Managing your employer brand to attract and retain better talent
Employer branding is the way your company is perceived by current, potential and former employees. This perception can affect your ability to hire and retain talent.
Have you made your reservations to Lisbon for World Employer Branding Day? The event, that “connects companies from around the world with the industry’s top employer branding leaders, agencies and communities to share and discuss global best practices”, is planned for mid-May of 2019.
Chances are the gathering in Portugal is not on your radar, but if your company doesn’t have an employer branding plan as a component of your overall marketing plan, it’s time to reconsider.
In a Forbes article on employee branding from earlier this year, Charles Sinclair was struggling to attract talent for, of all things, a recruiting startup. He concluded that he needed a new hiring model to reach this generation’s top talent.
“Our job was to attract talent and connect them with their next career adventure,” says Sinclair, cofounder of Oddwork. “Finding ourselves in a highly competitive market, we realized our only real chance of bringing talent to us over our much bigger competitors was via our own employer brand and company culture.”
Statistics back up the idea that employer branding can significantly help attract new employees and retain current ones. According to Human Resources Today, 75 percent of candidates research companies’ reputations before applying for a job opening and 83 percent of employees would leave a company if they receive an offer from a company with a better reputation.
In addition to incorporating social media, professional forums and review sites like Glassdoor, organizations are finding career sites to be indispensable. Jibe.com states that 64 percent of candidates listed career microsites as a top resource channel for researching new opportunities and 61 percent of talent acquisition leaders believe they are best way to reach candidates.
For those not familiar with career microsites, they may be linked to a company’s home page, but they are stand-alone sites with details about what it's like to work at the business. In other words, they are so much more than a link to an online application form or a list of open positions. They position your company by giving a feel for your culture, by showcasing real employees with real photos (no stock photos!) and even by offering general job-seeker tips that will benefit the candidate no matter where they apply. To see what a career microsite can look like, check out these examples from some of our member and investor business:
Oddwork’s Sinclair says no matter how you decide to market your employer brand it should include (remember, this is from an employee’s standpoint – not Wall Street’s):
Reason for being: why you do what you do
Cultural Pillars: who you need to be as an individual to fulfill reason for being (being kind to others, be adventurous)
Cultural Activities: enacting ways to support Cultural Pillars (employee Company Compliment Day, take staff on white water rafting trip)
Communication: Telling people outside the organization … future employees … about the first three components.
“The workplace gets happier and more motivated,” says Sinclair, “with the extra benefit of you not having to turn to a recruiting company for help ever again.”
For more workforce tips and articles, check out our other blogs here.