A Vibrant and Visible Employer Brand is Your Best Tool for Engaging Top Candidates
In the current war for talent, ignoring employer brand isn’t an option. Jobseekers report that the biggest frustration they experience in the job search is not knowing what it’s like to work with a particular company. The top talent you’re looking for crave information and insight. Capturing top quality candidates requires taking a proactive approach to establishing, building, and promoting your unique identity and value proposition as an employer.
Employer brand is what we call that effort. Your employer brand is developed out of research that clarifies the specific value your company culture can provide to team members. It should be crafted and promoted to connect with potential candidates and long-term employees alike. Your employer brand messaging emphasizes the opportunities for growth and development: how can your employees rise to challenges and learn new skills? Your employer brand addresses how employees are valued as people, not just workers: are there comprehensive compensation and benefits packages that meet complex and diverse needs? Your employer brand emphasizes engagement efforts to build community: how does the organization support, encourage, and respond to diversity within the workforce? And your employer brand informs candidates how the company responds to employee needs at every career stage: what resources are available to support everyone from new college grads to senior level experts?
Investing in employer branding is crucial for attracting top candidates, and it also has impact across the overall health of your workforce. The candidate experience is only the first milestone in the employment lifecycle. Just as we nurture children with as much nutrition, care, and education as possible in their formative years to set the stage for later success, providing jobseekers with the attention and guidance they need in the early stages of their relationship with your company has long term payouts. HR departments across industries have seen active involvement in employer branding result in:
- Significant increase in quality of applicants
- Noticeably faster times to hire
- Lowered cost per hire
- Reduced turnover
Engaging the Best Advocates of Your Brand: Your Current Employees
There are two elements to employer brand: messaging articulated by the company itself, and independent evaluation from employees. While both are important, vetted feedback from current employees holds more weight with candidates.
- Over 80% of jobseekers have shared that they rely on social media and company review sites as important research resources when engaging in the job search
- About 50% of jobseekers identified talent brand as the deciding factor when choosing an employer, and an even higher percentage (67%) said they’d accept a lower salary if the company had exceptionally positive reviews online
- Candidates have also reported that they trust employees three times more than the employer to provide information on working at the company
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to cultivate input from your current employees! As we’ve discussed, it’s the best way to connect and promote your brand with jobseekers.
Further – engaging your employees and collecting their feedback on experience with your organization also serves as a great opportunity to take a close look at potential for improvements.
Employer brand research, like the Comparably employee survey, helps establish a clear understanding of what employees can expect from the organization, and what the organization expects of employees. It provides a framework to inform and align practices across the talent acquisition lifecycle including: recruitment, marketing, outreach, onboarding, training, internal communications, professional development, management, and advancement. These updates, made based on direct feedback from your employees, have been shown to support retention efforts. Getting your personnel involved in building the employer brand can be the inspiration for new programs and management strategies that show your employees you’re listening to their ideas, which only helps improve the brand further.
Once You Have the Brand Message, Boost it!
An employer brand isn’t valid if you don’t live it within your company, but neither is it useful if it stays for internal eyes only. Once you have an understanding of your employer brand identity, promote it. Make sure your career website, social media profiles, and job descriptions embody the brand. Go to outside sources like Comparably to amplify your employer brand and get it in front of job seekers.
If you need some pointers to get started, here are some ways Comparably can help you build and promote your employer brand.
-
Carefully crafted culture surveys that provide you with effective research methodology to capture feedback from your current employees for employer brand promotion. The results can also be considered as one of several resources for internal improvement
-
Data-driven results organized by high-interest categories (i.e. CEO, team, office culture, professional development) that can be filtered by demographics
-
Employee sentiment reports
-
User-friendly platform to preview results, respond to feedback, and answer candidate questions
-
Publicity and press opportunities – company pages on Comparably help boost job search SEO rankings, high-involvement positive reviews lead to awards and badges that drive press promotion
An employer brand is honest, and includes a big-picture view of the benefits and challenges of life within your organization. Other review sites and platforms can often rely too heavily on long-form text reviews, which can quickly turn into single-issue vent sessions. While Comparably does provide space for qualitative feedback, our focus is on the insights and trends that can be drawn from streamlined, structured data provided by your current employees.
As with any growth initiative, the best way to build and protect your employer brand is to take an active role. Through word of mouth, social media, and various employer review sites, your company already has an employer brand, even if you aren’t involved in driving it. But the clearest picture of your value proposition can only come through when you take an active role in your reputation management. Engaging with the opportunities provided by Comparably is a great tactic in the strategy to cultivate a comprehensive picture of your unique employment offer, champion it, and watch as your talent acquisition efforts reap the benefits.
