Building Your Employer Brand to Attract New Talent

No matter the size, every company has a unique story to tell, and it can be used to create a compelling employer branding message that will not only help retain current employees, but attract top talent. In today’s candidate-driven market, competition for talent is high, and the period between a candidate’s first interaction with a brand online to receiving a job offer is critical. Your employer brand, or the perception of your company as an employer, can make or break a potential candidate’s experience.

Below, we’ll walk through how to create or improve an employer brand, and how it plays a role in attracting, recruiting, and hiring the best employees.

Employer brand addresses both your current and prospective employees. It includes your company’s core values, its culture, and the employee and candidate experience – everything from benefits and perks to career development opportunities.

Not paying attention to your employer brand can be detrimental, especially when it comes to hiring and attracting talent. In fact, 84 percent of job seekers say the reputation of a company is important when making a decision on where to apply for a job, and 9 out of 10 candidates would apply for a job when it’s from an employer brand that’s actively maintained. A poor employer brand, on the other hand, not only affects a candidate’s desire to work for a company, it affects the bottom line as well. In fact, a negative reputation will cost a company at least 10 percent more per hire.

If you want to attract the right talent to your business, you have to develop your employer brand as well as the perception that your company is a great place to work. You do this not only through intangible qualities, like your company culture, but tangible ones as well, including messaging, the careers page of your website, your social media channels, and more.

The first step in any project, including creating an employer brand, requires first assessing your current situation. Start by turning to the first place a prospective candidate is likely to visit – your careers page. Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes and ask yourself whether current job openings are visible and prominent enough to easily locate. Does the content accurately represent life at your company? Would a candidate be able to get a look and feel for your company culture just by visiting your careers page? What about SEO? Are you using enough relevant keywords that would draw search engine results to your page?

Next, outline your organization’s vision and values. What do you offer to current and prospective employees that your competitors don’t? The answer to this question will help form the basis of your Employer Value Proposition (EVP), a strategic statement that defines how you want to be perceived by your employees. It should not only convey your organizational values and ideals, but what it’s like to work at your company and what is expected of employees.

Then consider which job boards you’re currently posting to, such as Glassdoor and Indeed. Are your job descriptions compelling enough? Clear enough? Creating a clearly stated job title that is relevant to the job and easily found on job boards and search engines is the first step in hiring the right candidate.

Lastly, another thing to consider as you assess your employer brand is your social media channels. Do you have a presence on the channels most frequently used by your target candidate? If you’re a graphic design firm, it’s highly probable that prospective employees frequently use Instagram, so consider showcasing some of the company’s work (and other employees) on an Instagram account.

These are just the first few steps to getting your employer brand up and running. To learn more, join us for our webinar, “How to Attract Talent With Your Employer Brand,” where we’ll discuss how to put your brand assessment to work.