Authentic Employer Brand Content

What is Authentic Employer Brand Content?

An?authentic brand?is transparent, consistent, and?genuine?in its communication and behavior, which helps build trust and loyalty with its customers.

Brand authenticity refers to?if consumers believe a brand is genuine about their products/services, promises to customers & brand values. Authenticity is a key component to building a cohesive brand strategy. In the age of social media, brands can't hide anything from their customers.

What is an Employer Brand?

An employer brand refers to a company’s identity and reputation as an employer. This doesn’t just depend on the facts about your company, but on the general perception of your company as an employer. Basically, your employer brand is how the talent pool perceives your company as a workplace. The ultimate goal of refining your brand is to attract and retain high-quality talent that will stay and help grow your organization.

Why is it Important to Have an Employer Branding Strategy?

Today’s candidates have access to a wealth of information about which jobs are available and which companies are hiring. The modern candidate will spend time researching both the job and the employer to identify which options are most appealing.?

A strong employer branding strategy can be critical to your recruiting efforts. That said, many organizations haven’t invested in this area yet. A survey by iHire found that?nearly 40% of U.S. companies?do not have an employer branding strategy. This is a major oversight for creating awareness about your employer brand, and an opportunity for those who plan to capitalize on its power.

Your?employer branding strategy?dictates how candidates perceive your company, what they experience during the hiring process, and if hired, what happens to ensure they remain with your company. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that candidates understand your value proposition as an employer. In other words, they should clearly understand what your company can promise them in return for their commitment.

Having more employee-generated content keeps your employer brand lively and authentic.

A recent study by Corporate Responsibility Magazine found that?nearly 70% of job seekers?were unlikely to accept a job offer from a company with a bad reputation. Believe it or not, the job seekers surveyed here stated that this would remain true even if they were unemployed at the time. That truly speaks to the influence of an employer’s reputation.?

Another way to look at the importance of employer branding is to consider how much it can cost your organization. A poor employer reputation won’t just potentially lose you the valuable top talent who may have otherwise accepted a job offer; the candidate who does accept your offer will ultimately cost you more money to retain as well.?According to Harvard Business Review, a company with a bad reputation will end up?paying at least 10% more per hire. In other words, you’ll essentially be bribing job candidates to overlook your weak employer brand by offering them inflated salaries. A minimum of a 10% increase on every salary is an incredibly costly fine for having a bad reputation as an employer.

The Importance of Authentic Employer Branding

An?employer brand?is the outward expression of your company’s internal employee experience. Employer branding answers a basic question: What’s it like to work here? This can help you zero in on your employer's value proposition (EVP) which is the selling point of what your workplace has to offer.

The Value of Authenticity in Recruitment Marketing

In order for your brand to be effective, it must be authentic. Too many employers make the mistake of using performative employer branding — advertising one company culture during recruitment — only to blindside employees once they join the company.

This sort of bait-and-switch approach doesn’t work and it can erode employee trust, which can lead to poor employee engagement and higher levels of turnover. Employer branding demands total transparency as well as an accurate representation of your company culture.

Benefits for Employees

A transparent, authentic recruitment process ensures greater candidate satisfaction and engagement. During the recruitment process, applicants may be less inclined to drop out of your recruitment marketing funnel when they have a clear understanding of what to expect from your workplace culture.?

Once hired, your workers will feel that they got what they bargained for, and their actual experience of working for you matches the expectations created by your employer brand. And, when you solicit input from your current employees to hone your brand/EVP, your workers will feel more respected, valued & engaged in your company’s processes.

Benefits for Employers

Authentic employer branding helps companies attract workers who will integrate well into the company culture. In the short term, this streamlines your recruitment efforts, and transparent branding can pay long-term dividends as well.

Satisfied workers tend to be more productive and less likely to look elsewhere for employment. Long-term employees can develop skills that augment your operational effectiveness, and with lower employee turnover, you’ll spend less money on future recruitment efforts.

5 Steps to Improve Your Employer Brand

If you want to attract top talent, take a look at your employer brand and how you can improve it:

1. Analyze Your Company Culture

If you want candidates to perceive your company as a great place to work, it’s got to deliver. And a strong employer brand starts from within. It’s critical to remember that company culture is the factor that will likely have the most impact — positive or negative — on your employer brand.

In the past, a flashy career page and a few hand-picked testimonials could make any company look like a dream employer. But in today’s hyper-connected world of professional social networks like LinkedIn and employer review sites, a word about your company culture travels fast. If your branding efforts promise an experience you don’t actually offer, candidates, will figure it out quickly and do their best to warn others about what they experienced.?

The best way to gauge the strength of your company culture is to speak directly with your employees. Get a read on how they feel about the subject. Whether through anonymous surveys or face-to-face meetings, find out what they love most about working at your company — and what they’d like to be different. Here are some questions to ask your team about your company culture:

• Do your employees feel your benefits program is satisfactory??
• Do they want more open communication with leadership??
• Do they have a clear picture of the growth potential??

Listening to your employees will not only help you identify weaknesses your company can improve upon but will also identify strengths you should highlight as part of your employer brand.

2. Develop a Content Strategy to Promote Your Employer's Brand

Content is king for recruiting. Candidates use a range of sources to inform their understanding of your brand, and content is critical to their decision-making process.?

What is employer brand content?

