The two key elements that hold a brand’s reputation are its customers and employers. While customers become the face of a brand, employees play the role of its backbone. You can have a great face value, but without a strong foundation, you cannot stand for long.
History is the witness that businesses with employees’ support have stood strong even during the harshest waves. For employees to support you, they need to fall in love with you first. How do you do that?
Here comes employer branding
Employer branding is what your current, former, and potential employees think about you as a workplace. Employee branding strategy works charms in recruiting and retaining the best quality talent. Any reputed talent acquisition professional would vouch that positive employer branding significantly increases the quality of the hiring process.
Why should you care?
Employer branding plays much more important than you think. Imagine an employee working in a company with great products and services, but no employee benefits or increments. If people ask how it feels working for that company, he/she won’t say, “The products are great, which makes my work-life greater.” They will end up saying, “The brand may look great from outside, but it treats employees quite badly.”
If that won’t matter, here are some global stats which suggest that:
- 95% of quality candidates consider reputation as a primary factor in considering a job.
- Strong employer brands experience a 50% reduced cost per hire.
- The number of qualifying applications in a reputed brand increases by 50%.
- Brands with a strong employer reputation experience 28% less attrition.
How do you build a strong employer brand?
While there is no fixed rule on how one should go about planning the employer branding strategy, here are a few best-practices incorporated by industry leaders worldwide. The strategies formed will always be unique to your brand, but the roadmap can be as below:
Audit Your Brand
Mission & Vision
Having a clear idea of what your brand stands for does pretty much all the groundwork for all employer branding strategies. The best way to do it is by conducting audits of your long-term vision and mission.
“Revolutionize HR tech space with Artificial Intelligence in the next 5 years” – This is a pretty clear vision statement, which any employee would get inspired to come on board. Go back to form a unique value proposition and what it aims to solve in the coming time. Communicate the answer found to your existing and potential employees. The results will be mesmerizing.
Past Experiences
While one way is to look into the future, another critical viewpoint is to look back at how you came through till now. Take into consideration the aspects of culture, behavior, politics, processes, benefits, increments, and every other element that impacts your employees’ work-life. Internal surveys, collective feedback scoring, and open house sessions will help in gathering the required data.
Create ideal candidate personas
Now that you know what your brand objective is, start building the ideal candidate persona who can make things happen. Candidate personas include much more than just the job description. They include background, skills, interests, preferences, aims, and at last, objections too.
Believing that you are the best place for anyone seeking a job is one of the significant contributors to high employee attrition and low employer reputation. Try to find out what your ideal candidate wants in his/her career, and check if you are the right place for them or not. The idea is not to hire the best in the world, but the best candidate for you.
Cultivate Efficient On-boarding
O.C. Tanner, an experienced employee engagement and recognition expert, says great on-boarding processes increase employee retention rate by 69% for an average of 3 years. It is almost like making a first impression that builds the foundation of their bond with the company.
Introduce your employees to the team through employee engagement activities. Express the expectations and vision you have with them joining the team, and start tracking right from the start. Employees with a clear idea of their job role during the on-boarding period are likely to stay for more extended periods, along with a good viewpoint about the employer.
Build data-led Expectations
Everything your employee does in your company can be quantified into data. The purpose of doing this is to have an objective action and feedback points rather than opinions. This one takes complement from the first point itself, where you identify the objective of the brand. Have a clear task statement and timeline for the goals you set and communicate the expected contribution of every employee in achieving them.
Doing this not only helps transfer long-term vision of the brand into the employee but also lends ownership of tasks to the employees. Remember how your friend talked about a great campaign he was a part of? That story creates an excellent employer reputation.
Equip your Resources
Great talent without the right equipment support is like Thor without his hammer. You won’t see the lightning fall. That’s why employers must ensure that every resource gets the best possible equipment support to work efficiently. Not only does it help you increase productivity, but it also hooks the employee to the brand.
The point is not to start giving away Macbooks to all employees, but meeting the requirements for comfortable working experience. No employee with excellent work equipment forgets to boast about it to fellow peers, and that is an excellent way of improving employer branding.
Leverage from Privileges
Apart from the equipment, there is a lot more that influences how your employees feel about you. Infrastructure, environment, culture, holidays, leaves, working hours, and a plethora of such privileges contribute to your employer branding. Based on where your company stands, try to incorporate the best privileges for your employees, and keep improving them as the brand grows. Work environment and processes contribute up to 60% of what they have to say about the brand.
Also Read – Interactive Marketing: A whole new ballgame to attract the audience
Loved by Clients, Desired by Employees
Employer branding is an impressive way of building your brand’s reputation in the market as a whole. Especially in the B2B sector, clients conduct a thorough background check of the brand before on-boarding. Your status as an employer significantly impacts the final call of your clients. Subsequently, a brand with great clients attracts the best talent too. So make sure you are making the best out of this loop, always.
