Marketing Your Employer Brand

In a recent study, 69% of job-seekers would not accept an offer with a company holding a bad reputation.

This is why working from the inside to create an amazing company culture is essential – it’s how you obtain an irresistible employer brand to attract the best candidates. Do this in three simple steps:

Step One

Create a powerful employee value proposition (EVP) and then an individual value proposition (IVP) to create a business people generally LOVE working for.

Step Two

Find out exactly why people like working with you (is your EVP and IVP effective?). Then breathe this into your brand

Step Three

Market your sparkling employer brand – this is what we’re going to cover now.

Keep reading to learn how and compel top talent to seek you out with razor-sharp messaging.

Your Best Brand Ambassadors

Nobody understands your culture and values like your staff. It is they who are living out your brand’s story; their voice carries the most influence and is integral to your talent acquisition strategy.

Allowing satisfied employees to speak on your behalf will help you create something truly authentic and believable, giving top candidates the evidence they need to apply for your future openings.

Here’s how to encourage employees to shape your employer brand and attract the very best talent on the market.

Tell Real Stories

Your employees are living, breathing reviews of what it’s like to work for you.

Utilise their insider perspectives (and always reward them for the efforts!) to give job hunters a real taste of your company culture and values.

For example, you could ask your staff to contribute to your company blog, such as writing a ‘A Day in the Life of a ________’ post.

You could structure these pieces as:

Whatever suits the employee best.

You could even create a video like this one from Amazon to take the authenticity of your employee stories to the next level.

Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text. Don’t miss out on leveraging video’s awesome potential to engage with job seekers.

Sharing on Social Media

Share your employee-curated content on your company’s social media profiles. Where are top candidates most likely to look for you online? Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook … it’ll be personal to your business.

Instagram is great for sharing pictures and videos – just make sure your profile is set to public and not private so all users can see your content.

Monitor your content’s performance to find out what works and what doesn’t. This will help you refine your employer brand and send an irresistible message to your future high-performing employees.

Don’t stop there. Why not incentivise your staff to post regularly on your company’s social media pages?

Posting pictures of office antics and special events is a great way to get their insider perspectives across, helping them shape your authentic employer brand.

Remember: they’ll need to follow your brand guidelines (such as your tone of voice and brand positioning) to ensure consistent and powerful messaging.

Up Close and Personal

Face-to-face interactions are worth their weight in gold for employer branding. It’s a chance to reinforce the messages you’ve pushed online in person to really drive your company’s culture and values.

Bright and happy employees attending events on your behalf can represent your business in powerful ways.

For example, at career fairs, they can chat with candidates and fill them with confidence that your business is great to work for.

Perhaps you’re looking to attract passive candidates (professionals not officially on the job market but open to new positions).

Demo a new product or feature at a popular trade show and grab the opportunity to show off your business, its offerings and your committed staff. It might just be the sign an ace candidate needs to pursue a career with you.

Referrals Equal Marketing Magic

Trust your staff to deliver enthusiastic and talented candidates who have the right personality to flourish working for you.

Chances are if they are bringing in referrals they are saying good things about your company, painting a great picture to attract top-shelf candidates – employee-curated marketing at its finest.

Consider creating an employee referral program to define an easy and consistent process for staff. This could mean implementing a paper or online referral system and also instructing employees to follow set selling points when advertising your jobs.

In a study by CareerBuilder, 82% of employers rated employee referrals above all other sources for generating the best return on investment. Why?

Not only do you save substantially on the cost of hiring but you increase staff retention since candidates brought forward are more likely to be a great fit with your company.

Referrals are a smart and cost-effective way to market your employer brand AND support your talent acquisition strategy.

“On what high-performing companies should be striving to create: A great place for great people to do great work.” – Marilyn Carlson, former CEO of Carlson Companies

Market your employer brand using what you’ve learnt today to attract the best candidates and grow in marvelous ways. To recap, you should consider:

Have we missed something? If you have a burning question about your employer brand that we haven’t covered, send us a message on Twitter or email us at hello@weareadam.com – we’d love to help you further!