Company branding is important for making sure your product or service is well known and trusted by your customers. But what about your employees? Is employer branding really important?
Employees can influence your employer brand
You may not realise it, but your employees, present, past and future, can have a major impact on how your company is seen in the marketplace. Employee satisfaction is important to ensure you get the best possible effort from your people. Keeping them happy means they work well, and help to increase your profit. This is what is known as your “employer brand”. And it applies to former and future employees as well.
Employer brand can influence potential employees
In 2012, a white paper produced by social media site, LinkedIn, entitled “Why Your Employer Brand Matters”, found that a strong employer brand is very likely to influence potential employees to consider your positions of employment. This is indicated by you having a very positive impression on the individuals looking for work. What a person sees when considering employment with a company can have an effect on your employer branding. And they get this impression from present and past employees.
Employer brand can influence how people see you
You really have very little control over your reputation as an employer. At best, all you can do is try to positively influence it with clarity, coherence, consistency and delivering your promises. Everything you do or say has an influence on how people see your company as an employer. Even your offices, location, advertising, social media, employee engagement, policies and practices, management and workspaces have an overall effect on your employer brand. And you cannot craft an employer brand; it exists only in the minds of your audience.
Define your company’s employee experience
As a company, you have an Employment Value Proposition (EVP). This is the crafted ideal of how you want to be seen. It is the promise of what the employee will experience within the company. The idea is to express your EVP so as to influence potential and current employees. This is done by defining the employee experience within the company in terms of overall brand. It has to be authentic, relevant and, most of all, different from your competitors.
Your brand should be a reflection of reality
It really has to be the true reality of your organization and work culture. Being untrue to your word is the quickest way to destroy your employer brand. No matter how good it sounds, it will not work if it does not reflect the reality.
Make it interesting to your audience
There is something interesting about every company, regardless of who they are. Whether it is the culture, the working environment, the management principals or the added benefits. So your EVP has to be compelling and interesting to your target audience.
The difference should be meaningful
There is no point having something that is authentic and relevant if everyone in your niche is saying the same thing. Your EVP has to be distinctive from other employers. And it should not be different just for the sake of being different. That difference has to be a meaningful difference. One that will encourage people to go your way, instead of towards your competitors.
Branding should not confuse your audience
It is critical to ensure that you use the widest range of stakeholders possible when you develop your EVP. A major risk of branding is that they can often be over-exaggerated as recruiting campaigns with a very short shelf-life. They can also end up creating a “vanity” brand that directly conflicts with the overall brand or reputation management effort. And that can lead to confusion about your employer brand in your audience.
Some common mistakes in EVP management
The EVP should not be solely directed at your external audience. A common mistake is to only target “potential” employees, and forget the ones you already have. It should apply to the total employee experience, from the potentials, through the existing, and on to the alumni employees. You need to deliver on the promise for everyone involved.
One advantage of a good EVP is that it will attract applicants that you want to interview, and filter out those that are not right for your employment. Your recruitment strategy should be about not just finding candidates, but finding the perfect candidates. It can help to save time and resources by getting fewer applicants but with better quality. A strong employer brand can significantly reduce your cost-per-hire.
Target people with relevant recruitment experience
Talent acquisition is a very complex market. No longer is the talent market confined to a localised area. Modern methods are making the recruitment experience almost global. So you need to make sure that your recruitment is fully integrated into as many relevant areas and effective media points as possible. Make sure you include:
- Your website (not just your careers site);
- Your careers site (not just your website);
- Social media presence;
- Recruitment advertising on and offline;
- Job boards;
- PR and media relations;
- Employee referral;
- Recruitment agency management;
- University relations;
Your brand should align with your values
Every single part of your recruitment experience needs to be fully aligned to your EVP. This way every interaction with a potential stakeholder who can influence your reputation is consistent. It will be clear to the talent market if you tell different things to different people, and it will damage your employer brand.
And always be aware of how you treat those you do not offer a job to. They can influence your reputation as well. Every applicant, whether hired or not, in a potential advocate of your brand. And every one should have a positive experience with your company. This way they do not become your “detractors” in the talent market.
And if you use recruitment agencies, keep a close eye on their recruitment practices. Even better, ensure they follow your own recruitment standards, as they can quite often cause you a lot of damage, without you ever knowing how it happened.
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