Utilising Employer Branding in your Strategic Recruitment

What is employer branding?

Your reputation as a place to work and your value proposition to employee’s. What attracts new staff and retains existing employees to your business?

Employer Branding has gained increasing attention over the last few decades as staff loyalty has been an increasingly difficult thing to harness, as the concept of job-hopping is more common in most industries as a way for people to achieve career progression.

A strong employer brand evokes interest in jobseekers when they hear of an opportunity with your company or when they research your brand for the first time. In a candidate-short market it pays for employers to do what they can to compete against competitors for the best talent and that’s where we come in.

Why is employer branding so important?

Here are some interesting stats from LinkedIn on the importance of employer brand for attracting and retaining employees:

• 40% less employees leave companies with strong Employer Brands after first 6 months of employment. More concerningly,
• 83% of employees would leave their current firms in case of getting an offer from a firm with a better reputation.
• 75% of candidates research about firm’s reputation and Employer Brand before applying for a job

Unite People do our utmost to understand your brand and team so that we can communicate this to prospective hires, but our job also involves offering you the best advice to stand-out amongst your competitors. Developing a strong employer brand is one of the best strings you can add to your bow. We provide reactive and proactive recruitment solutions, but we also work with brands to offer strategic recruitment services that aim to attract and retain staff, which is where the impact of employer branding pays most value.

To guide branding decisions, a useful strategic tool to simplify employer branding is the brand identity prism model. It breaks down each element of your brand that you can have influence on to guide your next steps to align your employer brand with how you wish to be perceived by your target hires and current body of staff.

(Note: your employer branding will be more niche than your overall brand)

Download a copy of this tool using the button at the top of this page

Employer Branding can be challenging when the over-arching brand goals are aimed towards a different target group (your business’ primary industry), than target employees. However, in some ways its forces you to seek hires who share an interest in your industry rather than just someone who can do the job which can be more valuable. It may be worth distinguishing alternative channels to communicate your employer brand if this is the case to avoid diluting your overall branding efforts.

The brand prism model shines a spotlight on 6 key areas for consideration

Physique

Your brand physique is all of the visual branding elements you would typically associate with your brand to communicate your brand. When considering branding decisions, it can be easy to first think of just colour palette, typeface, logo, brand elements etc. These are many of the interactions people have with your business so are definitely important, but there are other less tangible elements of your branding which require consideration and we explore this in the following sections.

Personality

The age-old phrase that people buy from people perfectly summarises why it is important to express your personality in your brand. Professional brands can sometimes fail to connect with people in their communications as they value a clean record and sway from controversy, humour, sadness etc. In reality these are things that elicit emotional responses, and any good brand will be able to ignite an emotional response in their target audience. Ways you can show your personality and authenticity is through discussing current, relevant topics such as the football or pandemic, use of emojis, making light of failures or difficult topics, sharing interests, social events and so much more.

Culture

Company culture is increasingly influential when it comes to jobseekers seeking a new role. What are the values that guide your business decisions and do your staff embody these? Do your culture and values align with your target audience? Make your culture centred around the right values, and ensure all decisions align with these values. Not only will creating a united workforce provide excellent benefits, but hires will feel like they are joining something bigger than just a company, they will feel welcomed to be part of a community.

Self-image

How does your brand make new hires or existing staff feel? Be open to being corrected by your team at any opportunity and don’t make assumptions. How you hope your employees feel, may differ from how they actually perceive themselves as part of your brand. Value feedback that may be hard to hear but actually can be used to strengthen your employer brand, so that it enhances people’s opinion of themselves. This can be some of the hardest feedback to collect as people won’t wish to cause offense or create conflict, which means responses can be highly biased. One of the best ways to collect this information is through exit-interviews, ideally from an HR department who does not directly manage the leaver.

Relationship

Organisational structure plays an important role in businesses. Flat-structure start-ups often empower skilled individuals with the power and freedom to make impactful decisions. Scaling businesses sometimes enforce an authoritarian relationship between management and employees to ensure strict lines of communication. Consider how the organisational structure may help or hinder your employer brand.

Reflection

Think about how you position yourself to target employees, if at all? With employer brand being such a huge deciding factor in a candidate-short market, it’s important to sell the benefits of your brand over your competitors. Do your benefits package align with their lifestyles? Unite People take all of the facets of employer branding into consideration and aim to create positive candidates experiences which lead to introductions to your brand. We ensure we have the best staff to support your business.

Strategic recruitment enables your employer brand to have the most impact, and it’s a service we offer to support clients who are shifting from a reactive model of recruitment. Download our free template of the brand identity prism to start mapping your employer brand and get in touch if you require further assistance.