Enhance Your Employer Branding Strategy
How Can You Enhance Your Employer Branding Strategy?
5 Tips to create or upgrade your employer branding strategy to stand out among job seekers and improve your hiring experience:
1. Create a Seamless Remote Hiring Process
Your recruitment process should be a reflection of your employer brand. Since it is the first touch-point of any candidate to your organization, you should make sure you can reflect your culture and values in your recruitment process.
The traditional hiring methods take way too long and can put off many of your potential employees from applying to your company. Gen Zs have grown up with technology around them and will look for employers who understand and implement that mindset. Hence, having a remote hiring process becomes attractive for the younger workforce.
You can start with sourcing through social media or a recruitment chatbot integrated on your main careers page. A chatbot can also be used to create automated workflows containing assessments and asynchronous video interviews to help candidates start their application process right away.
Apart from that, a must-have for employers today is to invest in recruitment software or tools that enable you to hold online pre-recruitment assessments and online video interviews. Much time is wasted in coordinating when both parties are accessible for an offline evaluation and interview.
In this process, even if you get hundreds of candidates to attempt the assessment, only a few handfuls qualify for the next round, wasting hours of the recruiter’s productive time. Automating these steps will optimize your assessment process and give the applicants a taste of how to work with you.
2. Improve Candidate Experiences
One big step to improving your employer branding comprises enhancing your interaction with candidates or the candidate experience. When they see your job ad or read about you until they are recruited or rejected by you, you have a huge opportunity to provide every applicant with a smooth and friendly conversation and enhance your brand name.
For instance, making sure you reply to all applicants regardless of their qualifications will convey how you value a person’s every point of contact and time. You don’t want to keep people hanging and make their only contact with you a bitter experience.
Similarly, clear and direct communication, constant touch through emails and guiding them through different qualification rounds will convey that you value their time and interest in you.
Having a digital or mobile assessment and interview processes are the next significant steps to improve the candidate experience. Instead of having tedious pen and paper tests, a mobile hiring process gives the candidate the flexibility to attend an assessment or interview from anywhere at any time, thus, establishing a great candidate experience.
Providing the right experience to candidates from sourcing to onboarding can turn your candidates into your brand ambassadors. It can help organizations:
- Create Brand Loyalty
- Influence Retention and Attraction Rates
- Encourage Referrals
3. Have an Active and Engaging Digital/Social Media Presence
“Social media channels serve as a window into company culture – 21% of candidates who want to get a sense of company culture use Facebook to browse through photos and content on the site…”, according to Jobvite.
In the era of digitization, it is mandated to have your company’s active social media presence. Today, the workforce will look up the organization they want to work for on the Internet to know more about the culture, the work, the people, and the employers.
In this case, your current employees can be your biggest advocates. Encourage them to share their experience with their network on social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or leave reviews on Glassdoor. Utilize storytelling and share their stories on your career page for candidates to see what it would be like to work in a specific position to build a cohesive image of you as an employer.
For example, Microsoft has a Facebook careers page called Microsoft Life, where they post about their employees, their stories and experiences, and live interviews with their recruiters who answer potential candidates’ questions. This is an excellent way for a company to communicate with potential candidates.
Engage potential talent by regularly updating social media channels and increase the probability of the right-fit talent entering your recruitment funnel.
4. Cultivate Company Culture/Values
59% of respondents used social media to research the company culture of organizations they were interested in.
A company’s culture reflects everything they do — office layout, work-life balance, management style, dress code, employee perks, and benefits.
Your organization’s core values and how your employees perceive the work culture comprises your culture, and it is a vital aspect for job seekers when they look for a suitable job.
No culture is perfect, but you need to make sure that you can communicate your culture correctly. Through your employees and their storytelling, it can be through social media platforms or through events that you host.
One happy employee will praise you among all their friends and build trust among them. Brand advocacy is one of the best ways to spread the right brand image in the market.
Some of the things that you can do to get started on building a company culture that will speak for your brand name are:-
- Put your employees first
- Hold annual or bi-annual feedback surveys
- Be transparent
- Encourage an empathetic environment
- Appreciate your employees
Take the example of Airbnb. They have photo tours of their offices and candid photos of actual employees on their careers page. They share their mission, core values, and benefits and have a helpful FAQ page for prospective employees
5. Foster an Inclusive Work Environment
83% of millennials are actively engaged when they believe an organization fosters an inclusive culture.
Source: Deloitte
To create a strong employer brand, it’s critical today that you show your commitment to building diverse teams. Being inclusive means hiring people for their skills without being prejudiced against their gender, race, culture, ideologies, background.
It is necessary to cultivate a positive employer brand by ensuring you are extending your brand’s reach to new groups of people. Apart from the many benefits of having diverse teams, you will gain a substantial competitive advantage against your rivals. Potential employees would love to be a part of an unbiased organization.
“Diversity within a workplace means more than just demographics. It is a combination of acceptance, respect, and teamwork. It is what enables a vibrant, creative, and thriving workplace.”
Building an employer brand strategy is something that will take time and effort. It requires you to understand your potential candidates, your future talent pool, your employees, along how you want to be perceived as an organization. Once put in place, a solid employer brand strategy can help companies in more ways than one.
If you are ready to enhance you company’s employer brand. Let’s Talk
