Employer Branding: The Secret Weapon of Startups Competing for Top Talent

(For a Hebrew version, see here).

One of the most serious problems facing Israeli startups today is the inability to hire good workers at the exact point in time when they are critical to the company’s success. Recruits, it seems, are lured away by large international companies, or one of the unicorns with established employer brands and deep pockets.

In this post, I will discuss how startups can build a strong brand presence in the job market and recruit top employees by using growth-hacking marketing techniques such as social platforms and content marketing.

What is an employer brand?
An employer brand is how current and potential employees perceive your company: is it an interesting workplace with a good atmosphere and nice people? Is it loyal to its employees? Is this a place where I can grow?

An employer brand is the sum of these attributes. It is the story that we create to reflect the company's character, its uniqueness, and its values.

Why is it important?
Simple: it provides compelling reasons for the employee to join your organization and stay in it.

How can a startup establish an employer brand?
Every company has unique attributes that reflect their values and capabilities. The challenge is to communicate them effectively to your target audience - whether they are customers or employees.

Startups have quite a few advantages over large companies when it comes to branding, and some are particularly appealing to technical professionals such as engineers.

A few examples include a quick step up the company ladder, influence over the product and company direction, direct access to top managers, an opportunity to work with world-leading experts, high salaries, stock options; the list goes on.

And let us not forget the quintessential Israeli story of the EXIT: your company as the next big thing; the place where things are happening. In short, you need to understand your new "customers", build the story that provides that special "secret sauce", and deploy the right tools to reach them. 

How Is It Done?
Employer branding is like regular branding, only here your customer is the employee. Startups can deploy the same growth-hacking techniques that create a brand presence in the customer market to build a strong presence in the job market and reach out to potential recruits.

As with all marketing activities, you need a methodology and a plan:
Define your company’s values, attributes and commitment to employees, and then write your Employee Value Proposition (EVP).
Plan an EVP communication plan, aligned with your general marketing plan, including strategy, tools, schedule and budget.
Deploy using growth hacking tools. For startups with low budgets, the top tools are social media and content.  

Social media
Social media is cheap to deploy and effective and it is where your workers hang out, but it requires understanding and persistence.

Each platform serves a different purpose and the roles are constantly shifting. Nowadays LinkedIn is considered a leading platform for proactive employee search, and to find work. But the landscape is changing: top workers have left (or have never been there), posting jobs is expensive, and LinkedIn is less than ideal for employer branding since it is business oriented and customer facing.

Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, are effective tools for spreading the word and branding your company with minimum expenditure. This is the place to upload photos, news, and events, post ads and maximize shares.

When uploading a job position on Facebook, try promoting it. It’s the Israeli market, so it’s going to be cheap, and it means your ad will be seen in places that mention, for example, the word DevOps. You can also create a jobs tab on your Facebook page, so visitors can see other job posts and share them.

(Those of us with google advertising experience come in handy since we know how to craft that eye catching title that will maximize clicks).

Instagram is good for telling a more personal story and as a platform for employees to express themselves (photos of nerf fights or sunsets through the office window). There are other platforms (Slio, Google+) so keep a constant tab on the changing social scene.  

Content
Social media is the vessel; you need to fill it with content. Here too you require a strategy and a plan for each platform, based on its characteristics, your targets, and limitations.  

Twitter, for example, is a good for getting noticed by DevOps engineers (those on Twitter, that is, the young engineers) through tweeting and retweeting content relevant to #DevOps. To do this, you need to tap into industry leaders and resources sources (including outside Twitter) such as blogs. 

Showcasing your managers
One of the best kinds of content is the story of your manager. Nothing will make a potential recruit stand up and take notice like a picture of a team leader followed by a short bio and what they are offering. All the rich post Round-C Israeli companies use this tool and so can you. No need for fancy black and white shots or a dedicated web site. Just put your manager against a white wall, snap away, pay a graphic designer 250 NIS for an hour's work, and upload.

Some employers are hesitant to expose their managers for fear they will be lured away by other employers. Well, fear not: as you are reading this, recruiters are soliciting them. So if they are still with you, they will continue to be even after they take the stage.

YouTube
Never done it, it is just a thought: from my own experience, video is an amazing marketing tool. Making a short video about the job position and promoting it on YouTube under “DevOps” (again, since it is targeted to Israel, it will be cheap), means that anyone looking for something relating to this term will see your video. Same goes for web optimizing the career pages on your website.

Branding for specific job posts
For jobs that are important enough and difficult enough to fill (such as a DevOps engineer), specific job branding may be required. Here too, you will need methodology and planning:
Define candidate key attributes such as demographics, professional goals, and the preferred working environment. Then write a specific Employee Value Proposition (the example of different messaging for younger and older engineers is relevant here) to be used by personnel communicating with the candidate.
Develop a hiring strategy and action plan for the specific worker, including recruiting channels, contact methods and interview process. Most HR managers already have such a plan, simply add employer branding.
Deploy the recruitment action plan (the Twitter #DevOps example is relevant here).

Last But Not least: Reputation Management
Brand communication is an ongoing effort: as with customers, you need to strengthen your worker's decision. For this, nothing beats the food old low-tech branding tool that only startups can use: the weekly company meeting when, over beers, the CEO shares all that is going on in the company: from bugs and releases, to new customers, an update on the new office, to searcing for a new DevOps engineer. 

P.S. The photos are courtesy of a customer, OzVision. Coincidentally, they are looking for a DevOps engineer.