7 ways to attract talent with your Employer Brand

With the talent drought showing no signs of letting up, employer branding is more important than ever. If your brand sells you to your customers, your employer brand sells you to potential employees – or doesn’t. In today’s highly competitive job market, candidates are in short supply, and tapping into passive talent pools, people in the field who aren’t looking for a job, is becoming more and more necessary. So, it has become harder to incite employees with the promise of a competitive salary alone and businesses are having to work harder at attracting talent.

Bridging this employment gap as a business begins with looking at things from a candidate’s point of view. What motivates your employees to stay? Why should a jobseeker choose your company over another? When people leave, do they pass on a positive message about the company? Here are a few things you need to be doing to answer these questions.

1. Assess your competition

Are your competitors stealing your talent? Look at what they’re doing on their website and social media to attract potential employees. If you want to get technical, you can use tools like Ahrefs to find the keywords (SEO keywords) they’re ranking for and aim to beat them. 

You need to know and keep track of where you stand as a company, in the market. What is it that sets you apart? How can you do more of it? Sometimes the answers to these questions can be found by just taking a look around.

2. Create an 'Employee Value Proposition' (EVP)

Your EVP is the set of offerings and values that attract candidates to work for you. It’s the answer to their question: “What’s in it for me?” Communicate the rewards you offer in five areas: 

• compensation
• benefits
• career
• work environment
• culture.

While a competitive salary helps, financial compensation is not all there is to rewards. Recognition, bonuses, holiday time, and celebrating wins, it all adds up. Likewise, the shift to hybrid models in workplaces has made location matter less and placed a focus on factors like management quality and company culture.

3. Talk about culture

Elaborating on the previous point, company culture is one of the top items candidates are looking for in an employer, so keep the conversation about culture going both internally and externally. How can your leadership get the whole company engaged in your culture and values? How can you strengthen loyalties and relationships? According to Gallup, while 89% of employers think employees leave over money, only 12% do, while another poll by Speakap found that 79% of employees say company culture is an important factor in their job satisfaction.

Changing jobs, in today’s job market has become more about employees being dissatisfied with the organisation’s shift in ethos rather than a solely financial decision, according to a Deloitte survey of 10,000 millennials.

4. Show your culture through social media

Now that you’ve made sure your business values company culture, how do you get the point across to prospective employees? You have to make sure your social media presence shows authentic content about your culture and employees: how you reward people, how you celebrate wins, how you get involved in your local community, team traditions, special events, employee testimonials, and stories (especially videos).

What proves you’re a great employer to work for? Think reviews, awards, and press coverage. Make a noise about these on social media, not just once but over and over again.

If you go out of your way to make your employees feel appreciated, make sure it ends up on social media. Post about the big and little things and build an audience that candidates can find and follow easily if they are looking to join your business.

5. Put your influencers to work

Your most engaged employees probably have family and friends who share their values and work ethic. Get them spreading the word by sharing posts and consider featuring them in your video and blog content or even appoint them as official company ambassadors.

Use company events as branding opportunities and have your loyal team of influencers on digital marketing duty. They will be a super asset for your business because they have a stake in the company since they are directly linked to your workforce. 

6. Gather and highlight employee reviews

According to Hireology, the average candidate reads six reviews before applying to a job. Get your employees to post reviews at least once a year on Glassdoor, Facebook, and other channels that you can highlight on your careers page.

Seek honest feedback from your employees using polls and surveys. Inquire about their reasons to stay, what they like best, how they’ve grown in their career, and showcase this information. You can also get them to make videos about their experience while answering questions prospective employees might have about the business.

According to an estimate by Cisco, online videos make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic. They’re people’s favourite form of content–so use video to share about specific roles and the organisation as a whole.

7. Create an employee referral program

Reward employees for referring successful candidates, and you’ll massively increase your talent pool. Even better, employee referral is one of the best ways of finding candidates who are a good fit (after all, your existing employees like them!).

Referral rewards don’t have to be huge monetary awards. All they are supposed to do is incentivise your workforce, widen your candidate pool and get you some prospective employee suggestions from people who know exactly what you’re looking for because they’re already within your organisation.

You may already be doing all or some of this. If you’re not, don’t be daunted by the list, you don’t have to do it all on your own. Get in touch with us today for expert guidance on building your employer brand.

Redline Group’s mission is to enable high-technology companies to build world-class teams through knowledge-led recruitment. For more information from a trusted partner with over four decades of experience, contact us at 01582 450054 or email info@RedlineGroup.com or view our latest Google reviews by clicking here.