Creating an Effective Employer Brand to Attract Top Talent

The employment market has undergone some subtle but important changes over the past few years, not least in the way that talent now research their prospective employers. In this article, we’ll explore how to build and promote a strong employer brand through digital channels to attract the best candidates for your roles.

What is an employer brand?

In a similar way to your marketing or sales brand being the reputation and image of your company to potential customers, your employer brand is how appealing and credible you are to job seekers as a place they want to work. Employer brand is an amalgam of several factors: the type of roles you recruit for, the competitiveness of your salary and benefits package, your working arrangements and office location, pension, training, and long-term career prospects. But it’s more than this, too. Employer brand also encompasses your company values, culture, ethos, and working environment.

A strong and effective employer brand will help you to attract, engage, recruit – and retain – talented employees by clearly communicating what makes your company a desirable place to work, as opposed to competitor X, Y or Z.

Unfortunately, many businesses struggle with their employer brand because the overwhelming majority of their website and marketing content is customer-focused. You talk to your customers in a different way than to potential employees. It’s a different value proposition and a different market, so it’s sometimes difficult for talent to get an accurate perception of your company through your website.

Social media and recruitment pages

A partial solution to this is to dedicate a part of your website, a landing page, or a subdomain to recruitment. Just as the content on your main site is optimised for sales buyer personas, so likewise the content on your recruitment pages should be optimised for your target hires. And the process of doing so is the same as with marketing content. You need to start by defining your employer’s value proposition, using your content to articulate what makes your business unique, and explaining why someone would want to work there. At the same time, you can use SEO to maximise visibility for the type of person you want to attract.

Another part of building a strong employer brand is to invest in your social media presence. These days, many, if not most, job seekers use social media as their first port of call when investigating a company. Not just LinkedIn, but also Facebook. LinkedIn gives talent the ‘official perspective’ from your company, while on Facebook or Instagram, they will gain more of a personal insight into the interpersonal dynamics within your business: what your current employees are like, your age and gender demographics, social activities between colleagues outside work, charitable activities, and what it feels like to work for you.

In recruitment, your current employees are your strongest asset. The things your employees say about your company on social media, the way they present themselves, and the way they engage with you within work and outside, say more to prospective employees than any amount of carefully written content. Encourage your employees to advocate for your company by sharing positive experiences on social media and review sites. Authentic testimonials of this kind can significantly boost your employer’s brand and reputation.

The ideal situation is to consistently showcase your company values from multiple angles: demonstrating your company’s values in actions and decisions through your website, your blog, social media pages, and the pages of your employees.

Optimising your candidate experience

Another key part of building a good employer brand is to offer your candidates a professional and streamlined recruitment process. Be transparent and respectful at every stage of the process, maintaining good communication, and being candid about expectations, timescales, and what you are willing to offer. Be clear that you want to invest in people, with the resources and will to provide your hires with long-term training and development to grow their skills, advance their careers, and progress as people during their time with your company.

Next steps

To find out more about building a good employer brand and how you can use the tools and techniques of digital marketing to attract the right talent to your company, please get in touch with JDR today by clicking here.

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