5 best practices to approach employer branding the right way

Of all the things that have risen to importance in an employer’s mind recently, employer branding is one of the most integral factors of efficient and cohesive working of the workforce. To be able to present a work environment as ideal to potential employees and to have them believe in the company’s vision is, in layman’s terms, what constitutes employer branding.

All of this is not as simple and cannot be properly explained in a single sentence. The purpose of this article is to familiarise or make its target audience understand how to approach employer branding the right way and to positively influence their respective approaches and set recruitment strategies.

Before diving into how one’s ideal approach should be, one must know the exact reasons why employer and employee branding is critical for recruitment strategies. Here are some statistics:

• Around 95% of potential employee candidates identify the reputation of an employer as a key factor when considering a new job for themselves.
• Having an employer brand that is attractive to an outsider can reduce cost per hire by around 50% while increase potential recruitments by another 50%.
• A poor or unattractive employer brand results in an employer having to offer a 10% pay increase to attract better recruits.

Additionally, it is also pivotal to the recruitment strategy to consider that the employees believe in their employer’s brand and approach. Here are some employer branding tips:

1. Identifying the employer’s brand and aligning them with its branding strategies

The beginning of creating an ideal employer brand is arguably the biggest step forward in the right direction. An employer must identify and recognize its own self, what it identifies as, what it intends to be, how it intends to be and what it expects from a potential employee. Any candidate for the job will be attracted to a purposeful showcase of a brand and its potential. To be able to showcase itself, its purpose, its ideas, its endeavours and all that it intends to undertake in the best possible manner is quintessential to any employer and its brand.

2. Creating multiple ideal target candidate personas

An employer must create semi-fictional representations of employees it is looking to hire. These personas are ideal and will never fully conform to any employee recruited by the employer. But the purpose of these is to visualize what the employer is looking for in its recruits and help the employer in rather forming a comparative perception of all potential candidates from the entire pool of job seekers. This influences the recruitment strategy and ensures that the employee recruited is the best fit for the company and adds to both the employee and employer branding.

3. Making sure employees understands and univocally stands for the employer’s brand

To make for an ideal employee brand, an employer has to make sure, each of its employees understands the purpose, idea, vision and goals. Strong top-down execution of ideas and endeavours is pivotal in this case. The importance of a firm yet flexible hierarchy cannot be stressed enough.

This transitions to another important point in recruitment strategy: employee retention. An employer must constantly strive towards retaining its best employees. This is often overlooked as it doesn’t fall directly under employer branding but it is definitely an important aspect, one that must not be ignored.

4. Optimizing and course-correcting one’s strategies according to reception

More often than not, it is not a bad start but an ineffectiveness in adapting and correcting itself, which has led to the monumental failure of a brand. An employer needs to react covertly to public reception. When the employer deems it ready, the brand must be opened and put forward for the public to receive and critique. This critique is invaluable. It should be the primary parameter considered, that shapes any future changes, major or minor, to the strategies of the employer and maybe even the brand itself. The failure to do so has resulted in premature deaths of ideas, brands and employer branding.

5. If it ain’t broke…

Once you follow the previous steps adequately, you will have identified a working formula. Initially, it will require constant and cognitive repetition. Without a question, the working formula itself requires optimization according to the reception and critique it receives.

But at some point, when you notice a working formula, lock it. Using it repeatedly is what keeps employer branding afloat and steaming forward in the desired direction.

In conclusion, an employer must identify the needs of the brand. It is obvious but worth mentioning that there is never a perfect, single path paved for success but there are always better and more efficient ways of getting to a goal one wants to achieve. This article paves the way to understand the best possible approaches to employer branding and its relevant subsidiaries: employee branding and recruitment strategies.