3 steps to a brand that attract top talent
One of the main things in searching and attracting talent is a powerful brand. With a good brand image, candidates will actively look for opportunities within your organization. Your employer brand will depend on your products and services are perceived within the market. What you would want is to be known for providing exceptional products, services and customer service. In addition, to being a great place to work.
1. Evaluate
You always have a brand, just not a brand strategy.
Map out your candidates’ journey. The stages candidates will need to go through when researching, applying and accepting a job. In conclusion, a candidates journey doesn’t start when they apply for the job. If you assume this you have missed three vital stages – awareness, consideration and interest. The journey will vary with candidate type (active Vs passive job seekers) and will involve online and offline elements.
After that evaluate the candidate journey, identify areas you can optimize to decrease time to hire and increase the quality of hire. Review your candidate contact points – career site, company LinkedIn page, job descriptions, jobs ads, social media pages etc Remember to pay attention to messaging, tone of voice and consistency.
Once this is completed, why not ask your current employees as to why they joined, what they like, and any improvements. A great way for insights is employees exit interviews. Also, monitor review sites as a lot of people will feel more comfortable writing a review than giving feedback face-to-face.
Next, sanity checks your hiring metrics. How is your organization performing on each of these crucial metrics?
- Job offer acceptance rate
- Time-to-hire
- Quality of hire
- Hiring manager satisfaction
- employee referrals
- Employee engagement rate
- New hire retention rate
- Win/loss ratio
- Awards won
By keeping tracking of these metrics, you can measure the impact of your employer brand strategy.
2. Plan
Once evaluated you can now plan for the future. A future where talent acquisition, employee engagement and retention are empowered by a robust employer brand.
Faking it might sound like a good idea, but there’s nothing worse than being called out by your employees. You must ensure your employees are living what you are preaching in your brand. Ensure everyone is thinking the same and all working towards your core values.
Start at the top, you’re not going to get far without your senior positions. Things you should discuss:
- What do you offer your employees that your competitors can’t?
- What is unique about your organization?
- Your organization’s inherent strengths?
- The values do your employees live/breathe?
- What do you offer prospective employees and what do they get in return?
The point of this is to know what your employer values are. Benefits, opportunities and rewards you offer your employees. This can help to help your employer brand strategy with your mission, values and goals.
You need to create a detailed business case:
- Goals and objectives: what do you want to achieve and why? Craft tightly defined and measurable goals and objectives which adhere to SMART principles.
- How employer brand benefits recruitment: While you understand the benefits you shouldn’t assume your senior appointments do. Share quick wins from your candidate evaluations.
- Measure and celebrate success: Like any business you need to make sure you are making a return on investment (ROI), meaning you need to measure the right metrics. Ensure you share when you achieve your objectives.
- Requirements and anticipating cost: There are always cost to consider, both internally and externally. If you need extra resources how many and how much will it cost? The time take to implement? And when you will see a return on investment (ROI).
- Market strategy, next steps: What needs doing and by when? Milestones and who’s responsible for what? What platforms will you promote this and to whom?
3. Implement and measure
Once your senior positions are on board with it, you will need to spread it out to all your co-workers. Don’t forget to explain what you’re doing and why. Your employers are your best ambassadors so having them on board is important. You don’t want them to be out of touch with how they perceive you and the company. The strength of your brand is determined how your employers and others perceive your company.
First, you should run what your vision is and what changes will be made internally. Select a few employers to push your brand and will be dedicated to continually growing and improving it. Don’t forget to involve your employees, after all, it is them that will be behind it. Showcase their achievements, testimonials and show their day-to-day lives and activities. You can also get your employees to share these on their socials which will increase the reach.
These steps can be considered as a soft launch. For some might be the extent to your steps. For some, it might be the start. Whichever is you, don’t do more until you are happy with your first steps. If too much is done it may not work at all, or it’ll be hard to measure what change made the outcomes.
Remember to always measure your outcomes. Remember the metrics we mentioned earlier, don’t forget to measure these. For candidates, you might want to add the following metrics too: job advert view rate, reach and engagement on social media, views, new Vs returning users, bounce rate and time-on-page for your careers page.
With these metrics, you can determine what isn’t going so well. Remember whatever you do make sure it is authentic, viewers will notice when a company isn’t being true.
