With today’s race for talent and skill, there’s a big focus on employers making themselves as attractive as possible to promising job candidates. Having a strong employer brand can help your company reduce recruitment costs, set itself apart from the competition, and improve overall retention.
If your current employer brand is failing to attract the best talent, it’s time for a refresh. Here are 6 steps to help you start 2020 off right.
How to Improve Your Employer Branding This Year
1. Zero in on social media
With people reading reviews on Facebook, LinkedIn and job recruitment platforms, whether you want it or not, your business has a presence on social media. In 2020, make sure you control the narrative by giving insight into what it’s like to work at your company. Posting images and videos of managers valuing the employees can be a good start. Take the time to collect footage of the office, post testimonials of company culture, and focus on delivering the appeal of a productive, driven, and compassionate work environment.
2. Rethink your content strategy
To enhance the appeal of your employer brand, you should revisit your content strategy and see if you can inject more personality into it. Although revamping a content strategy is a time-consuming commitment, your investment will ultimately pay off in the future. Here’s how to improve your employer branding content.
- Identify your candidate personas: Personas act as profiles that feature a set of characteristics like favorite companies, employer history, tool preferences and much more. Identifying candidate personas will help you determine what voice and style of writing would resonate well with your target applicants.
- Build a content calendar: You will be creating new and updating old content on a regular basis, so to keep things streamlined, it’s best to set up a content calendar. This will allow you to decide topics in advance, establish clear deadlines and ensure that production is divided effectively between team members.
- Use storytelling: The objective of your new content strategy should be to engage applicants on an emotional level. Make sure to incorporate that personal element that differentiates you from competing employers. Through visual and written storytelling, convey the journey of your business and how you have shaped a specific culture over the years. Such content will entice the candidates and present your corporation as a group of real humans rather than faceless employers.
3. Tweak your perks and benefits
Fringe benefits and perks play a significant role in the satisfaction of your staff and in attracting the best candidates. It is, therefore, imperative that you thoroughly review what your company has to offer. Get feedback from your employees to identify which benefits they redeem and love the most and which ones they’d like the company to offer. Introducing additional high-quality benefits will boost both your talent acquisition and employee retention rates.
4. Examine competitor strategies
In order to stand out from the competition, you need to know what other companies are doing. In other words, you need to be aware of the weaknesses and strengths of businesses that are similar to yours. The best way to find this out is to act as a job seeker. More specifically, be the candidate persona that you’re targeting. Search the platforms they use, Google your company (and competitors’ companies), and review job application pages.
When possible, see which of your competitors’ content gets the most saves, shares, and likes, as well as where they repeat content or ideas. These are vital indicators of tactics that are working even when there’s no clear way to gauge their success. At the end of your research, dive deep into your recruitment strategies and see what you can do to improve.
For example, if the competitor has a beautiful job application page, you can hire a web developer to tweak and improve yours.
5. Create an employee advocacy program
Your existing employees play a crucial role in establishing the employer brand of your company. Why? Because people trust those whom they can resonate with more than anyone else. In this case, job candidates will judge your company by the experiences of existing employees.
For this reason, we suggest that you create an advocacy program where employees market open vacancies to their connections and receive a reward for a successful referral. Recognize and reward the efforts of those who share candidate-focused content, promote the employer brand, and recommend new hires.
6. Enhance your recruitment experience
Rather than making candidates guess what the recruitment process will be like, make sure to tell them what they should expect. Cloud-based software company Salesforce, for instance, put up a microsite to guide applicants through every stage of their recruitment process (because they truly care about the candidates and want to treat them as a family). You can do the same by communicating that you will:
- Conduct an initial video screening and get back to them with an update within a week.
- Send them a calendar reminder with the name and position of the person they’ll be meeting, a URL (if it’s a virtual meeting), address and parking information, a list of required pre-requisites, and all appropriate content details.
- Tell them when they can expect a response from you after the interview. Then make sure to notify those who have not been selected for the job. You can keep up relationships with qualified candidates who didn’t make the cut this time by saying, “Please keep following us to learn about future opportunities.”
- Inform the shortlisted candidates about the next steps in a timely manner.
If you’re still struggling to get the best candidates, contact an experienced placement firm to do the heavy lifting for you. They can connect you with their deep networks of qualified candidates. This will allow you to focus on making your company as inviting as possible so that you can land and keep the best employees.