Employer Branding
March 1, 2024 2024-03-01 13:43Employer Branding
Does a company’s reputation matter while looking for a job? Absolutely Yes! As a matter of fact, 85% of workers disagreed with joining a company or continuing to work if the company had a poor reputation among the former employees or the ordinary people. Even the new job-hunters look for the best companies to work for while conducting their research.
A company needs to create a powerful employer brand for attracting and retaining top talent. But how much time do you need to spend incentivizing the brand and its products/services? Don’t worry about anything. We’ve got you covered.
Why Is Employer Branding Important?
Employer branding plays a huge role in a company’s net profit. According to the data provided by LinkedIn, compelling employer branding can decrease employee turnover rates by 28% and reduce the cost of hiring by 50%. A survey conducted by Glassdoor found that 75% of the total job seekers are attracted and expected to apply for companies with well-managed employer branding.
Employer branding is the perfect strategy to captivate new employees, retain the existing employees, thereby reducing the turnover rates and saving a lot of money. It’s essential to know how you can implement employer branding; therefore, now let’s move to the best employer branding strategy.
Employer Branding Strategy
Employer branding strategies help you positively impact the company’s status and build a solid reputation securing higher talent acquisition and retention. Basically, employer branding is how skillfully you advertise your company to job seekers and what opinion the existing employees have towards your company as a workspace. Let us see what some strategies you can use to create an excellent employer brand that helps you in all aspects are.
1. Focus On Company’s Value Proposition
To create a powerful employer brand, it’s essential to focus on its culture, goals, values, and vision. Knowing the company’s need of the hour and working on it to find the talent requirement and fulfill your objectives is very helpful.
EXAMPLE:
For instance, if we take a look at Teach for America’s mission statement- “One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.” This statement is an excellent example of how gripping and captivating your sentence must be. Moreover, the company also promises its employees to think out of the box and utilize their creativity, stating, “We operate with curiosity and embrace new ideas to innovate and constantly improve. We take informed risks and learn from successes, setbacks, and each other.”
Thus, you can also align your company’s values with your employer brand along with your business goal.
2. Conduct An Employer Brand Audit
The reputation and fame of your company play a huge role in influencing the decision of job seekers. Perhaps, you may not be aware of it. Conducting internal surveys, researching and reading reviews online, driving social media searches, or hearing a firm that administers reputation monitoring can assist in attaining public respect.
The research conducted must reveal the superior aspects of your company’s work culture that you can proudly highlight, along with any room for improvements to ensure a powerful employer brand.
3. Elaborate About Your Employer Value Proposition
After conducting extensive research and forming a list of benefits and values of your company, now you’ll need to create an employee value proposition as the next step. An employer value proposition refers to the marketing promise or an advertising message that your current employees can’t be misleading or disapproved of. These employer value propositions are extensively used in the company’s website, LinkedIn pages, or recruitment materials.
Moreover, an employer value proposition is an essential point of discussion for your recruits and HR team with talented candidates.
Your employer should express the company’s purpose or its positive impact on the world. Potential candidates prefer doing meaningful work over bigger paychecks.
EXAMPLE:
An example of an excellent employer value proposition is the one created by a global management consulting and management firm called Accenture. They have kept on their Career page: “Help build the future. Be yourself, make a difference. Work where you’re inspired to explore your passions, where your talents are nurtured and cultivated. Innovate with leading-edge technologies on some of the coolest projects you can imagine. And get the tools you need to keep learning and growing, so you stay continually ahead of the game while making a difference in the world.”
4. Leverage Current Employees
In today’s world, social media is again a great place to search for jobs. A new study reveals that 79% of job seekers use social media in their job search, and it’s a huge count!
The job seekers are very much interested to know and hear from the actual employees of the company. Leveraging employees by conducting interviews or asking to share feedback on the website or offline can help in these aspects. You’ll need to be courteous while responding to negative comments. Also, you will need to think cleverly to maximize your positive reputation.
