August 28, 2019
In an increasingly challenging recruitment market, organisations must differentiate themselves from their competitors and create a strategic advantage for staffing their workforces to obtain top talent. Without a proactive employment brand, companies stand to lose out on top talent, which will ultimately impact their bottom line.
There are currently more open positions than there are people to fill them, and employment challenges will only grow as baby boomers continue to exit the workforce. The market is much more candidate-driven and job seekers have more ways than ever to research potential employers. In fact, LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2017 found 80% of talent leaders felt employment brand has a “significant impact on their ability to hire great talent."
There are three key elements driving the evolution of employment branding today:
Authenticity
People are quick to lose interest in brands that aren’t authentic. For what’s debatably the first time in history, the truth sells — especially when it comes to employer brand. Today, the most successful companies do not talk "at" their employees or candidates; they talk "with" them, openly and humanely. This expectation of honest communication and brand transparency has started a revolution.
Your employment brand must accurately reflect your company culture and clearly align with brand strategy. We have seen a huge rise in the number of companies leveraging their internal culture to attract and retain the right employees and deliver on their brand promises. By publicising their culture, potential employees get a glimpse at what it’s like to work there. Authenticity often starts with an engaged workforce and employees are the best sources of sharing this.
In addition, consider embedding a live Glassdoor feed into your careers site to show candidates you embrace the truth. They’ll find it anyway, and this will give them the opportunity to see how you’ve engaged any critics. It also shows you know you’re not perfect but you’re constantly striving to be better. When it comes to candidate attraction, authenticity really does pay off.
Relevant
At the same time, organisations must provide relevant content that connects with talent on an emotional level. Not only should your content be compelling and insightful but it must resonate with individual job seekers. Organisations need to be strategic about what content is being shared and when.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) now plays a big part in the decisions that job seekers make. People want to join companies that share the same values and want to be affiliated with organizations that are viewed in a positive light. In fact, 64% of millennials consider a company’s social and environmental commitments when deciding where to work, according to the Cone Communications Millennial Employee Engagement Study. Therefore, the stance that organisations take regarding their contribution to their communities and environments are critical to the company’s reputation.
Top-ranked employer brands that are leading the charge with CSR have a reputation for providing great, personalised candidate experiences and have made an effort to offer a consistent, transparent and engaging employer brand.
Inventive
As companies seek to remain inventive in the eyes of potential talent, it’s all about standing out from the crowd.
Creating compelling, engaging, shareable content is no easy task. It takes hard work to consistently generate blog posts, infographics, videos, and podcasts, for example, that people are interested to engage with. Job ads with videos are viewed 12% more than those without, and HR teams that use videos receive a 34% increase in application rate, stats from Career Builder revealed.
And it’s even harder to develop content that appeals to people on an individual basis. But it needs to be done. Candidates have come to expect hyper-personalised experiences and organizations that fail to deliver this will be left behind.
From career apps to interactive self-assessments, leading organisations are staying inventive and redefining recruitment with content marketing.
And finally, employment branding should be a continuous initiative, not a project. Leading companies evolve their employment brand to align with employees’ attitudes and improve its effectiveness to attract candidates.
Check out WilsonHCG’s 2021 Fortune 500 Employment Brand Report. Featuring six key employment branding categories and more than 20,000 data points.
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Employment branding cheat sheet