Employer brand content represents the materials you build to inform the broader candidate pool about what it’s like to work at your company. The content you publish on job sites, professional social media networks, review sites, and your company website, as well as the content used in candidate outreach, should all work together to create a positive employer brand image.

Why is it important to have a strong employer brand content strategy?

To build a strong brand as an employer, you must craft a comprehensive, multi-channel content strategy to engage your target candidates. Although an ongoing content strategy is a time-consuming commitment that won’t show results immediately, it sets the tone for how your efforts will ultimately pay off in the long run.

Here are some key tips to develop better content to support your employer brand:

First, consult your candidate's personas

To build a strong employer brand, your candidate-facing content must resonate with your ideal candidates. Profiles of potential candidates include a set of preferred characteristics like work history, skills, goals, employment preferences, and much more. They can help you personalize recruiting content for your?ideal candidates.?

For example: let’s say your ideal candidate for an entry-level marketing role values collaboration in their work environment. You can use this information to create a short video of your marketing team working together or a blog post that explains your values around working together within the organization.

Then, tell a story about your employer's brand?

The goal of your content strategy is to engage candidates on an emotional level. Captivating an audience through a story or narrative adds a personal element that differentiates your employer brand from others.?

Through written and visual?brand storytelling, talk about the journey of specific employees. These stories can help resonate with candidates, showing your company as a collection of real people rather than faceless workers.

Emphasize your company values?

Modern job seekers want to work for employers that mirror their own values. For this reason, we recommend clearly defining the?core values of your company?and promoting them throughout your content.

3. Establish an Employee Advocacy Program

Not all of your employees are recruiters, but they’re an integral part of the employer brand-building process. Consider offering incentives to employees who refer new hires, share content, and promote branded information.

Remember: employees who feel valued and appreciated will be more willing to advocate for your company. Recognize and reward your employees’ efforts and they’ll become valuable brand ambassadors.

4. Leverage Social Media

It’s critical to?build your employer brand on social media?if you want your ideal candidates to find you.

Most recruiters leverage platforms like Twitter and Facebook to post job listings, but that doesn’t contribute much to establishing your brand. Instead, your team can use social media to engage with candidates and share valuable content. Consider creating a separate profile for your recruiting efforts to distinguish your employer branding from your traditional marketing efforts.

5. Test and Measure Your Employer Brand

Improving your employer brand is an ongoing process and may seem hard to quantify. But much like marketers test and measure the success of their campaigns, recruiters should try and evaluate their strategies.?

Companies often think they have a strong employer brand, but really they have no clue. Measuring it is all about tracking?important recruiting metrics, which include:

Reviews and ratings?

Your company ratings on review sites such as Linkedin and Glassdoor are extremely important as they are the first place many candidates go to learn about the quality of your employer brand. Track your ratings over time and identify common critiques that could indicate a larger problem within your company culture.

Retention rate?

Employee turnover is fluid and unpredictable, but?retention?rates can be a key indicator of the quality of your employer brand.

Source of hire

Track the source of each hire to understand which channels your hires are coming from most (and least). This metric will help you identify your top channels and determine where you should focus your efforts.

Employee satisfaction?

A strong employer brand requires a healthy culture and happy employees, so you should be measuring employee satisfaction across all teams and departments. Anonymous surveys are a great way to let employees provide honest feedback about their experiences without fear of repercussions.

The Benefits of Employer Branding

Now that we’ve answered some of your questions about employer branding, let’s take a look at some of the great things it can provide you with. Below are some of the major benefits of successful employer branding.

Bring in Top Talent

It’s almost impossible to quantify the value of hiring the best in the business to work for your organization. But it’s not easy to attract top talent when you’ve got a poor reputation as an employer.?

The best in the business gets the pick of top talent when it comes to job openings, and successful employer branding is what can make you that pick.

Strengthen Company Culture and Employee Engagement

Much of the talk in this article has centered around how poor employer reputation affects you and your organization. Meanwhile, being considered a poor employer is obviously more detrimental to your employees.?

Improving your employer brand doesn’t just mean projecting a positive image, it means reforming your image through positive action. Your current employees should appreciate that just as much as potential ones.

If you create a solid employer brand, your employees will benefit from a positive and supportive culture, be more willing to engage or be advocates for your company, and increase retention rates.?

Save Time and Money on Hiring

The longer your hiring search continues, the more time and money it’s costing you. It’s even more expensive to hire the wrong person and then have to resume your hiring search shortly afterward. With great employer branding, your hiring team’s biggest task will be deciding which candidate is the most fantastic of them all – since you’ll have attracted like-minded people to your organization.

Improve Your Overall Reputation

Today’s consumer is far more concerned with the ethicality of your business practices than ever before. If they’re aware that you maintain a strong, positive culture among your employees, they’re more likely to hold a positive opinion about your organization. If they hold that positive opinion, they’re far more likely to become a customer or a potential employee.?

Resources

• https://www.ihire.com/about/press/ihire-reveals-results-of-2019-employer-branding-pulse-survey
• https://hbr.org/2016/03/a-bad-reputation-costs-company-at-least-10-more-per-hire
• https://socialrecruitingstrategies.com/blog/how-to-create-employer-brand-content-that-is-authentic
• https://pdfserver.amlaw.com/cc/COMMITForumPowerpointdocumentSeptember232013Final.pdf
• https://www.recruitmentmarketing.com/employer-brand/how-to-build-an-authentic-employer-brand/
• https://pipeline.zoominfo.com/recruiting/employer-brand

-Team FindErnest