Do you wish you could position yourself as an employer of choice? Do you dream of enticing more of the right candidates to come to you? Instead of the other way around?
You’re not alone. These concerns are at the top of most employers’ minds. Even highly-successful companies, like Google, Starbucks or Apple, continue to look for ways to get their target candidates more familiar with their employment opportunities.
The good news is you can leverage the same strategy these companies use to make such recruiting goals possible—by building an employment brand.
Ask anyone what it’s like to work for a company like Facebook, and you’ll get some pretty common responses. You’ll probably hear comments like “it’s innovative” or “they’re collaborative.” That’s the amazing thing about employment brands. The market perception of what it’s like to work for you often precedes the actual experience.
The challenging thing is you can’t build an employment brand based solely on pillars of values or expectations. Instead, it has to be lived out by your employees and their actions every day. That means you’ll need to think of your brand as a collection of the following:
How do you initially treat the people who want to work for you?
What do you offer employees in return for their time and effort?
What’s the ethos of your company? What do you care about?
What do your leaders believe in? What kind of individuals make up your workforce?
By building a magnetic employment brand, you can help you attract the right people for your organization. When you have a perception that precedes experience, you can compete beyond compensation. Because you’re providing other benefits through an employment opportunity at your organization. Lastly, it helps set better expectations for prospective employees, which improves retention.
Cultivating your employment brand should always be a top initiative. Whether you have one today or not, you should continually be working to build it or refine it. However there are some critical points in an organization’s lifespan when re-evaluating your employment brand is key.
If you’ve just recently entered the marketplace, it’s time to validate your employment offering, and solidify the perception of your workplace.
If you’ve recently acquired another company, consider creating or re-evaluating your employment brand to fuse multiple cultures and align overall goals.
Anytime you decide to “rethink” your consumer value proposition, it’s also a good time to reassess your employment offering and experience.
Growing awareness around your employment brand is a key step toward improving your talent acquisition. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the vital steps to a candidate experience, or how an outdated career site is affecting your company reputation.
