement. Which company would you be more likely to apply to?
This is the power of a strong employer brand. In today's competitive job market, it's not enough to simply offer a good salary and benefits package.
Job seekers want to work for companies that align with their values, provide a positive and supportive work environment, and offer opportunities for growth and development.
A strong employer brand can help attract top talent to your organization, reduce turnover rates, and improve overall employee engagement and productivity.
It can also help differentiate your company from competitors and position your brand as a desirable place to work in the eyes of potential customers and clients.
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How To Develop Employer Branding Strategy In 8 Easy Steps
Alright, so you’re ready to get serious about your employer brand.
To build a compelling employer brand, you don’t need to get experts. We’ll break it down for you into some fundamental steps to building an employer branding strategy to kick-start the process.
Step 1: Audit the perception of your brand
A real-life example of a brand audit is Goldman Sachs. They conducted a survey of over 40,000 employees on a variety of metrics to understand the perception of the company (including diversity and reputation).
In the results, they discovered some unfavorable words crop up repeatedly like “cutthroat,” “elitist,” and “competitive.”
To counter this, they launched the “Day In The Life” campaign that shows what it’s really like to work at Goldman Sachs and attract the next generation of talent.
Before anything, the first thing you need to do is clearly understand how people initially view your company.
A comprehensive audit of the brand’s current perception, both external audiences and your employees, lets you figure out if your present reputation and messaging project the attractiveness and values you’re aiming for. You can pick up cues from several places, including
- Social media channels - Track your organization’s mentions to get a deeper understanding of how outsiders view your brand.
- Employment review sites - Many potential employees will scour through such sites in detail prior to deciding on their future employer. Here you can find answers to questions like what people say about your organizational culture, what’s your rating, what are the negative reviews, etc.
- Employee feedback - Hear from your employees themselves through surveys or open meetings. This way, you can pinpoint issues and rectify them.
Ultimately, this audit will help you determine what your brand looks like from different angles.
Step 2: Define the goals of your employer's brand
The process is quite straightforward. Your focus should be on determining the objectives you wish to accomplish with your employer branding strategy. There are several typical targets, including:
- Increase offer acceptance rate
- Increase referral rates
- Get more career site visitors
- Build trust with current candidates
- Increase employer brand awareness
- Enhance candidate engagement
- Increase online engagement
- Get more high-quality candidates
- Get more job applicants
Step 3: Identify your candidate persona
Defining your ideal candidates is a vital aspect of the employer branding process. Without this knowledge, it's impossible to craft a focused message to attract them.
Check out our cheat sheet for creating a candidate persona.
Step 4: Establish your company’s differentiators
Knowing that your company is unique helps craft your brand story. Essentially, it’s your company culture, social responsibilities, values, mission, etc.
Feeding this into employer branding helps someone decide why they want to stay with you or join you over another company.
Step 5: Create your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
Employee Value Proposition is a unique set of values and offerings that positively influence the targeted audience.
Essentially, it’s what you offer that makes employees passionate about being a part of your organization, and as such, is a lynchpin of your employer branding strategy.
The employee lies at the heart of your EVP. Your proposition must cover everything they’re looking for so they can connect with your firm in a fulfilling and positive way. So what matters to your staff?
- Health insurance?
- Paid time off?
- Bonuses?
- Work-life balance?
- Flexibility?
- A thriving culture?
- Professional development?
Ideally, it should be an assortment of the above. Either way, your EVP is central to how you can retain your existing staff and how attractive potential candidates find your brand.
You need answers to a few questions to successfully set up an employer branding strategy. Why have your current employees picked you? Why are they staying back and not jumping ship? What do they like the most about you?
Answers to these questions will best explain your EVP, and by doing so, you will focus on attracting your ideal candidates.
Every EVP has 5 main blocks:
A quick recap of the above steps:
After following the above steps, you’ve managed to:
- Audit your brand
- Understand your goals
- Identify your ideal candidates
- Mark out your differentiators
- Determine your EVP
Step 6: Define the channels to promote your employer brand
With all the information you've gathered, the question remains: how will you reach potential recruits and effectively engage with your current employees on a global scale?
Here’s where the candidate persona comes to aid. It helps understand what channels your candidates connect with. Once you know the effective channels, it’s easier to position yourself and target your audience successfully.
The following channels are just a few options for promoting your employer brand.:
Through images, testimonials, blogs, etc. you can translate your vision, inclusivity, the development of your employees and brand, and what your brand stands for. Just remember, not to make it seem fabricated or forced. To appeal to your audience, authenticity is critical.
