Employer branding: giving your organization a competitive edge

Attracting the best candidates as a recruiter is not a simple task. Your business’ brand is competing with a range of other exceptional organizations to gain their attention. As the top 20% of candidates are attracted by a company’s culture and decide their future roles based on a company’s brand, employer branding should be a critical element of your hiring strategy.

Giving your organization the advantage over your competition is essential, and an outstanding employer branding strategy can help with this. Take a look at this post to find out all you need to know about employer branding.

What is employer branding?

Employer branding is the process of defining your organization’s brand to prospective candidates. It includes planning, creating, and executing a range of employer branding strategies to shape your brand. The employer branding processes you use shouldn’t embellish or exaggerate your existing company’s brand, goals, or values. It should reflect the actual perks of your organization and match your brand.

It’s important to note that employer branding strategies are similar to recruitment marketing approaches. Both of these strategies are related to bolstering your organization’s reputation. But there is an essential difference.

Whereas with employer branding, you define your business’ brand, which includes determining your employee value proposition. With recruitment marketing, you are typically more focused on promoting your brand in various ways.

Why is employer branding important?

There are several reasons why employer branding is important for you as a recruiter. When combined with recruitment marketing approaches, employer branding can help you communicate to candidates that your business has a positive work environment. This is a pivotal factor that usually influences top candidates when deciding whether to accept or reject your job offer.

Approximately 50% of workers say they wouldn’t join a business with a bad reputation despite a compensation increase. But you can encourage your candidates to join your organization with a powerful business brand, which enhances your reputation, boosts your recruitment efforts, and increases the level of candidate engagement.

Employer branding is also the key to retaining your existing employees and reducing staff turnover. With a strong company brand, you communicate to your employees that their working environment is positive, which boosts employee retention rates.

Efficient employer branding strategies will also ensure that you avoid spending additional costs defining your employer brand to each candidate individually. This is because, when executed alongside a recruitment marketing strategy, your company brand has already been publicized positively. Employer branding that is carried out in the right way can decrease your overall recruiting costs by approximately 43%.

HR professionals can even enhance the quality of their candidate pool with a good employer branding strategy. By sharing critical information about your company’s culture and your team’s quality, you can influence your prospective candidates to apply for your vacancies.

It also widens your talent pool because the stronger your brand, the more likely your candidates will share your strong employer brand with others, helping you attract top talent.

Continue reading to find out the essential steps you should take to create and implement your employer branding strategy.

How does employer branding help your reputation?

An effective employer branding strategy helps the reputation of your business in various ways. In addition to helping you plan towards creating a positive brand, it enhances how prospective candidates view your company’s culture. Employer branding also:

• Informs your candidates of your company benefits and vacations
• Gives your candidates information about your corporate social responsibility or services to the wider community
• Helps you inform your candidates about career development opportunities, and similarly,
• Gives your candidates information about training opportunities specific to your brand while showing your willingness to invest in your employees continuously

Winning incentives like these are critical factors to consider when defining your employer brand, significantly boosting your company’s image. When you have defined such incentives and considered how they align with your brand, you can promote them using recruitment marketing strategies.

How does employer branding help boost your company’s value?

Not only does an effective employer branding strategy help you lower your company’s recruitment costs and save money, but it can also boost your company’s value as well. It does this by:

• Ensuring that you retain your best-performing employees by promoting key company incentives and values. This approach makes your employees more driven to advance and grow within the company and also adds value.
• Helping your organization to reach targets and gain higher profits more easily because of increased workplace productivity.
• Significantly reducing your time to hire as your employees can act as ambassadors for the company. As your strong brand empowers your employees, they will spread your positive company image and help you discover candidates faster.
• Helping you save on recruiting time and resources. This occurs because your company image will have already been shaped by your employer branding strategy and shared via recruitment marketing approaches.
• Reducing your cost per hire because, as mentioned, you are already promoting your brand. This means that you can spend less on sharing your business’ brand with each candidate individually.

You can reap the rewards of these benefits, add to your company’s value, and save resources by using an employee value proposition.

Employee value propositions and employer branding

Employee value propositions (EVPs) are the cornerstones of employer branding. Therefore, the success of your branding efforts will largely depend on the extent to which you can develop a compelling employee value proposition (EVP).

What is an employee value proposition?

An employee value proposition sums up the key ways your organization is a positive environment in which to work. It typically includes the various benefits your company offers and positively influences your candidates during the recruitment process. Some of the benefits that an EVP might detail are:

• The fact that your business offers ongoing support to its employees, and
• The fact that every employee is recognized and valued

When you create your EVP, keep in mind that it shouldn’t simply become a list of advantages and benefits, it should also include information about the values and culture of your company.

You should also ensure that the perks you define in your EVP are already valued by your existing employees, as it should let your candidates know what they will get in return when they accept your job offer.

What are the benefits of an EVP?

The reason why EVPs are so powerful is that they promote your organization and let your candidates know they are opting for the best business when they choose yours. As well as helping you draw in the best candidates they can:

• Help you define your business and discover what makes it distinct from your competitors
• Help you attract and retain top talent, and
• Assist you in engaging your candidates while enhancing the candidate experience

By defining your values and company brand in your EVP, you will also find it easier to present your values to your candidates. And once you have shared your company brand and values outlined in your EVP, you can open up a discussion with them to get a sense of whether their values are aligned with yours.

What are the key steps to creating and enhancing the brand of your business?

There are specific steps you can take to ensure your brand is powerful and stands out from your competitors’ brands is an accurate representation of your company.

Having a clear idea of your company’s values, what it does, and its unique selling points are crucial first steps. Then it’s also important to think ahead to the other steps involved in creating your brand. These include:

• Being aware of your company’s culture and ensuring that your current employees endorse and approve of it.
• Researching your company’s current brand, which might include analyzing your applicants’ and candidates’ feedback and completing a brand audit.
• Researching the benefits of working for your organization with your current employees.
• Creating your employee value proposition to share your company’s value with your prospective candidates. Your EVP should contain details on the financial offerings, the benefits your company offers, the career development opportunities your company provides, the positive aspects of your work environment, and the business culture.
• Reinforcing and shaping your company brand with blog content and company videos.
• Deciding how you will promote the brand and considering which channels you will use. This might encompass using appropriate recruitment marketing strategies to publicize your brand.

Boost your business’ brand with the best employer branding strategy

You might find it challenging to create an exceptional business brand that outshines your competitors, but it is nonetheless important for various reasons. It can be the key to reducing recruitment costs, widening your talent pool, and retaining top talent.

Remember, recruitment marketing is the next step to disseminating the brand you have created for your business. With the right strategies, you’ll have a powerful business brand that helps you draw in top talent and create more company revenue.