What is Employer Branding?
Your employer brand is your company’s reputation, reflecting the core values that make up your company’s culture. It describes the added value your company brings its employees, such as great benefits, career development, and work-life balance.
In other words, an employer brand is how your current and prospective employees perceive your company as a place to work. It encompasses your company culture to employees, how you present your company among top talent, and how you structure your online communication.
Your employer brand is crucial for attracting, retaining, and engaging top talent. It is what makes your company outshine others, and be considered a great place to work.
In a nutshell, employer brand is how your current and prospective employees perceive your company as a place to work.
Employer branding utilizes social media marketing techniques to develop a distinctive employee value proposition that can attract top talent. This was originally a unidirectional process, wherein the organizations communicated their brand in ways that were almost entirely under their control. However, with the exponential growth of social media, employer branding strategies changed drastically. Organizations are rapidly losing sway over their brand because employees have begun sharing company-related messages and work experiences either on their own social media profiles or on specialized review portals such as Glassdoor, making internal issues difficult for employers to manage. Yet, the information that is readily available to job seekers, can affect their intention and enthusiasm to apply and join the organizations. Over 50% of job seekers look for company information on social media platforms and consider employee testimonials more credible than the CEOs’ with respect to the company culture, and work-related aspects of the company.
As a result, employers today are encouraging employees to contribute to employer brand communication in order to reach new and interesting professional talent profiles that are beyond the company’s network.
Employee testimonials are considered more credible than those of the CEOs with respect to the company culture, and work-related aspects of the company.
Ideas To Improve Your Employer Branding on Social Media
Here are a few ways through which you can get a handle on the employees, and their issues, and help in healing and improving the employer brand.
Determine The Employee’s Favorite – Engagement levels vary across channels, and so do employee preferences.
Often, the most active channels elicit more interactions than the less engaged channels. Spend more time on the most engaging channels, as you set time aside to go through the reviews and responses on other channels.
Leverage relevant metrics to rank your channels so you can determine which channels require little, more, and the most attention. For example – Facebook might not require you to spend so much time there, but Instagram could require a couple of hours. LinkedIn and Glassdoor on the other hand could require the whole day.
Acknowledge The Employee’s Concern – When an employee approaches you whether online or offline, with a query, you must acknowledge it. This goes a long way in building trust among your employees, making them feel heard, and maintaining a brand reputation.
Provide them with an instance, wherever necessary, and let them know that you’re actively looking into the issue. Make it crystal clear to the employee that you understand where they’re coming from, as that will amplify the value of the community being built.
Be Authentic and Consistent in Your Communication – When customers subscribe or sign up to be part of your community, they hope to connect with someone real. So, instead of maintaining a consistent voice and tone of messages across all communities, it’s imperative to engage with customers, supporters, and followers on a human level. Be empathetic, and approach every interaction from the customer’s standpoint.
Always Provide Follow-Up Interactions – Let’s say you managed to handle an employee’s team-related complaint that you’d promised. Now, don’t leave it at that.
Once you’ve done your job, and fulfilled your promise, check in with them, and get an update. Are they comfortable with the new changes in their environment?
This shows other employees that the company they are working for is genuinely concerned about them and that they are dependable in case of any issues, thereby strengthening trust among the ones that are already a part of the company.
Gather Employee Feedback – A company is not built overnight. It’s a time-consuming process that requires patience and involves constant team expansion and engagement techniques.
Your employees know and can provide you with their unbiased opinions and suggestions, anonymously, if not directly, about what’s working and what’s not. So, create social media polls and surveys to obtain feedback regarding your company, its culture, and anything else you want to know like the management. Social media platforms are there of course, but let’s not forget our traditions – don’t forget to gather employee feedback via email.
Analyze the feedback and leverage the insights to optimize the employer branding you create, and the strategy you use to manage your company culture.
Set Goals And Measure Progress – As you devise new strategies or decide to tweak an existing one, be sure to constantly monitor the progress. Each type of employer brand strategy must have a goal to achieve. The common goals are –
- Improve employee engagement
- Build lasting employer-employee relationships
- Improve brand awareness
- Increased employee referrals
- Job acceptance rate
- Time-to-hire
- Quality of hire
- Increased retention rate
Your employer brand, and hiring strategy need to be continuously tweaked to see how it affects the goals above. Monitor the campaigns that have had a significant impact on your employer brand, and also the ones that missed the mark. Just remember that the employer brand is a slow process, and hence, a long-term investment so is patient and don’t get disinterested if you don’t see instant results.
Your employer brand, and hiring strategy need to be continuously tweaked. It is a slow-building process, and hence, a long-term investment, so be patient and don’t get discouraged if you don’t see instant results.
An Engaged Community And A Robust Employer Brand
We recommend you consider these tips as you try to build an engaged community and a robust employer brand. Get on-board with Brandemix – the best employer branding agency in New York and San Diego, that specializes in enhancing your company’s culture through social media, media coverage, blog posts, press releases etc. Job seekers can see the kind of employee life they can expect while working with your organization. By giving them a peek into the company’s culture, you will attract genuinely interested and highly-qualified candidates to your company who know they will fit in.
By giving them a peek into the company’s culture, you will attract genuinely interested and highly-qualified candidates to your company who know they will fit in.
FAQs
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What is Employer Branding?
Employer branding reflects how your current and prospective employees perceive your company as a place to work. It encompasses your company culture to employees, how you present your company among top talent, and how you structure your online communication.
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What is the role of social media in building/ maintaining/ improving your employer brand?
Employees have begun sharing company-related messages and work experiences either on their own social media profiles or on specialized review portals such as Glassdoor. Job seekers today look for company information on social media platforms and consider employee testimonials more credible than the CEOs’ with respect to the company culture, and work-related aspects of the company. As a result, employers today are encouraging employees to contribute to employer brand communication in order to reach new and interesting professional talent profiles that are beyond the company’s network.
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What are some goals that can be achieved by improving your company’s employer brand?
Each type of employer brand strategy must have a goal to achieve. The common goals are –
- Improve employee engagement
- Build lasting employer-employee relationships
- Improve brand awareness
- Increased employee referrals
- Job acceptance rate
- Time-to-hire
- Quality of hires
- Increased retention rate
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How can Brandemix be of assistance to your company on your employer branding journey?
Get on board with Brandemix – the best employer branding agency in New York and San Diego, that specializes in enhancing your company’s culture through social media, media coverage, blog posts, press releases, etc. By giving them a peek into the company’s culture, job seekers can see the kind of employee life they can expect while working with your organization. As a result, you will attract genuinely interested and highly-qualified candidates to your company who know they will fit in.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“Jody Ordioni is the author of “The Talent Brand.” In her role as Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix, she leads the firm in creating brand-aligned talent communications that connect employees to cultures, companies, and business goals. She engages with HR professionals and corporate teams on how to build and promote talent brands, and implement best-practice talent acquisition and engagement strategies across all media and platforms. She has been named a "recruitment thought leader to follow" and her mission is to integrate marketing, human resources, internal communications, and social media to foster a seamless brand experience through the employee lifecycle.”
