The Danton Guide to Employer Brand
As we embark on Employer Brand Awareness Week, it’s inspiring to see how far we have come over recent years when looking at how organisations are evolving to attract and retain their best talent. Employer brand relates to how your people and potential hires view your business. It goes beyond a physical brand (or placing a beanbag in the boardroom) and it’s gaining pace.
With a reported 94% of people considering an organisations employer brand when applying for jobs, it’s safe to say that businesses need to do more than simply posting a job advert when looking to fill a position.
We’ve put together some considerations to help you develop your employer brand. Read on to find out more.
Tip 1: Get a Handle on your People Reviews
Before you launch into your new employer brand strategy, take a moment to review your reviews. Check out employer review sites to gain an insight into what your previous and current people think about your company and employer brand. But don’t leave it there. Make sure you do your housekeeping and respond to the reviews, whether they’re positive or negative - this shows that you care and appreciate their feedback.
Then focus on gathering more feedback and survey your current workforce to understand why they choose to work with you or why they would consider leaving.
Tip 2: Set Objectives and KPI’s
Once you have reviewed the current state of your employer brand, you should have good understanding of where you need to improve. Include these areas in your objectives and consider measuring the following:
People retention rate
Job application rate
Source of candidates
Satisfaction levels
Tip 3: Create a Persona for Each Role
Every time you open a role, create a persona for your ideal candidate. Your persona should also indicate which aspects of your employer brand should be highlighted to attract this specific candidate.
Candidate personas should include:
Expertise
Skills
Location
All of this information helps to refine which platforms your ideal candidates are likely to frequent.
Tip 4: Define your Core Values
People care about who they work for and how their work impacts the company and world around them. If you haven’t done so already, defining your core values and mission statement will help develop a strong employer brand to attract people who will fit with your culture.
Tip 5: Check out your Competitors’ Employer Brand
If you’re competing with another business for talent, you need to know their strengths and weaknesses. Get into the mind of a prospective candidate and review your competitors’ offer, from their perspective. Look for content that has a lot of engagement - this will indicate the type of strategic content that is working for them.
Tip 6: Get to Grips with your Internal Employer Brand
If you have the capacity and resource, it pays to invest time in a cross-departmental team focused on improving employer brand. But we appreciate that this isn’t feasible for many businesses.
Building an in-house employer branding team from your existing resource can provide transparency and make sure you move in a direction that meets your internal and external objectives. As a minimum, you should include stakeholders from each of the following functions:
Senior leadership - they will ensure alignment with the overall vision and goals of the business.
HR / Recruitment - they are on the front line of your recruiting effort, so have a clear grasp of what people expect.
Marketing - they will create the strategies and creative materials to help sell your employer brand.
Tip 7: Develop an Employee Value Proposition
An employee value proposition (or EVP) covers:
What the individual can expect from working with you
What you expect from your people
Whether you planned it or not, your business will already have an employee value proposition!
All of your activities around recruiting or retaining your people will reflect on your business and serve as your employee value proposition. So, make sure that you make it count. An effective EVP should be shaped by the feedback you receive from your current and prospective employees and then optimised to ensure that your business goals are being met.
Tip 8: Hire the Right People
If you hire the right people, who fit with your business vision and culture, and you offer a clear and accurate employee value proposition, then your internal employer brand should be organically strong.
Tip 9: Survey your People
Survey your employees to hear how they talk about your company as their employer and why they choose to work with you. Also, ask employees what they dislike about the company and if there is anything they would improve - but be sure to focus your survey on finding solutions.
Tip 10: Get Employee Buy-in
Make sure to get buy-in from your people, especially managers and leaders. They will be the guiding force behind your internal employer brand and are best placed to identify pain points and find solutions before they escalate.
Tip 11: Maintain and Increase Communication
As you build and develop your employer brand, keep your internal team in the loop about progress and changes. They will be best equipped to support your efforts and ensure your messaging and content is on brand no matter how or where candidates learn about your business.
Tip 12: Invest in your Company Culture
Your employer brand will reflect your company culture.
Company culture is defined as the shared set of values, ideals and attitudes that characterise an organization. In other words, it’s the personality of your company; from the way your team feel about the work, to how they interact with their peers and your customers.
If you have a company culture that needs improvement, it will reflect poorly on your employer brand and eventually impact all areas of your business. If you build a strong and positive company culture, then you will have an easier time maintaining your team's happiness and employer brand.
Whether it’s strong or if it could do with some improvement, you should aim to test out new company culture ideas as a way of continuously improving the experience for your people and entice new talent to apply. Plus, the better your company culture is, the easier it will be to create a standout employer brand!
Tip 13: Improve your Perks and Benefits
When considering a new role, one of the main things people care about is salary and benefits. Yet, most businesses fail to share any information about this in their adverts or on their websites. Perks and benefits play a major role in both the satisfaction of your existing people and when it comes to attracting new people into the business.
Take the time to review everything in your offer. Survey your existing people to understand which benefits they love, if there are any they appreciate or access more than others, and if there is anything they would like to add. Investing in high quality benefits will boost your retention rate as well as the number of applications you receive.
Tip 14: Review your Recruitment Marketing Strategy
When you’re happy that your employer brand is as strong as it can be, focus on creating an action plan to promote your brand and maintain your reputation with job seekers and stakeholders throughout the year.
While you can’t control every aspect of your reputation, you can implement a cohesive recruitment marketing strategy to share important information about your company and your people at every stage of the recruitment process. This will help you attract talent and nurture relationships until roles are filled.
Tip 15: Create an Employer Brand Content Plan
Content is key to an employer branding and recruitment marketing strategy. Create a content plan to set out deadlines. Then focus on co-ordinating internal employee highlights, plan social media content and respond to enquiries and online reviews.
Your long-term content strategy could also include developing strategic partnerships, the creation of recruitment videos, hosting recruitment events and updating your careers page. Organising all of your content in a calendar will make it easier to manage, maintain and track results.
Tip 16: Unlock the Power of Recruitment through Social Media
Social media is no longer optional. With the majority of job seekers searching for jobs online and on social media, it is almost guaranteed that they will be heading across to your social media profiles to check you out.
Social media can be viewed in the same vein as your website or a job advert, so use it to your advantage and ensure that your page is on brand and in line with your employer brand strategy. A lot of job seekers scope out a company’s social media to understand the culture and the day-to-day life of their future colleagues, so keep content fresh and relevant.
Tip 17: Test Out New Platforms and Avenues
Social media should be included in your strategy, but there may be other platforms that will help you reach your target market of prospective employees! Talk to your people and look at what platforms your competitors are using to inform your decisions. In most cases, your content can be re-purposed, but make sure that it is optimised to the features available on the platform itself.
Tip 18: Be Authentic and Transparent
People can tell when a company is being disingenuous with their employer brand. Highlight the best parts of your company but stay true to your brand and your people. Surveys and reviews can help to gather feedback and gauge whether your employer brand reflects the experiences of your people.
Because every business is different, you need to find the strategy and approach that works best for you. Keeping employer branding at the front of your people strategy will help you to create an employer brand that genuinely reflects the company and culture you’ve created.
For more tips or specific advice, on creating an employer brand tailored to your business, contact our team at Danton HR on 01527 306760.