Put the spotlight on your Employer brand

Put the Spotlight on Your Employer Brand

Candidates want to work for an organization with a strong culture that treats its employees well. This reputation can give companies the edge in attracting top talent. How can you showcase your company in order to attract the right talent? Through employer branding.

What is Employer Branding?

Your employer brand is the external representation of your internal brand. This could be driven by your company values, but it also manifests itself through the way that employees interact with and within the company.

Why Take Control Of Your Brand?

Everyone uses social media, so information is accessible. Candidates can learn about your company in seconds, so you need to know what information is out there and control it. Many professionals rank employment as a key factor when job hunting, so it’s essential to attract top talent too. Being seen as a great place to work also reflects better on your brand with consumers too.

Finding Your Brand

To show it off, you need to know what your brand is. You may think you know what it’s like to work at your company, but it’s likely there are different opinions throughout the company. As well as whether or not people enjoy working for you, this also covers what they see as the company’s priorities, strengths, and weaknesses. This can be hard to pin down in larger companies. For example, it’s easier to have everyone on the same page if you’re an IT recruitment firm than if you’re a small IT department in a huge accounting firm.

Don’t compromise on what your brand is, but instead tailor multiple employers’ brands to different roles that you are recruiting. In specialist IT companies, this might not be a big problem, but you need to keep it in mind for a non-IT role. If you are recruiting for someone in accounting, sales, and or marketing, you will need to present your brand differently.

To develop your brand, ask yourself what the best attributes of your company are to current and potential employees? What is your company’s culture? What roles are you needing? What are your employee’s perceptions of working with your company? How do all of these align with your external brand?

Build the brand persona of your ideal audience. Include demographics, skills, experience, and interests of those you want to attract. You can consult applicants and your IT recruitment agency to get an unbiased take on your brand.

Get input from across the company. Focus groups with employees from varied roles and backgrounds are a great way to get views on how your employer brand is performing. Compare these results to your brand personas. If there’s a disparity, adapt your brand or change your practices to bring them into line. Your employer brand must be genuine. If it isn’t, it will quickly be exposed by unhappy employees.

Conclusion

Employer branding is now an essential part of talent attraction. What your brand is, the way you build it and how you show it to the world can be the difference between attracting top talent and falling behind your competitors.