The importance of your employer brand

Just like an effective customer brand helps you command a premium price and attracts higher level business, a strong employer brand allows you to attract the best talent in the market, whilst retaining the quality already in the business.
 

The benefits:

• Attract top talent to your company

When the right people are aware of your brand you have an engaged group of candidates who are invested in your content and values. This can pay dividends for future vacancies with increased application rates.

• Retain the best talent in your company

A great employer brand helps motivate your team. If your current workforce is invested in the brand and believe in what it stands for, they will be more productive. This creates a “tribe mentality” in which people want to grow personally and build the business with you.

• Differentiate yourself from the competition

It may sound simple but if you want to attract the best talent, then you need to be the company the best talent wants to work for. Within a competitive market you need your message to resonate with the right individuals. Your tone of voice and content needs to be marketed directly at these people.

• Increase profits and decrease recruitment spend

Creating an employer brand doesn’t come for free and requires a lot of work. However, in the long run it can present a massive ROI. You can massively reduce your recruitment spend with talent now reaching you from a careers site, email subscriptions and social media.

Where do I start?

You need to establish where you are now. How is your company viewed internally and externally?

To create a starting point these are some questions that need answering honestly:

• What is your current team’s view of you?
• What does the market think of you?
• What are rivals doing better than you?
• What are you doing better than your rivals?
• How can you improve your recruitment process?
• What behaviours define your relationships with current and future candidates?
• Does your employer strategy match your company strategy?
• What do your current team think will attract new candidates?
• How do you market your employer brand currently?
• Who are the future recruits you are looking to attract?
• What are the character traits and desires of your target market?
• How do you intend to market to your potential recruits in the future?

Where do you want to be?

To assess where you want to be it’s critical to develop your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Your EVP is a clear statement of what you can offer current employees and future talent. This should be a single resource in which any employee, stakeholder or future hire can look and instantly see what you stand for and your vision for achievement in the future. This is your “Employer Brand Bible” there will be a further blog on how to create your Employer Brand Bible in the near future.
 

Bring the brand to life across all platforms, communications and touch points.

So, you’ve worked on your brand and message, it is now important to consistently get that across in every way possible. Brand has long been associated with the logo of a company but it is far more than that. The biggest brands in the world are instantly identified by their logo alone, but that didn’t happen overnight.

Brand is more about how you interact with your target audience, and the feeling that gives them when seeing your collateral.

All touch points need to be considered, including:

• Visuals
• Careers website
• Bespoke photography and videos
• Social intranet
• Mobile app
• Design of social media channels
• A defined social media strategy
• A defined content marketing strategy
• Marketing collateral including adverts, brochures and banners
• Online tests and gamification of the recruitment process

It is imperative that your employer brand enhances the way your company is viewed by the wider workforce to make your recruitment tasks of the future more efficient and more effective. In the long term it is designed to save both time and money.