Another excellent method of leveraging employees is asking them to post on their social media when your company does a giveaway, fun activity, party, or outing. Social media lets the candidate freely interact with your company. Moreover, leveraging the existing employees as brand advocates can be very beneficial.
EXAMPLE:
For instance, you held a Fun+Work event at your workplace. Later, you can ask the employees to post the pictures on Facebook or Instagram using the hashtag you’ve chosen. This is an enjoyable yet powerful method for your employees to share their fun work culture with their own network.
5. Make A Strong Onboarding Process
Onboarding is one of those exceptional experiences that a fresh employee goes through for the first time. An unsupportive and hostile impression right at the beginning can result in some significant consequences. In fact, according to statistical data, employees that experience a negative onboarding experience are twice as likely to leave the company for a different job.
However, a good and memorable onboarding process can help in instilling a positive company brand image. Making an employee excited about their jobs, teams and their role in the company can induce employee engagement right from the beginning. Providing your employees with the proper guidelines and required tools to ace their performance, you can ensure a smooth transition, lower turnover rates, and a more productive team.
6. Offer Learning And Development Opportunities
According to a study, the number one reason people switched up their jobs in 2018 was boredom and needed a new challenge. Fixing boredom isn’t a big deal.
Offering/allowing your employees to continue learning or developing a skill to become proficient reveals that your company emphasizes continuous learning and employee skill development. Ultimately, the new skilled employees will become more valuable for your company. Hence a win-win. Also, challenging your employees with new tasks frequently can also help eradicate boredom, resulting in higher retention rates.
7. Utilize Blog Pots, Slideshows, Photos, And Videos To Tell Your Company Story
While adopting a new marketing strategy to improve the reach of your products/services, you don’t just communicate the message straight by using only one medium. Instead, you prepare and provide photos, slideshows, videos, blogs, and other forms of communication on different platforms to reach out to as many people as possible.
In the same way, it’s essential to use different high-quality means of spreading messages to tell your company story. You may display a slideshow or a video on your About Us page or may put the history of some interviews of your significant employees.
8. Make A Powerful Diversity And Inclusion Initiative
A diverse team provides more innovative ideas and better workplace culture and helps attract all different types of talented employees. One of the primary reasons to spend resources on diversity and inclusion initiatives is that it helps create a strong employer branding. Perhaps it is also essential to create positive employer branding by extending your brand’s reach to a new and much larger audience.
Since now you have an idea of how you can create an employer brand, why not have a look at some of the best employer branding examples.
Best Employer Branding Examples That You Must Know About
1. Starbucks
Starbucks, the most successful coffee chain globally, does a pretty great job in creating a strong community and work culture among their employees besides making the best innovative beverages. The company treated its employees as partners, fostering their bond and self-importance.
Starbucks also has Twitter and Instagram accounts especially dedicated to @StarbucksJobs, which they use to promote their employer brand and connect to job seekers. Using social media to appreciate their employees and increase their productivity, Starbucks has proved that they value their employees over their products.
Instead of posting cinematic shots of their drinks, Starbucks uses their social media handles to share their missions, personal employee stories and congratulate employees on college graduation. The company also posts a lot about its commitments to diversity and inclusion.
2. Wistia
Wistia is a video-making software that helps other businesses improve their advertising strategy and build their brand. If they were to be brand conscious, they would have used their own software to its best to impart the ideas that they wish to convey to the job seekers.
Instead of constantly complimenting their company and the facilities, the message on their Career page is instead very simple yet encouraging. It states: “Join a team that celebrates each other.” However, they continue to bring out their ideas with numerous brilliant Wistia-created videos about their company, people and work culture, and things that make their work culture so unique.
3. Canva
According to the Global Talent Trends Report by LinkedIn, 23% of Generation X and Millennials and 32% of Baby Boomers consider the company missions as the foremost factor while choosing a job. This means that more workers and job seekers want to have a strong purpose in their work.
Canva uses this same ideology in its employer branding strategy. If you check their Careers page, they’ve highlighted the importance of job seekers, and each value is represented by great visual arts. The company also actively posts this idea on their social media handles which are loaded with motivating content and innovative ideas for incredible designs.
