What do you do if your employer brand fails to attract and retain highly engaged employees?

Conducting an internal audit is an essential first step. It allows you to collect direct feedback from current and former employees, clearly showing where the gaps might be in your employer brand. Understanding the employee experience from their perspective is crucial in pinpointing the areas that require improvement, whether it's company culture, values, or the employee value proposition. This method ensures that your adjustments are grounded in real employee insights.

Does your employer brand reflect the reality of the business and people's experiences? If it does, are you communicating it leveraging your leaders and employees in a language your potential candidates and employees can relate to? Is it only aspirational or current reality of the employee experience? These are a few potential reasons you may want to assess if the employer brand is not working the way you intend to.

If your company isn't attracting and keeping engaged employees, there are steps you can take: Find the Problems: Figure out what's not working by asking employees what they think. Improve Your Message: Make sure your company's message shows why it's a great place to work. Make Work Better: Focus on making work a better experience for everyone. Offer training, fair pay, and a good atmosphere. Use Your Employees: Get your current employees to talk about why they like working for the company. It can help attract new people. Listen and Change: When employees tell you something's wrong, listen and try to fix it. Keep Checking: Keep an eye on how things are going and be ready to change things if they're not working.

1. To begin Conduct regular employee surveys to gather feedback and track engagement levels. 2. Implement an exit interview process to understand reasons for employee turnover. 3. Analyze recruitment data to identify trends and adjust strategies accordingly.

In a dynamic market, does your value proposition stay true to the changing reality of the business? For like COVID times, are work-life balance and health important or have your priorities changed? Undertaking a thorough assessment of your EVP and being transparent with yourself and your employees about the need for change is crucial in these times. The priorities of people may also change and thus your EVP needs to reflect the needs of your talent.

Your Employee Value Proposition is like a storefront window. If it looks dull or outdated, potential customers (or in this case, employees) will pass it by without a second glance. Revise your EVP to keep it fresh and relevant to attract the right talent to your organization.

Your employee value proposition is vital to your employer brand. If it's not resonating with potential candidates, it's time to revise it. Make sure that your EVP reflects the benefits, culture, and opportunities that your organization offers.

Messaging is like a language that speaks directly to your audience. An outdated or unclear message gets lost in translation, failing to resonate with employees or potential hires. Tailor your messaging to reflect changes (industry trends, audience preferences, and competitor strategies) while staying true to your brand identity.

Your messaging should be consistent across all platforms, from your career website to social media channels. Articulate company's mission, culture, and benefits in a way that resonates with your target audience.

If your employer brand is lacking, it might help to check in with current employees to see what you can be doing better as well as what you're currently doing well right now

Encouraging employees to share their positive experiences and stories on social media or through employee testimonials can turn them into your best brand ambassadors. Their genuine endorsements can be more persuasive than any marketing campaign.

This is extremely important as the challenge is not only attracting talent, but retaining it. Implement strategies to retain your talent, use stay interviews to understand their motivations. Amplify the things that cause them to stay and put measures in place to mitigate the reasons they would leave. Turn your employees into an asset that can help you attract more talent.

After our company revised its EVP to focus more on mental health, I've seen a significant drop in burnout. It feels like they really care

Is your company promoting a culture of inclusion and diversity? Evaluating how well your company practices inclusivity and creates a welcoming environment for all employees is key.

Embracing inclusion isn't just the right thing to do—it's also a smart business strategy. 1. Create policies and practices that promote diversity and equity. 2. Support it with open communication and empathy, ensuring everyone's voice is heard and respected. 3. Prune away bias and discrimination to allow inclusion to flourish.

If your employer brand fails to attract and retain highly engaged employees, implementing tangible measures to track progress is key. Start by setting clear, quantifiable goals related to recruitment, retention, and employee engagement. Use metrics such as time-to-hire, turnover rates, employee satisfaction scores, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to gauge your employer brand's health. Additionally, monitor social media engagement and employer review sites for real-time feedback. Regularly assess these metrics against your goals to identify areas for improvement. By measuring your progress, you can make data-driven decisions to enhance your employer brand and better meet the needs of your workforce.

It is crucial to keep a watchful eye on the progress of your employer brand initiatives. This entails monitoring employee engagement levels, retention rates, and feedback from new hires. Continuously evaluating these metrics will help you determine the effectiveness of the changes you've made and identify areas for further improvement.

A brand isn’t a company. While it can attract talent, retaining them is the job of good company leadership and management. Branding should never be about hiding cracks in an organization but fostering an honest and exciting view of what a company can offer. Honest testimonials, exciting retreats, and good financial and personal benefits, like vacation time and transparent salaries, are key things employees look for so it’s important to encourage great business practices and incentives with absolute transparency before even considering how to communicate them. If a company is good then speaking honestly about that is the best way to position an employer brand. New employees catch on quickly to inauthentic narratives.

If you have a clear EVP, a solid EB positioning and it all matches with your company culture and employee experience, and you still can't attract and retain highly engaged employees, that's probably because you are not hiring, rewarding and promoting the right people. Meaning, people who would thrive and feel comfortable in your culture and with the experience you are offering as a workplace. Start hiring, rewarding and promoting the people that match your values, that feel attracted by what you offer as an employer and that will contribute to your ideal culture in a positive way.

The CEO and the HR Director should have an in-depth conversation with the Chief Brand Officer to make sure that the following is being integrated and cultivated (for EVERY department): - Job postings should reflect your core brand singularity. - On-boarding should be a comprehensive experience to instill the core brand culture that everyone is committed to. - Reviews (annual, or otherwise) should incent, reward, and/or instill accountability for living out, strengthening and modeling the core brand. In short - all 3 points above should work towards building a true Brand Culture (merged with, of course, creating a fair, inspiring, purpose-driven, human-centric growth culture). (unless you don't have a CBO? which is a different problem)

Before initiating any external communication efforts, it's crucial to focus on internal actions to strengthen the employer brand. Some key internal actions to prioritize: 1/Audit the Employer Brand: Evaluate the employer brand to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses. 2/Gather Feedback: Collect input from employees and candidates to understand their perceptions. 3/Identify Key Areas: Determine areas for improvement based on feedback and audit findings. 4/Develop Targeted Strategies: Create specific plans to enhance weak areas and capitalize on strengths. 5/ Implement Continuous Improvement: Establish a feedback loop for ongoing refinement of the employer brand. Only after these steps, some external communication plan can be launched.