The Ultimate Guide to Employer Branding
From the pandemic to the Great Resignation, to “quiet quitting,” professionals are entering a new phase of empowerment, where they now realize the value of being in a healthy work environment to become productive contributors in the workplace. Employer branding becomes a much more essential arsenal in your company’s talent attraction and retention strategy to winning the war for talent.
The job hunt pre-pandemic is so much more different today with jobseekers needing much more information about their prospective employers before making a decision to join - the most important being an employer’s flexibility in providing remote work options.
What is employer branding?
Employer branding is an embodiment of the company’s mission, vision and values that need to appeal not just to external talent prospects but also to current employees, partners, customers and other key stakeholders. Employer branding refers to “the image that an organization portrays, whether it’s weak, neutral or strong - to show that it is a great place to work,” as defined by Brett Minchington, founder of the Employer Branding College.
Why is employer branding important?
With professionals around the world having higher expectations than ever, companies find themselves in tighter competition to find the right talent for the right job. The traditional recruitment method of “post and pray” will no longer cut it as more professionals rely on social media, company review sites, and even insider information to make informed decisions about their career moves.
Your company’s reputation is anchored strongly on the perception of your stakeholders about your employer brand. Some people make the mistake of treating employer branding and product branding as the same. But a successful employer branding campaign requires a deeper understanding of your people’s sentiments, brand positioning and brand delivery as a great place to work.
How to get started with employer branding in your organization
Whether you’re a one-person show or a full-fledged team of talent warriors, employer branding requires thoughtful project management to ensure that you maximize your success. Oftentimes, we see companies focus on execution whilst neglecting the careful placement of the foundations of employer branding which leads to unsustainable plans and wasted budgets. Our team at Workbean can help you with your employer branding journey, no matter how big or small your organization is.
Conduct an employer brand audit
Creating a strong employer brand requires an understanding of who you are - the good and the not-so-good. Having this knowledge of your organization’s DNA allows you to be more effective in communicating your value proposition. One of the most important - and primary activities in identifying your employer brand is to conduct an audit.
Doing an employer branding audit is an arduous process but if you stick to it and allot the right resources to do this, you can inevitably reap the benefits of getting higher quality talents and improved employee engagement. Here are some steps you can take:
Identify key groups you want to talk to. Is it your employees, prospective candidates, leaders, or alumni?
Research and formulate the right questions. Craft your surveys to be bias-proof to help you uncover your strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. We find that
Find the right channel and tools to reach out. You want to make sure that the experience of answering your survey is seamless and easy to understand. Use proven online tools such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms or Airtable to create good-looking surveys.
Clean up your data and create easy-to-understand charts and graphs. Don’t waste the valuable time you spent finding the right people and getting them to answer your survey. Create a simple presentation that effectively summarizes your findings from the audit. It should show you your key strengths and some unique propositions.
Research your talent competitors
Oftentimes, organizations think that their competitors for recruitment are the same as that of their market competitors. With the rise of digital talents who are ready to work from anywhere, the playing field is no longer level and even big multinational companies may compete with startups or even small businesses for the best talent.
Most companies, big or small, need at least a digital marketing specialist or a web designer - how do you make sure that the right people come to you for work? Where are your ideal candidates working? How does your competitor make their company appealing to their ideal candidates? What aspects of their employer brand are they highlighting most often?
Once you have answered these questions, you can map out at least 10 of your best competitors’ VMVs (Vision, Mission and Values) as well as their employer branding statements to see if you can find some patterns or best practices to emulate.
Create your EVP (Employee Value Proposition)
An Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the clear and concise benefit that an employee receives in exchange for the talents, skills, and expertise that they will commit to their role while working at your company.
Now that you have your audit results and some competitor research, you are now ready to synthesize your findings and create your EVP.
This process is not as easy as some think as it requires a deep analysis of your organization’s VMVs, employee perceptions and priorities, candidate perceptions, leadership inputs, and more. But if you are able to establish a good foundation during the audit, the data extraction and analysis should be fairly manageable to accomplish and make sense of.
You will find a more comprehensive guide for creating your EVP in this previous article we wrote.
Create your employer branding guidelines
Just like marketing and corporate communications, you will need to put together a set of branding guidelines to remain consistent in your tone, messaging and positioning across the board.
Employer branding guidelines can be a concise version of your marketing’s brand book and it has to contain some, if not all of the following elements:
Logo Type
Typefaces
Brand Colors
Tagline (with some explanation of its origin)
Application Guidelines
Having a specific guideline for employer branding makes it easier for you and your team to maintain a consistent brand representation in all the channels you choose - from digital to print.
Set up your digital channels
Once you have your EVP and guidelines set up, you can start strategizing which digital channels to use to create employer brand awareness. You can experiment with different platforms to see which one works best for you. When finding the most appropriate digital platform to champion your employer brand, you want to make sure that the platform provides you with the ability to display your most important employer branding information that is backed up by stories, proof points and interactive media to engage your prospective candidates and other stakeholders, which of course is all possible with a Workbean Page.
Some platforms you may want to consider:
Post consistently
Maintain a steady flow of audience by posting content on a regular basis. Consider creating a content calendar and make this a part of your employer brand meetings to ensure that this practice is followed almost religiously. You will see how much people can connect with your employer brand by seeing how often they visit, and how frequently they interact or engage with your content. One of the fundamental concepts in marketing is the Rule of 7, whereby a prospect needs “hear” an advertiser’s message at least seven times before they make an action to engage.
Following the Rule of 7 concept, you will have to come up with different strategies for the various online platforms you will choose to promote your employer brand and ensure that you are consistently active and approachable in those channels. Doing so can guarantee that your employer brand will stick to your target audience’s mind.
Track, measure and improve performance
Finally, you need to measure the performance of your digital platforms with hard metrics. With most platforms, basic analytics are provided and these are usually more than enough to see the level of brand awareness and engagement your company is having.
To get you started, here are some useful metrics:
Number of career site visitors (unique and returning)
Days (and times) with most activity
Number of followers on your social media channels
Number of interactions per post on your social media
Audience demographics (age, location, industry, interests) - broken down by every digital channel you have
Employer Brand Health Score - coming really soon on Workbean, the world’s first!
It will be easier to articulate the ROI of your employer branding efforts when you establish a clear set of metrics to track and measure. Moreover, tracking these metrics will help you refine your messaging, your content strategy and overall approach to employer branding.
Employer branding matters more than you think
The journey of employer branding does not have to be intimidating if you have the fundamental knowledge of how to get started. To keep up with the growing sophistication in the talent marketplace, you have to embrace the endless possibilities that digital marketing can unlock for your organization to make you the undisputed employer of choice for your prospective candidates and a preferred partner for all your other stakeholders. Posting and praying is dead. A solid employer branding strategy is the key to keeping your company relevant for years to come.
Looking to get started on your employer branding program? Workbean can help you define your employee value proposition, communicate your culture, and figure out how best to reach out to your target audience.
Original Source: https://www.workbean.co/resources/article/the-ultimate-guide-to-employer-branding-1