A strong employer brand can help your organisation stand out. But in the present hiring conditions, what are some of the challenges and emerging trends that employer is witnessing? Read on to find out.
What is the Employer Brand?
It’s often confusing and at times funny that how employer brand is defined. It is part of HR and recruitment, mostly marketing, and surely leadership. For me in the most simple terms, it’s what you find when you Google your company. But beyond defining and simply claiming your organisation as a great place to work and hurdling for ownership between functions; it is important to know that it’s your reputation as an employer plus brand and building and protecting it is integral.
For the effective promotion of your company or your brand, companies need to have a credible, distinctive, transparent and aspirational employer branding strategy in place. Employer Branding is a long-standing concept that has found momentum in the interconnected world. In a modern business world of talent acquisition, it is used to promote a company, or an organisation, as the employer of choice to the desired target group. Without a strong employer brand, your company is likely to lose out on top candidates since employer brand has a direct impact on talent acquisition.
From an HR point of view, employer branding is essential. Research shows that a strong employer brand can help your company to improve the talent pool of applicants, retain high performing employees, reduce your hiring and marketing costs, improve productivity and differentiate yourself from competitors. Therefore, investing in employer branding is important since it doesn’t only have a direct impact on recruiting and talent acquisition, it can trickle down to other areas of the business as well.
The Challenges
Hiring the best talent is always a challenge and to sustain and grow in this candidate-driven market, it is important to have an employer brand that allows people to self- assess their fit. Also, in the present job market scenario, Employer Brand may at times assume more importance than critical factors like job profile and pay package.
Building a brand requires both external and internal branding and it is really important as a potential employer to know your strengths and weaknesses. For a fundamental success, one of the utmost important aspects is to make culture your business priority and investing in it internally. Secondly, get your leadership involved with the employer brand program, so it permeates and runs through the organisation, as well as driving broader organisation-wide
adoption.
Research shows that a strong employer brand can help your company to improve the talent pool of applicants, retain high performing employees, reduce your hiring and marketing costs, improve productivity and differentiate yourself from competitors.
Trends
In this digital age, it has become easier to discover what a workplace looks like than ever before and crafting an employer brand that attracts talent has become paramount. Eventually, an employer brand should be able to create an impression of an authentic, credible, attractive employer.
For me, the trends to future-proofing your employer brand come down to:
1. Employee-generated content: The most natural employer brand content is the one shared by your existing employee. Having a proactive program and rewards keeps them excited about creating that content.
2. More videos: It is easier than ever to create a video now and engaging people with it. E.g. the live format videos; and the same can then be repurposed into other content like a blog, emails, etc irrespective of the type of content social algorithm always weigh more on videos.
3. Measuring KPIs: It is very hard to measure the impact of your overall efforts on the employer brand, especially the positive brand impressions and influence on the candidate journey and the hires. Some of the metrics I rely on are the number of views to the careers site, increase in engagement rate and inbound job applications. Not to forget the per campaign basis metrics.
The trick is to make your employer brand resemble or closely related to the company brand to make it authentic. Furthermore, realizing its impact on business growth and putting a cross-functional approach certainly is the way ahead.
I think it is such an exciting time for employer branding, as more companies, tools, products are coming out every day to make your hiring process and employer brand better. Not to mention, lot more organisations started to recognize the need for an attractive employer brand.
To sum up, employer branding is not as confusing or funny, but more of an opportunity for growth and innovation.
