In competitive job markets, it’s paramount for employers to be able to attract good employees. To this end, organizations are investing heavily in building out their employer brand—creating content and incentives to entice top talent to join their teams. But what is an employer brand and how do you know if yours is strong enough to attract the best talent? Your friends at Block Club have you covered.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how to build your brand and create content that will attract the best and the brightest.
What Is an Employer Brand?
An employer brand is the public image you create for your organization’s workplace culture. It incorporates what employees think, feel, and communicate to others about your organization as a place to work. Branding your workplace culture is just as critical to your recruitment objectives as branding your consumer products is to your business objectives.
Strong employer brands:
- Demonstrate that an organization is a great place to work
- Help organizations stand out as an employer of choice
- Reinforce company culture and boost morale and employer affinity among current employees
In effect, strong employer brands enhance recruiting efforts and give organizations a leg up in the battle for top talent.
Defining Your Employer Brand Position
To attract the best employees, you need to develop a strong employer brand. That starts with defining your employer brand position, which reflects the specific mission and ideas you want your target job candidates to associate with your organization. More precisely, your brand position articulates why your organization is superior to others in the marketplace in terms of employment opportunities.
Ideally, your employer brand position is based on insight into the goals and perceptions of a targeted group of job candidates. The result is a vision for your employer brand that should be shared throughout the organization and used to guide strategy around recruitment efforts. Your brand vision should inform all of the recruitment content you create, such as job descriptions, corporate messaging, even the careers page on your website and the onboarding experience for new hires. Job candidates should see the end result of your positioning statement in your recruitment efforts, and existing employees should feel the effects of your positioning statement in their day-to-day.
Want to know more about employer branding in action? Check out our handy guide to the tactical ways you can bring your employer brand to life.
The Parts of a Positioning Statement
An employer brand position should contain the following components:
- The target, or a brief description of your ideal candidates, including characteristics such as demographics and psychographics.
- A frame of reference, or a statement of that defines your mission as an employer and how your organization helps employees achieve their goals.
- The points of difference, or an assertion about why your organization is superior to competitors in the same frame of reference. This may include functional or emotional benefits.
- Reasons to believe, or supporting evidence for claims related to the frame of reference and the points of difference.
Developing Content That Aligns with Your Employer Brand Position
After you’ve defined your employer brand position, you’ll want to create content that leverages your organization’s best asset: your happy employees. Interviews with interesting, passionate employees can become the backbone of your employer brand and communicate your desired position. You can develop good employer brand content by identifying employees who are strong representatives of your organization. These brand ambassadors should reflect the types of candidates you want to attract. They can be used as subjects in content that supports the ideas in your employer brand position. In many cases, effective employer branding content takes the form of employee profiles, where the representative employee becomes the subject of written or video Q&A. In other instances, you can use direct testimonials from these employees (or have an agency ghostwrite content) to support your employer brand.
Distributing Employer Brand Content
Once your employee profiles have been created, they should be distributed on a variety of platforms, all in alignment with your employer brand position. Consider the following distribution options:
- on your organization’s website or talent brand website
- through social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
- on job boards
- via email marketing to potential candidates and recruits
- via your organization’s intranet to promote your talent brand inside of your organization
Ready to Recruit
In today’s world of work, an enticing employer brand is a necessity. Regardless of whether the job market is competitive or not, you want to make sure that you’ve recruited the best talent possible to help you grow. With a well-thought-out brand strategy in place, you’ll be able to do just that and stay one step ahead of your competitors in the ongoing race for top talent.
About to embark on an employer brand project?
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