A Well-Defined Employer Brand Attracts, Retains, and Repels

 

A Well-Defined Employer Brand Attracts, Retains, and Repels

Have you noticed that top corporate brands don’t have to advertise their open positions? They attract more than enough candidate applications because they are an employer of choice. And yet they continue to fine tune their employer brand.

They do this not because they want more applicants, but because they want to increase the quality of those applicants. Concurrently, an effective employer brand will repel those who don’t align with the company’s culture, mission, and values to streamline the HR vetting process.

Sourcing and recruiting high-quality candidates, retaining high-value employees, and repelling low-quality applicants is what an effective employer brand can do for your company. It can be a real cost-saver in both the short and long term. Harvard Business Review (HBR) estimates that a poor employer brand may cost a company at least 10% more in wages to entice a candidate to accept a job offer.

Define Your Corporate Culture, Create Your Employer Brand

Your employer brand is really on offshoot of your corporate culture. It communicates and markets the benefits of working for your organization to jobseekers. Not in a homogenized, everyone-wants-to-work-here manner, but by identifying the core cultural markers that makes your company an employer-of-choice.

These cultural markers are then used to identify and attract your ideal candidate. One can even think of the employer brand as a high-level benchmark of the organization. Your mission and values statement are a good place to start.

Your employment brand should:

• • Define who you are as well as who you are not.

• • Tie your customer brand to your employment opportunities.

• • Differentiate you from your competitors and even from companies outside your industry.

• • Be compelling enough to connect emotionally with potential recruits.

• • Communicate the values of your organization to potential employees.

• • Explain the corporate culture and what an employee will experience working for your organization.

Recruiter.com recommends an authentic approach, “If you are authentic about the kind of culture your organization has – conservative, experimental, edgy or whatever it is – you will attract people who would be comfortable with that culture.”

Marketing Your Employer Brand

Once you have captured your culture and created your employer brand, it’s important to include it in all recruitment marketing material. Job Fair brochures and flyers, as well as job opening advertisements must clearly communicate your employer brand to be effective in attracting talent.

RecruitingChicks blogger Teela Jackson writes in Recruiter.com, “It is also important for your Recruiting team to provide a consistent message to candidates in the sourcing and interviewing process. Your employment brand is an integral part of your company’s talent attraction and retention strategies.”

Employer brands are not created overnight. Depending on the size, locality, organizational values, complexity of culture, and whether your company is a branch location or head office, it may take months or a year to create a fully functional employer brand. Your recruitment agency can help you to define or refine your employer brand and to market it effectively.

Author Bio

Russell Richer has 15 years experience as a B2B copywriter. A former 17-year corporate accountant, he specializes in promoting B2B products, software, SaaS, and services related to sustainable manufacturing, industrial contracting, supply chain, environmental health & safety, and business process automation. Contact Russ @ richer-communications.com.