When it comes to employer brand, over 95% of companies believe it has an impact on revenue. However, only 44% of businesses have any employer branding strategies in place.
Your employer branding is crucial if you expect to recruit great talent as well as retain them. Employer branding refers to how your company is perceived by others.
Specifically, it reflects the outsider perspective on how employees are treated by your company. For 84% of job seekers, that positive branding is important when choosing where to apply.
To help your recruiting efforts succeed, we’ve compiled this list of the top 5 employer branding strategies that work.
Top 5 Employer Branding Strategies That Work
1. Define a Candidate Persona
When you build a marketing strategy for the target clients, you build a client persona to visualize the demographic.
Practice the same activity to define your ideal candidate persona. Through this activity define who your target audience is, their interests, beliefs, and more to create a detailed portfolio.
For example, are you interested in hiring from the growing millennial demographic, which is predicted to be 75% of the workforce by 2030?
When you have a candidate persona in mind, you can better focus on what content to make and where to publish it for greatest exposure to the candidate persona.
Examples of this content can include employee created content to share what your company culture is like.
Give your ideal applicants a look into what working for you is like and why they want to work there.
2. Share Employee Testimonials
Sharing what your employees think about working for you is one of the best employer branding strategies.
91% of job applicants look for resources to evaluate company brand before applying. This can be an online or offline source.
Therefore, you can provide this resource easily by sharing employee testimonials publically.
This gives candidates a view into what working for you is like from the current employee perspective.
A testimonial can come in many forms, such as an employee written blog post or video sharing their story.
Remember your candidate persona and make the content that best suits your company as well as the candidate.
3. Enable Team Growth
Your employees are going to grow alongside your company. By encouraging that growth, your employer brand will benefit.
Essentially, this shows any candidates and clients that you encourage growth. This can be both personal and professional types of growth. An example would be to offer training on certain workplace skill sets.
As for personal growth, you could have benefit plans that help your employees deal with any student loan debt.
This can motivate an employee to go back to school or be enticing for candidates fresh out of college. This becomes a better benefit as time goes on.
4. Utilize Social Media
Using social media for your business is a great way to actively maintain an employer brand. Additionally, you can promote any open job positions on social media.
Job seekers have ranked social media as the best resource when it comes to searching for a job, according to a study by CareerArc.
Your company social media doesn’t have to be just about job postings, though! You can share employee created content here, for example. Run a blog? Share those posts on your company Twitter.
By doing this, you’re engaging with multiple audiences across social media platforms. Some people prefer one social media platform over the other.
When using the platform your ideal candidate will use, you’re more likely to get your message to them.
5. Make an Engaging Website
When you make a website for your company, you want it to be engaging. This applies both to your website content and your website appearance.
A good looking website with relevant information is a great way to show that you care about your brand.
As for content, this can vary on what you wish to share with candidates and visitors to the site. For instance, you can make a page for employee testimonials.
Another example that can boost your brand is to show how your company culture helps the community around you.
Whether that help is through your company services or charity such as the example, you show an awareness of your company’s impact. It also comes off as a genuine way to celebrate company accomplishments.
Combine Employer Branding Strategies With Recruiting
Understanding your employer brand is crucial for your business overall. When you’re recruiting, it becomes even more important. You want any candidates who you contact or who find you to like your brand. It will make them want to work with you and want to stay with you too.
Employer branding strategies also help your recruiting efforts provide better results. For example, when partnering with a recruiting firm such as TruPath, you can easily show them this branding strategy.
Firms like TruPath makes it their goal to talk to their clients first when starting a recruiting process. That way, they can not only find the best candidates with your branding strategy but help you improve it as well.
This applies to all recruiting services, from direct hires to an executive search. No matter what, keeping your employer brand active and present makes for a more cohesive and beneficial recruiting process.
Wondering how to improve your recruiting efforts as well as your employee brand? Reach out to the team at TruPath and one of their expert staff members will help you get started.