What is employer branding?

Employer branding is the sum of what your current and potential employees think about you. By building an authentic and desirable employer brand, an organization aims to differentiate itself from its competitors and again become the employer of choice in the minds of its current and future employees.

Some channels that you can voluntarily use to communicate who you are as an employer are your company website, more specifically, the career pages, social media handles, job ads and application process, employee ambassador programs, etc. There are however other channels that you can’t completely control but need to keep an eye on like the press, review sites like Glassdoor, word of mouth, customer experience, and the like.

Importance of employer branding in the post COVID era

1) A world of remote opportunities

After the rise in unemployment rates during the COVID, remote work has become an attractive option for both employees and employers. This has lifted the geographical limitations that candidates had before and has presented them with a new world of opportunities that they can pursue anywhere in the world. More opportunities for talent, more competition among employers, more emphasis on the employers’ brand.

2) Employees seek stability

The drastic increase in the unemployment rates has also led candidates to look out for options that are secure and stable, which means more and more talent will now be inclined to companies that have an established brand and can offer job stability unlike before 2020, where new and upcoming businesses or startups were seen as more attractive.

3) Employees value integrity

Tough times reveal what businesses are made off - do they really care about their employees? Do they give back to their community? Are they working towards a meaningful goal? All this is now in focus more than ever before. And hence, your employer brand becomes your opportunity to share who you are with the world outside and inside the organization.

Understanding the employer branding process

 

To understand the employer branding process, we could simply adopt the basic marketing funnel and match it with the recruitment cycle. Employer branding is one of the foundations of recruitment marketing.
 

Let's see what the funnel would look like if adapted to recruiting.

Stage 1 - Awareness

The goal: To connect with your target pool of candidates and introduce yourself as an employer brand, then slowly unveil the variety of job opportunities you offer, your workplace culture, etc. These candidates can be folks who may or may not be actively pursuing a job change.

Stage 2 - Familiarity

The goal: To persuade them to consider a job change. In this stage, they compare you against the other options they have and start evaluating what’s the best decision to make.

Stage 3 - Consideration

The goal: To get top talent familiar with your employer brand - in this stage, they start actively collecting information about you - read reviews, ask friends who have worked with you, etc

Stage 4 - Purchase

The goal: The recruitment’s equivalent to marketing’s ‘purchase’ is ‘applying to a job’. You focus on getting people to apply for jobs at your organization and then eventually accept them when an offer is made.

Stage 5 - Loyalty

The goal: To build a two-way loyalty road with your current employees so that they love to work with you and keep choosing you as their employer over and over again.

A lot of recruiters or organizations focus more on the consideration or the application stage, while the attention towards awareness and familiarity is weak. But as you strengthen the first two stages, your talent pool will just grow in quality and quantity.

Improving your employer brand - 3 places to showcase

Some food for thought: Today, most KPIs for employer branding are confined to internal factors such as new hire retention, new hire quality, employee engagement, employee turnover, etc while a lot of money is actually spent on external branding. Organizations have to figure out ways to methodically measure external factors like ranking on review sites, brand perception, etc.

Since we all love real examples,

Look at SpaceX's career page.
  • It clearly states whom they are looking for: world-class talent! Of course, no compromise there.
  • Communicates what SpaceX is about: Finding a future on other planets.
  • Then it goes on to promise that SpaceX is an equal opportunity employer, offering competitive salaries and perks.
  • The design just subtly justifies their story. On the whole, the page leaves the reader with glimpses of what working with SpaceX is like.

If you don’t already have an attractive career site, here’s how you can create a career site in minutes with Freshteam.

Netflix as an employer brand

Netflix uses the handle @wearenetflix to share stories about their employees, leaders, values, inside-the-office happenings, and more. Their Instagram page is actually as interesting as a Netflix account.

This is one of their recent posts highlighting how they value diversity in the educational background with pictures of their real employees who are star players but didn’t actually go to college. People will connect with brands through simple real-life stories more than through any job advertisement.

Atlassian’s choice of perks 

Who doesn’t love a thoughtful employer? Atlassian has beautifully showcased its beautiful mix of perks on the career page. It shows what they value - giving back to the community, sharing profits with employees, the mental health of their people, growth, and workplace flexibility.

It makes you feel like they put themselves in the employees’ shoes and hence came up with that perfect perks mix.

 

Employer branding is your means to help potential employees understand who you are at the heart of your business. It’s not just what your career site and job ads say, it’s who you are from the inside out. It’s about being a great employer and communicating that you really care about the things your people care for in small and big ways.