The Science of Employer Branding: Building a Magnetic Company Culture
According to a survey, almost seventy-five percent of candidates consider the reputation of a company as the key metric when applying for job opportunities. Therefore, you need to strategize to build a strong employer brand.
Wondering what an employer brand is? It is the identity or reputation that the organization communicates to its employees and potential candidates. This blog explores employer branding, its importance, and steps to create a branding strategy with examples.
What Is Employer Branding?
Employer branding is a strategy that helps you manage your employer brand or reputation among your existing and potential employees. It is a way to market your organization or company as a brand to the job seekers.
The responsibility of relaying the appropriate message of your employer brand falls on the CEO or marketing department. In larger organizations, a recruitment marketing team looks over these initiatives. They get insights from all the conversation that is happening about your organization and further improve the engagement.
Objective of Employer Branding
The objective of this branding is to convey that your organization is a worthy employer. Online reviews, testimonials, referrals, social media posts, and conversations about your organization by your employees and candidates influence your employer brand. Therefore, the aim is not just to attract talented prospective hires but also to retain high-performing employees. Now, how will you do that? By highlighting your organization’s unique culture and values and differentiating yourself from your competitors.
But why should you be interested in knowing whether your employees are talking about your organization in a positive light or not? Let us discuss this in the next section.
Benefits of Employer Branding While Recruiting
Here is how employer branding benefits the recruitment efforts of an organization:
Positive Company Culture
Ask anyone, and they will tell you they prefer a stress-free and supportive workplace environment, not a gloomy and unsupportive one. Therefore, focus on your company being synonymous with a positive culture in people’s minds.
Talent Acquisition
People with talent look for associations with companies that have a good employer brand because it boosts their resume and work experience. Therefore, strong employer branding in recruitment will lead to a rise in talented candidates applying to your company.
Referral Advantage
If your employer brand fails to influence your current employees, you might miss out on a huge advantage. Employee referrals bring quality employees, but it will only happen when existing employees recommend your organization to their network. So, it is essential to employ a branding strategy.
Company Reputation
What do the candidates see before applying to a company? Its reputation in the field. By promoting your employer brand, you maintain a good reputation that helps attract job seekers.
Reduce Turnover Rate
If your employees feel your brand is reputable, drop your worries immediately. They are most likely to be satisfied with their jobs and less likely to consider other job opportunities.
Diverse Workplace
A diverse and inclusive workplace is considered safe and productive. Your organization will attract high-performing individuals from diverse backgrounds if you promote inclusivity initiatives as part of your branding.
Reduce Hiring Costs
A strong employer brand may attract higher applications than a regular recruitment process because candidates seek to work with reputed companies. Sometimes, they are ready to work on a lower pay scale if the employer brand is reputable. This way you can cut down your hiring costs by a decent margin.
Employer Branding Strategies
You have read enough, and it is time for action now! Follow these employer branding strategies to build your own strategy.
Back to Basics: Highlight Your Branding Goals
Familiarize yourself with the company’s objective, core business, mission, goals, culture, and values. By identifying your company’s aim and business requirements, you will understand the kind of talent pool you need to achieve that aim. Your branding goals can range from getting high-quality candidates to improving offer-acceptance rates. You have to identify unique attributes of your company, around which you will build your employer brand.
Let’s Do Some Work: Audit Your Employer Brand
It might seem like a long process, but auditing your brand can be very helpful. Here, you are trying to identify what your current employees think about your company and the perception of the company among job seekers.
Some methods you can utilize for this exercise are employee surveys, analysis of career site reviews, and internet and social media searches. You can also hire a firm to conduct internal and external research and monitor your brand reputation. Whatever method you choose should help you identify your strengths and weaknesses. What your employees appreciate, you must highlight, and what is lacking must be worked on.
What Is Your Message? Employer Value Proposition Speaks
The employer value proposition (EVP) comprises your organization’s culture, values, and mission, along with the benefits it offers employees in exchange for the skills, talent, and experience they bring. It is a corporate message that speaks directly to the potential hires and employees.
So, craft a purposeful employer value proposition to invoke passion among the employees and potential candidates who want to do meaningful work with an organization that has a positive impact.
Ready to Reach the People? Promote Your Employer’s Brand
Now that you have your EVP ready, it is time to take your employer brand to the masses. The better you promote it, the more likely you are to benefit. You leverage various channels to promote your employer brand. You can post a job with an appealing job description. Some other channels are:
- Careers Page
- Candidate Experience
- Online Reviews
- Current Employee Testimonials and Success Stories
- Social Media Profiles
- Blog Posts
Success or Loss? Track Your Progress and Find Out
Tracking your progress is an essential strategy. Therefore, measure your employer branding strategy through various metrics such as quality of hire, cost per hire, offer acceptance rate, time to fill, application rate, source of hire, etc. These will help you analyze the effectiveness of your initiatives and optimize your strategy accordingly for the future.
Employer Branding Examples
Still, wondering if employer branding is a good idea for your company? Here are some examples to inspire your branding zeal.
Shopify
Over the years, entrepreneurship has changed many folds. Now entrepreneurs and their employees are working from not just the conventional office set up, but also from the comfort of their home. On its career page, Shopify identifies this new generation of entrepreneurs and potential employees who share the same ethos. Their ‘Make Commerce Better for Everyone’ slogan is a great mantra for branding because it shows how they support different talents.
Tata Motors
When potential candidates are exploring jobs, they want to know more about the organization’s work culture. Testimonials from employees who have previously worked or are currently working in the organization are helpful in such cases. The career page of Tata Motors is rich in such testimonials, providing an insight into the culture of the company.
Internshala
Underlining the core business of your company is very important for your employer brand. The career page of Internshala features a video highlighting a part of its target audience of students. It also has a section describing the benefits the employees and interns get and the workplace culture of the platform. It helps engage and inform potential employees about the company and motivates them to apply for their desired job opportunities.
ITC
As we have read in previous sections, branding strategy involves providing information about mission, culture, and values. ITC’s career page provides an informative section called ‘Know ITC’ that serves this exact purpose. Another section ‘Is ITC Right for Me?’ is a good example of an employer value proposition as it describes what the company has in store for employees and its unique features.
Conclusion
Employer branding is essential for managing a brand and marketing it among potential and existing employees. Its benefits include reducing employee turnover rate, and hiring costs, and enhancing many other elements as discussed. You can deploy your own strategy for your employer brand with the five easy steps explained above. You can also pursue a digital marketing course to learn more about building a brand online and reaching your target audience.
Now that you have all the information, are you ready to work on your employer brand? Tell us about your strategy in the comments section!
