As an employer, you offer everything a job searcher might want. Your company pays competitive wages, new employees are eligible for an array of attractive benefits, and professional development opportunities exist from day one.
Even better, the work is rewarding. You’ve worked hard to build a company culture that emphasizes collaboration, diversity, and autonomy.
Despite all of this, the response to your recruiting efforts hasn’t been what you were hoping for. It seems as if you just aren’t getting much attention.
What’s lacking? It could be branding. If you haven’t built a strong employer brand, you’ve made it nearly impossible for job seekers to connect with your company. You’re just one face in the crowd.
What Is an Employer Brand?
Employer brand is the total of everything that makes up the experience of working for your company, and how you choose to communicate that to the world. For example, if one person told you they worked for IBM and another person said they worked for Disney, you’d visualize two very different things.
That’s because both of those organizations have very different employer brands. You know this because those brands have been effectively marketed to the public.
Why Is Employer Brand Important?
Today, job seekers have access to more job opportunities than many of them know what to do with. It’s easy to get lost in the masses of employers that are looking to fill positions with top industry talent.
By building a compelling employer brand, you help ensure that your company stands out. That’s always been important, but it’s especially crucial in this candidate-driven job market.
If you want to build a powerful employer brand and get your message out to potential employees, you have to show up in the right places. These five places are the best place to start.
- LinkedIn Company Pages
It’s a mistake to view LinkedIn as just a place for job seekers to post up their profiles in hopes of getting noticed. Companies should take the initiative to be as active as possible as well.
Candidates often use LinkedIn to research employers, and you can use your profile as an opportunity to communicate your brand. Use your company page to share:
- Blog posts
- Information about your company culture
- Industry news
- Upcoming events
You can even use LinkedIn as a platform to share employee testimonials and pictures of your workplace.
- Team Members’ Networks
In many ways, your employees have even more power than you do when it comes to recruitment marketing. That’s spreading the word about your employer brand. When you tell the world that you’re a great employer, that’s one thing.
However, when the people who work for you are willing to say that, it simply has more impact. If they are willing to say that across their personal and professional networks, the impact is undeniable. Recruit your most engaged employees to use their networks to share:
- Video testimonials
- Company news
- Information about job openings
- Stories of their work experiences
Their endorsement of your employer brand will resonate with the public and help to attract interested candidates.
- Your Company Intranet Page
Employer branding isn’t just something you do to attract external candidates. It’s an important part of keeping your current employees engaged as well. You’re going to struggle with employee retention if your team isn’t connected with your organizational values, culture, and mission.
The fact that so many teams have gone remote makes this even more important. Use your intranet to obtain feedback from your teams, share your company values, and build up your employee value proposition. You can do the latter by sharing information about your benefits, training opportunities, and employee success stories.
If you don’t have an intranet page, you can still showcase your branding to your team. Tools like Slack can be used for many of the same purposes.
- Social Media
Your social media branding efforts start with your owned pages. As potential employees become interested in your company, you can be sure they will check out your social media channels.
Take advantage of this by creating and sharing content on your career pages that show off your work environment, culture, events, community involvement, and values. The key here is to understand how each platform works and to maximize the tools provided to you to get content out to your target prospects.
Don’t stop there. Look for communities, groups, and pages that are relevant to your industry and location. Create a presence, and start participating in conversations. Your brand’s thought leadership and insights will get people engaged, and contribute to the brand you are working to build.
- Your Career Site
Your dedicated career site or career page can be used for much more than posting job openings. Instead, view it as your most powerful branding tool. This is one of the first places job seekers will go for information about your site, and likely the first place they will make direct contact with your brand.
It’s the perfect place for your company story, testimonials, benefits information, and any other content that lets prospects know exactly what you are about.
Also, visiting your career page, whether it’s to apply for a job or simply learn more, is the first step of the candidate experience. Make sure that they get off to a good start with the information they need, and a page that is easy to navigate.
