Companies that attract top talent are great at one thing – employer branding. Most of the job seekers will become interested in working for a company after they visit their website. Others, however, will refuse to consider that company based on this visit.
The company website is often the first touchpoint that prospective employees will have with an employer brand, so it needs to make a great impression.
Recent trends suggest it’s becoming harder to discover top-quality talent, and as a consequence, businesses need to work harder to make themselves employers of choice.
Investing in an employer brand and creating an effective careers site can lead great talents from interested to obsessed.
Careers site
It is not about what it is in the job descriptions, but how a career site is developed. The careers site is one of the most important tools that empower the employer brand and define the future of its team.
The candidate experience starts in the moment prospects find a company – the business needs to sweep them off their feet from the start.
- For starters, a company should enforce its employer brand – making it very clear to prospect candidates that they’re in its territory. It is all about paying attention to fonts, colors, and the use of images.
- From there, a business should give concise, particular reasons why any good talent would want to work there.
A straightforward approach, one that skips the great location or free lunch, can easily get people from point A – random visitors – to point B – brand believers and prospective candidates.
Application experience
A recent survey has reported that 95% of recruiters and marketers, when asked whether candidate experience impacts their employer brand, have said yes.
Ineffective management of application experience will surface in some shape or form to affect the health of an employer brand.
For that reason, today, application experience is viewed as a leading indicator – among many others – of the employer brand.
Like any other leading indicator, improving it will also improve everything that follows. There are five areas that impact candidate experience the most:
- Always listening to candidates first
- Setting clear expectations from the start
- Exemplifying fairness throughout every step
- Providing some kind of closure
- Demanding accountability
Social media
Considering the world we live in today, the importance of social media for an employer brand comes almost as obvious. Most job seekers use social media in their hiring search, so it’s not about whether a brand is present on social media, but how present it is.
This trend of the social media aspect of employers is dominating the Australian market lately, where transparency is appreciated before anything else. Professionals such as this branding agency in Melbourne offer it as part of their employer branding strategy.
Consider offering compelling brand visuals and true pictures of current workers on your social media. The content, of course, should be tailored to the unique style of each social media account:
- Facebook gives space for longer content that connects with a varied demographic.
- Compelling pictures and videos dominate Instagram.
- Twitter is excellent for concise summaries of key industry news – such as blog posts, recent awards or reached milestones.
Employee Referral Programs
Employee referrals represent the top source of hire for almost any company. Candidates who are referred into the company through an employee are also four times more likely to result in a hire than a candidate who applies directly through a careers site.
In other words, strong internal branding that encourages referrals is just as crucial as external branding efforts.
By establishing and promoting an employee referral program within a company, you can encourage existing employees to really think about the positives of working for you, and then spread the word to their friends. The right incentive might lead to social media posts and other forms of sharing.
A positive candidate experiences
While it’s intangible and not as easy to conceptualize as other parts of an employer brand, the candidate experience is a make-or-break aspect of an employer brand that candidates pay very close attention to. 78% of candidates say the overall candidate experience at a business is an indicator of how well the organization values its employees.
In other words, job seekers look at candidate experience as “proof” that a business lives up to its company values. Basically, positive candidate experience is:
- Short
- Efficient
- Fair
- Has transparent communication
And it doesn’t stop after the hiring decision. Notifying the persons who didn’t get the job is especially important.
In essence, the employer brand reflects how an organization wants prospective and existing employees to look at the company. Using the data gathered here creates a strong employer brand and results in rewards in terms of:
- Better retention
- Productivity
- Worker satisfaction
- Savings on the bottom line
The fight doesn’t end there. Monitoring and maintaining employer brand efforts as the economic climate changes are crucial so that adjustments and new initiatives can be implemented at a moment’s notice.
A business needs to pay attention to its reputation as it builds and nurtures it. Today, it is much easier to create a negative reputation than to erase it altogether.
