An employer branding strategy is critical to your business’ success. Consumers and employees need to know what your company stands for and what it can offer at a glance. This is one of the key features of most successful businesses and you cannot hope to grow or scale your business significantly without attending to this need.
A branding strategy is about more than just creating a logo for your business or choosing the color scheme that you want to use for your branding themes. The branding strategy of your business also needs to include information about the ethos of your brand and the position that it takes on causes and its community. Branding provides your business with a personality as well as a recognizable livery and you need to attend to both needs to generate a strategy that will deliver big results for your hiring needs.
If you are ready to learn the steps that you need to take to develop your employer branding strategy, you need to read on!
Steps To Developing Your Employer Branding Strategy
1. What Are You Offering?
Your branding strategy needs to tell consumers what value you offer. You need to be able to show what your company can do by delivering value statements or mission statements that stand for something. You could state that each sale of your product delivers support to a foreign country or children in need. Or you might indicate that you can offer superior services that will change business productivity for the better.
Any kind of value statement must show what the heart of your mission and goals are as a business with clarity. The more succinct and relevant this value statement is, the more likely that it will have an impact on job seekers that lasts. You want future employees to immediately be able to relate to your company and this is a great way to communicate your ethos and value structure to create an emotional connection that will lead them to apply for your open positions.
2. Do An Audit
You need to know how your company is performing currently so that you can improve it. There is no sense in making big claims about the family-focused nature of your working groups or the ethics of your company if you cannot uphold those standards when you hire someone onto your teams. Make sure that your employee satisfaction is high by doing surveys of existing employees and working on the trouble spots that they point out.
Working hard to improve employee experience is part of your employee branding. Word will always get out, whether through Glassdoor reviews or word of mouth, about your business. You will want to be able to really put your money where your mouth is about everything from the ethics of your company to the working conditions.
3. Craft A Value Proposition
This is a critical part of your employer branding strategy and it can show potential hires a bulleted list of a higher-level overview of just what makes your company tick. You will want to be sure that you talk about the values that make your business a strong and cohesive one and mention work culture as well as work perks.
Your value proposition is the first way that you can attract people to think about applying for open positions, so it needs to be strong and offer the right information. A dry and boring list of benefits and basic hiring facts is not enough to get quality applicants these days. You need to be able to show the promises that you are willing to make to those that come on board and you need to speak to your values, your culture, and your business management style to attract the right attention.
4. Make Onboarding Easy
No one wants to have to struggle to get hired by a company and people are increasingly less patient with long hiring processes. If your onboarding routine takes more than two weeks, you will probably lose a large share of your potential candidates to other offers that can tie up the hiring process more expeditiously. There is no reason that hiring should take any longer than this and you should have this part of your new employee process down pat before you start trying to seek hires for complex positions or management jobs.
Onboarding is the first direct experience that many employees will have with your company. If you make the onboarding process a misery, these employees will likely look for other jobs as soon as they can. Onboarding bottlenecks can lead to all kinds of hiring struggles that can easily be avoided by streamlining this process and making it user-friendly.
5. Use Your Current Employees
Current employees who are committed to the company can deliver a lot of useful information to potential new hires. From creating video interviews that can be shared on social media or other platforms to bringing loyal employees into interviews, you can use these qualified people to help cement your company’s value statement.
Happy employees are easy to spot from a mile away and your potential new hires will be able to tell that this is how their potential co-workers feel when they meet with them. This is one of the best ways to generate a cohesive branding strategy since many people are inclined to feel like the HR department is not really involved in the day-to-day aspect of the business itself. You can speak highly of your business just by being willing to let your employees speak for themselves.
Employer Branding Can Leverage Big Results
Your employer branding strategy is one of the key aspects of successful hiring. If you have been wanting to attract top talent, you need to brand your hiring process and develop your company’s branding messaging so that interested job seekers will be desperate to get hired by you. You can show so much about your company with a quality branding strategy that there really is no excuse for not crafting one as soon as possible.
