Jan Söderström
There is no doubt that building a strong employer brand is very important in today’s recruitment. Great, if you already have a mobile-friendly career page and company profiles on social media! However, if you want to reap the real benefits of your employer brand, you need to think about how else can you improve your employer brand. To give you some ideas for your next steps in employer branding, we collected tips from recruitment leaders and experts and sharing them with you in this blog post. So, without further ado, here are some hiring tips from hiring pros for hiring pros:
“People don't want to work with companies. People want to work with people. This is why your employer brand needs to put your current workers front and center.
A lot of companies utilize "Day in the Life" videos to capture their culture, but the fact is, those are better for specific jobs than holistically highlighting how that job fits into the bigger business picture, and how that job aligns with other opportunities and career growth in your company. By highlighting career paths, internal mobility, and the journeys your real employees have already experienced, you'll be able to tangibly show your company is committed to the development and a long term career destination.”
Craig Fisher leads marketing and employer brand at Allegis Global Solutions and he has led talent acquisition teams at the Fortune 500 level. He's the author of Inbound Recruiting, and a popular keynote speaker at tech, social media, HR / recruiting, and sales conferences worldwide. Find Craig on LinkedIn, Twitter and visit his website.
“Every company has corporate social media channels where they talk about how great they are. These feeds are overseen by PR, communications, HR, a social media team, etc. I question how authentic this communication really is.
With Employee Advocacy, you flip this, and it’s the people make up the organization, who do the talking. There isn’t anything new in this, but when you train, encourage and enable employees with a piece of technology, it gets easier to do this at scale. And crucially, it gets easier to measure the impact of Employee Advocacy”
“Nowadays, you can look at Glassdoor, Indeed, social media and other places to get the feel of what the employer is all about, what the culture is like on the inside, and what are the people you would be working with. You can’t make up a fairy tale story and put that on the website, because candidates thinking about applying to your organization can easily see what’s happening on the inside just by using the Internet. I think companies really have to adapt to that and instead of thinking how to market and advertise themselves, actually do more introspection and look at how they can change their work, environment, and culture from the inside. Because if we do it right from the inside, then that’s going to shine through on the outside on social media and other platforms.”
Jörgen Sundberg is an HR and employer branding expert and CEO of Link Humans, an employer branding agency that helps companies measure their employer branding with Employer Brand Index. He is also the creator of Employer Branding podcast. Find Jörgen on Twitter and LinkedIn.
“As your company’s HR director it helps to think like a marketer—that is, view all your communications from the perspective of your prospects. Make sure to focus on the benefits of a specific program or position, and don’t be afraid to get creative with your tactics.
Above all, keep your brand’s voice consistent with your company culture. And make friends with those in the marketing department, in case you ever want to bounce ideas around. After all, you’re in this together and an organization’s ability to attract and retain the best employees benefits everyone.”
Meghan M. Biro is a globally recognized Talent Management and HR Tech brand strategist, analyst, digital catalyst, author, and speaker. She is Founder and CEO of TalentCulture, Founder of the #WorkTrends Community, and the host of #WordTrends podcast. Find Meghan on LinkedIn and Twitter.
“The first thing I tell companies is that the owners of the company or management have to get social themselves. If you want to be successful in recruiting, you have to grasp the importance of a brand. Building a social footprint takes a lot of time and the recruitment industry tends to have a very short-term mindset. People want results immediately, and they don’t understand that it takes years. You can make this your life’s passion.”
Greg Savage is a recruitment thought leader, keynote speaker, the most influential recruiter in Australia, and founder of four successful businesses. Find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and visit his blog.
“I think Glassdoor is an amazing outlet. It gives feedback to companies, and it gives job seekers an idea of what the company is like, and they can decide if they want to part of it or not. Whether the companies want to ignore negative reviews or not, they need to address it. They can balance it with reviews from employees who ARE happy working here. Preferably not all on the same day and certainly not from HR. They can encourage those who’ve been there for a long time to add something.”
“Unfortunately, the grand majority of recruiters only use LinkedIn. It is a real shame because, with only 380 million people on it, LinkedIn is a very small talent pool. However, those who have had the training and learned to become inquisitive are looking elsewhere. For example, you’ve got Facebook with 1.9 Billion people on it, Twitter with a buzzing community of 300 million, and Instagram with over 400 million. Designers on Behance and Pinterest, tech people on GitHub and StackOverflow, and so on.
Think about what is your recruitment, where should you go and look. Far too many overfish this one small pond (LinkedIn), but the really inquisitive ones have gone off and are discovering other social networks, which is really exciting.”
Katrina Collier teaches companies to use social media to gain access to their candidates directly on many social channels, such as LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. She has been recognized as a thought leader by social recruiting solution Work4 and is one of The 100 Most Influential People in HR & Recruiting on Twitter. Follow Katrina on LinkedIn and Twitter.
“Employer branding isn’t about sugar coding and talking about how great of an employer you are. It is about highlighting the differences - highlighting what makes you unique and different from the next guy or the next company that’s trying to recruit as well. So those differences and those differentiators are really what you want to emphasize as your employer branding content.”
“I was at Universum’s New York office a couple of weeks ago, and we were looking at data to see what type of content on each specific social platform resonates with talent. Believe it or not, but across all social channels, the number one driver when it comes to engagement is what the work actually is that people are working on. They don’t want to hear about your CSR, or walkathon that you had last weekend. They want to hear you tell them what are you working on and how are you changing the industry. This type of content is the top when it comes to engagement.”
Stacy Donovan Zapar is a recruiting strategist, speaker, advisor, trainer & search specialist. She is Founder of Tenfold, a boutique recruitment consultancy specializing in talent attraction training, consulting and search for world-class employers including Zappos, TripAdvisor, Netflix, Amazon, Walmart, Petco, Virgin, Booking.com, and many others. Follow Stacy on LinkedIn and Twitter.
“At this stage, you should already know that word-of-mouth and referrals from actual “customers” are far more impactful than your marketing efforts. Most car commercials are indistinguishable but hearing someone you know rave about their Ford/Hyundai/Mazda will stick out in your mind.
Smart companies take advantage of this by focusing less on marketing stories and more on letting staff tell their own stories.
However, buying every employee a microphone and space in Times Square might be taking it too far. You need to build out the infrastructure that successfully asks employees for stories, maintains guide rails to keep those stories focused, and provides a means of distributing them.
Each story is a tiny gem that will likely appeal to people who look, act and sound like the storyteller. Data Scientists look for stories from fellow Data Scientists. Salespeople are interesting in stories from other Salespeople. Women like to hear the stories of other women. Building a library of niche stories allows you (and your recruiters) to micro-target your candidates with stories that feel like they were written just for them.”
James Ellis is an employer brand and recruitment marketing expert, keynote speaker, consultant, and the host of The Talent Cast podcast. Find James on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Hope you found these tips useful and are already coming up with ideas to supercharge your employer brand! If you are not sure how to begin with building and promoting your brand, you should check out our Employer Brand Guide that we made. It covers everything from A to Z and will surely give you some inspiration and material to work with!
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