4. Jet
The commercial website of the jet has got a beautiful video that spreads awareness about its motivational workplace, engaging environment, and fun work. This video is very striking because it contains actual visuals of real employee interviews which increases the trust of the job seekers towards the company.
Moreover, the video also invokes a sense of pride in the current employees, who are clearly seeing their company’s committee taking steps towards their mission statement through the video of their workers.
5. SoulCycle
SoulCycle’s goal is to provide boutique fitness spaces and ideas to improve the work culture by offering some benefits that motivate the employees to work their best and become good humans. For instance, Soul gives two businesses paid day-offs per year to its employees to volunteer at any charity to make them learn communal values and actually feel happy. Along with that, Soul also offers free classes to their employees.
This clearly shows that the company’s priority is to make fitness enjoyable and use exercise as a medium to attain peace and to attain social manners. Soul has got high ratings on almost all review websites, including four stars on management and work-life balance. Therefore, SoulCycle has indeed got a potent employer brand from which you can get inspired.
6. Eventbrite
Everbrite’s web page displays its recruitment team along with a short description of each member. The bios are funny and relatable, with unique, fun facts about each recruiter. This is an extraordinary and fresh approach to introduce the recruitment team to the job seekers.
Furthermore, the Eventbrite recruitment team page mentions: “Interviewing shouldn’t be nerve-wracking —– it should be exciting. It should spark great conversation. We believe in respect, transparency, and timely responses (we don’t leave anyone in the dreaded recruiting black hole).”
Their tone and language usage reflect their culture very well and encourage the job seekers to apply.
7. HubSpot
HubSpot has a document known as Culture Code on its culture page. Their Culture Code includes everything that the company hopes to promote and infuse in its employees, candidates, and audience.
The Culture page further includes a separate section specifically dedicated to learning and development opportunities. It has Hubspot’s commitment to diversity and inclusion and interviews with actual employees. Their language is also very seeker-centric: “Here’s how we can help you grow.”
The Culture page also concludes in a very hearty way with a “day in the life” video depicting the company’s relentless efforts to communicate its culture via employees. Ultimately, HubSpot’s strategy for employer branding is an excellent example of learning interactive media skills.
8. Shopify
The gap between talented candidates and tech jobs increases and takes longer to get in the correct position. This is common with all tech recruitments. Many companies use a solid employer brand to attract top talent. Shopify, a great e-commerce website, is the perfect example of a tech company with powerful employer branding. On their Careers Page, they acknowledge this and tell the job applicants that it’s their time to “apply to you.”
This recognition is perfect for forming a bond with potential job candidates, and they continue to comprehend with the reader stating, “ Finding the right job is hard work.” Further, their Careers page consists of all the details and helpful information for someone who would apply to their website.
Wrapping It Up
Building a strong employer brand is like entering an unknown land. And That’s perfectly alright because a compelling employer branding attracts potential employees and prevents unsuitable ones from applying.
There are many strategies with which you can have a good employer branding plan to attract job seekers. Each example mentioned on the list has done a great job in designing its own employer brand. Also, remember that your current employees represent your brand just like your brand represents them.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What makes a good employer branding?
To create a powerful employer branding, it’s essential to focus on the company’s culture, goals, values, and vision. Knowing the company’s need of the hour and working on it to find the talent requirement and fulfill your objectives is very helpful. Conducting internal surveys, researching and reading reviews online, conducting social media searches, or hearing a firm that administers reputation monitoring can assist in attaining public respect.
What are some examples of employer branding?
The gap between talented candidates and tech jobs increases and takes longer to get in the correct position. This is common with all the tech recruitments. Many companies use a solid employer brand to attract top talent. Shopify, a great e-commerce website, is the perfect example of a tech company with a powerful employer brand. On their Careers Page, they acknowledge this and tell the job applicants that it’s their time to “apply to you.”
This recognition is perfect for forming a bond with potential job candidates, and they continue to comprehend with the reader stating, “ Finding the right job is hard work.” Further, their Careers page consists of all the details and valuable information for someone who would apply to their website.
