How to Develop a Great Employer Brand

Some companies are still not aware of how important branding really is. A study conducted by the Harvard Business has yield details on how a large company with thousands of employees could spend millions of dollars in additional wages in order to make up for their organization’s poor employer brand.

In fact, it can be very challenging to convince talent to join or even express interest in a company or business that has poor or worst no branding at all. This same challenge could cost employers an extra 10% in wages

The biggest corporations with poor branding are estimated to shell out $4,723 per hire just so these organization can attract more talent or quality employees. The figures can be inflated for smaller companies. But what if you can prevent having to spend more to attract the right key people to your company? This is where great employer branding comes in.

Branding initially is the responsibility of the marketing team however recruitment can also have a hand in improving or ruining the company’s image or reputation. A negative experience of a talent or prospective employee with recruitment can affect a company’s image or branding. The higher the frequency of the negative experience candidates or applicants have with recruitment the worst it gets for the company’s branding. The same thing could happen with marketing. Even just a single negative moment in the press can affect an employer brand years down the track.

What can be done by recruitment to have a great employer brand?

1.Be sure to have an employer brand audit

The HR team and even the CEO’s should ask themselves the following:

Do you have a career site?

Does your site need a makeover?

Do you discuss your company culture in recruitment collateral?

How fast and easy is your application process?

Do you follow up?

How effective are your HR team at interviewing?

Do you have a clear onboarding process?

Have you made a few regrettable hires?

Put yourself in a candidate’s shoes for a moment.

2.Next, determine what kind of brand you want to convey

What do you want candidates to know about your workplace? No employer brand is complete without a clear message.

Create and develop your messaging by having a list of strengths and weaknesses, then emphasize those strong points and incorporate these into your recruitment marketing material.

The recruitment marketing material should be very clear about the culture of the organization. For example, if you are an office with energetic, coffee-loving extroverts who bond together over drinks on a Friday afternoon, or working Mums and Dads who value flexibility and work-life balance?

If you know how to express the culture of your workplace clearly, the chances of finding like-minded professionals will be significantly higher.

3. Be sure to have an employee advocacy program

Employees are an organization’s most important asset. This is why it is so important to encourage the entire team to contribute to your branding strategy where they can.

The best and fastest way to accomplish this is through an employee advocacy program – one where your employees are an essential part of distributing information and messages across social media and their own networks.

It would be to a company’s benefit to encourage its workforce to keep an eye on the organisation’s social media and blog posts and the employees can then share them with their own network. If employees are actively involved in advocating the company’s employer brand, it becomes easier for potential candidates to see what kind of workplace they could enter into.

Brett has been an editor for many years largely to boost his own vocabulary skills. He provides a number of different companies primarily dedicated to blog entries. He is working now First Personnel