Step 7: Internal review and alignment
At least in the initial stages, you must get buy-in from all stakeholders - whether it’s management, employees, internal recruiters, or others.
Once everyone is happy, you can develop the resources and tools to educate the wider teams and ensure every single person is on the same page going forward.
Step 8: Measure your employer's branding success
After establishing your goals in the initial stages, it's important to measure the success of your employer's branding strategy.
With this in mind, we’ve created a dashboard to help you measure employer branding. It’s long so you can have options and select the metrics that connect more with your current challenges and goals.
By the end of it, you will have a dependable means to measure the appeal of your employer brand, as well as which key performance indicators (KPIs) provide the most accurate results.
- Retention & attrition rates - Keep a record of the number of employees who stay and leave on a yearly basis and their average length of service. See if you can identify any shared leaving trends among your workforce like do they possess a certain skillset, whether are they from a particular area in the organization, or whether are they of a certain age.
- Employee opinion - Besides general employee surveys, get an in-depth analysis through deeper assessments like interviews with senior leadership, reviewing exit survey results, or focus groups to analyze better, set benchmarks, and compare results year-on-year.
- A number of applicants - As the name suggests, the number of applicants is how many candidates apply for jobs with your organization. This metric goes hand-in-hand with other metrics like quality of hire. And along with increased applications, you also want to hire the right candidate for the right role.
- Quality of hire - Sure, you want to attract talent but you also want the right people filling in the right roles, and here’s where the quality of hire plays a pivotal role. You can assess with pre and post-hire performance objectives and also measure your current average profit contribution per employee and you can benchmark what top talent should be able to contribute.
- Cost per hire - It’s the cumulative cost of filling an open role including, how long you spend hiring for that role. The lesser time the better, but again: quality of hire is key. Calculate by adding all the internal and external costs of hire and dividing that by the number of hires in a specific period. Divide that sum by the number of hires in a certain time frame.
- Time to hire - Time since the position was open until the new hire starts working. The less the better, but combine this one with the quality of hire.
- Source of hire - Where are your best candidates coming from? Select the best source and drive all your focus and investment there.
- Candidate conversion ratio - This is the number of successful candidates hired compared to the number of vacancies available during a fixed time. This is a valuable metric to determine your recruiter's value. If you have a qualified candidate yet are unable to fill the role, you need to review your recruitment strategies. Candidate conversion ratio = Successful hires made / total vacant jobs x 100
- Candidate satisfaction - This is gold right here. It’s easier to capture feedback from candidates who you hire than those you don’t. So make the best use of it!
- Offer acceptance rate - Going through the entire hiring process only to not receive a job offer acceptance can be expensive and disheartening. You must figure out the reason behind low acceptance rates. You can calculate this by the number of successful job offers/number of job offers made over a period x 100.
- Employee referrals - During referrals, your employees are happy with your culture, which is great. And they refer candidates who will fit in, so they’re sort of pre-screened. Hence, this is one of the best ways to find quality candidates. Calculate this by the total number of referrals/number of those referrals hired x 100.
- A number of interviews - You can collect this information very quickly and it tells you the quality of the applications you received.
- A number of clicks - The more clicks on your ad or career page, the more popular is your employer brand.
- Attrition - A detailed review of why people are leaving your organization will help combat this. Check time without recognition, last promotion, last manager, area, tenure, etc.
- Exit reasons - Exit interviews are important, and use this time to capture reasons why people leave. Typical answers will be new challenges, more money, or better opportunity. Seldom will people say the truth about a bad manager. Dig deeper, if possible.
The Only Employer Branding Guide You Need!
In today's competitive job market, developing an effective employer branding strategy is crucial for attracting and retaining top talent.
By following employer branding best practices, such as defining your company's values, showcasing your culture and mission, and engaging with your desired audience, you can build a strong employer brand that resonates with current and future employees.
But employer branding is not just about creating a positive image of your company. It's also an essential component of your overall recruitment strategy.
A well-executed employer branding and recruitment strategy can help you attract the right candidates, reduce turnover rates, and improve overall employee engagement and productivity.
So whether you're a small startup or a large corporation, investing in your employer branding and recruitment strategy should be a top priority. By taking the time to develop a comprehensive and effective plan, you can create a positive and supportive work environment that attracts and retains top talent, and positions your brand as a desirable place to work.
