Building a Strong Employer Brand Before the Year Ends

Key Takeaways

• A strong employer brand significantly impacts an organization's ability to attract and retain exceptional talent.
• Strengthening the employer brand involves conducting audits, refining the employer value proposition, and leveraging current employees as brand ambassadors.
• Improving the candidate experience, enhancing online presence, and focusing on employee retention and development are crucial strategies for building a robust employer brand.

In chronically tight labor markets, how candidates view an employer makes all the difference in an organization’s ability to attract and retain top talent. When there are more open jobs than employees to fill them, candidates often go with the employer who offers them the perfect mix of culture, development, and total rewards.

Strengthening the employer brand allows organizations to better compete for top talent, reduce hiring and turnover costs, and thrive in a competitive landscape. By leveraging feedback and metrics, recruitment marketing professionals enhance their online presence, improve candidate experience, and prioritize employee retention and development, setting the stage for success in 2025.

Conduct an Employer Brand Audit

An employer brand audit involves a thorough review of an organization’s reputation, both internally and externally. It is designed to help talent acquisition (TA) professionals evaluate how employees and candidates perceive the company.

Conducting an audit requires evaluating several aspects of the employer's image. To accomplish this, TA professionals can use the following evaluation methods:

• Employee Net Promoter Score Surveys: Asking employees how likely they are to recommend their company to others as a place to work
• Candidate Surveys: Inquiring about how candidates feel about the application and interview process
• Social Media Feedback: Using social listening tools and asking users directly to see what others are saying about the brand?
• Website Feedback: Providing feedback forms for candidates to evaluate how easy it is to find what they need on the career site
• Website Analytics: Monitoring important metrics like bounce rates, conversion rates, and application completion rates

Gathering honest feedback stops hiring professionals from evaluating the employer brand from their perspective. When they’re working hard toward improving the brand image, it’s more challenging to remain objective.

Additionally, feedback helps TA professionals analyze responses to identify specific areas to target for employer brand growth. With data, they can spot and track trends and see improvement over time.?

Develop Your Employer Value Proposition?

The employer value proposition (EVP) is all about what hiring professionals promise employees in exchange for using their skills to help the company reach its strategic goals. A strong EVP isn’t just about payroll; fair compensation is important. Instead, it encompasses several organizational elements, including:

• Mission and Values: Telling candidates what the company aims to accomplish and the principles that guide the work
• Unique Attributes: Showing potential employees what makes the company a great place to work, such as a culture of open communication
• Employee Benefits: Helping candidates understand the tangible perks that come with the job, like remote work days and healthcare plans
• Growth Opportunities: Telling candidates how the company will help them reach their professional goals through training, mentoring, and skill development

It’s important for TA professionals to ensure the EVP comes across to candidates as authentic and compelling. A few ways an organization can do this include:

• Evaluating what the organization already offers
• Getting employee and candidate feedback and analyzing data
• Choosing focal points based on feedback data
• Aligning what the company provides with what candidates and employees want
• Drafting the EVP using an authentic brand voice
• Communicating the EVP via multiple channels
• Continually evaluating feedback and updating the EVP regularly

Recruitics leverages the expertise of world-class branding consultants to help some of the world’s most recognizable companies strengthen their already robust image. The EVP offering validates and enriches the employer brand through a unique Four Paths process that includes strong alignment, brand discovery, value synthesis, and brand expression. The result is a holistic EVP that attracts quality talent and improves retention.

Leverage Your Current Employees

The current in-house team is one of the best assets a company has for building a strong brand. Candidates considering applying are more likely to trust the word of people who work for the organization over what the marketing or leadership team has to say. Many feel that employees are more likely to present a fair and balanced view.

Hiring professionals leverage this trust by capturing employee testimonials and success stories. Some ideas for showcasing company culture through employee-centric content include:

• Day-in-the-life posts showing what daily work life entails
• Employee video or blog interviews about their development journey
• “Meet the Team” features that highlight who candidates will be working with once they are hired for a role

This type of content encourages employees to become brand ambassadors for the organization. They become the company's face and voice, helping candidates understand why and how working for the organization is so rewarding.

Enhance Your Online Presence

Talent acquisition professionals must work toward building a cohesive online presence that incorporates several avenues to capture candidate interest.?

The best place to start is with the company career site , which should offer a seamless, mobile-friendly candidate experience.

Recruitics’ Fusion career site builder makes this an easy process. With an advanced CMS for easy management, these sites help TA professionals generate dynamic and intelligent landing pages that feature thorough job descriptions, employee testimonials, essential elements of the EVP, and a streamlined process to capture passive talent.

Next, companies should focus on social media. With 41% of Gen Z making career decisions based on TikTok videos, recruitment marketing professionals must know how to use social media for effective employer branding.

Sharing engaging video content and having posts direct candidates back to the career site or online application helps boost engagement and conversion rates.

Finally, it’s important to manage and respond to reviews on job search websites like Glassdoor and continue to share engaging content on a variety of platforms, including blogs, videos, and infographics. This shows candidates that an employer is active, responsive, energized, and committed wholeheartedly to the EVP.

Improve the Candidate Experience

A great candidate experience shapes how potential employees will think about and interact with an employer brand. It also affects what they’ll say about the company to other candidates. To improve the candidate experience, it’s essential to:

• Streamline the application process so it can be completed within 15 minutes
• Communicate clearly throughout the hiring journey to avoid losing 70% of applicants
• Provide timely and constructive feedback to candidates who were not selected for the role
• Ensure an inclusive and bias-free recruitment process, especially when using AI-driven technology

Taking these simple steps ensures that even candidates who don’t land the role walk away with a good impression of the employer and excitement about applying for future roles.

Focus on Employee Retention and Development

An employer brand isn’t just about what candidates have to say. It also encompasses what employees are saying about the work environment. Offering career advancement opportunities is one key to satisfying employees and ensuring they stick around. This shows employees that the organization cares about their professional goals and sees a place for them in the company long term.

It’s also important to implement employee recognition and reward programs. Recent Gallup research shows that employees receiving regular, high-quality recognition are 45% less likely to leave , demonstrating that a little appreciation goes a long way toward reducing turnover.

Talent acquisition professionals should also consider retooling compensation and benefits packages to ensure they’re on par with competitors. This and supporting employee well-being initiatives indicate that organizations genuinely care about their employees and align the company’s actions with the employer brand.

Measure and Track Your Employer Branding Efforts

The only way for talent acquisition professionals to know that their efforts to strengthen the employer brand are working is by measuring and tracking improvement. Some key metrics to monitor include:

• Conversion rates on all marketing avenues (including the number and quality of applicants
• Employee retention rates
• Employee and candidate net promoter scores
• Social media engagement, such as likes, shares, comments, and impressions

Hiring professionals can use tracking and analysis technology like Recruitics’ Vision , an AI-powered platform that allows recruitment marketing professionals to customize their data sources to create centralized intelligence to assess the success of employer branding efforts properly. With data visualizations that align reporting with business objectives, this tool helps talent acquisition professionals make better, data-driven decisions that bring a higher ROI.

A Strong Employer Brand is Key for Organizational Growth

The employer brand is critical to ensuring a company attracts and retains the talent it needs to reach its strategic goals. Fortunately, recruitment professionals don’t have to wait until the new year to start working on brand improvement.

Conducting audits using feedback loops, building a strong online presence, and retooling career development and rewards opportunities are just a few of the things TA professionals can start doing now to strengthen the organization’s image internally and externally.

–

Contact the Recruitics team today to speak with our consultants about how they can help you build or strengthen your employer brand.