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Employer Branding: Definition and strategy

November 4, 2021


Despite modern attitudes toward branding, it is apparent for all of us that employer branding is a traditional concept with specific features. It could be one of the main reasons that the recruiting procedure has been changed recently.

Around 84% of the hiring processes have been changed to the remote exchanges in the Covid-19 pandemic. On the other hand, cyberspace facilitated employer branding.

Twitter started a two-year project to work from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While managers shifted this short-term project to the permanent policy in the middle of 2020.

The importance of technology motivated managers to use modern influential strategies to improve their branding in the contemporary world. Nonetheless, it is controversial how can managers create an acceptable organizational culture, decline the marketing costs and recruit high talented staff?


The Definition of employer branding


A brand's fame can present the purposes, policies, and slogans of that company as well as define how people perceive their company’s values and workplace. Employer branding is a long-lasting concept that emphasizes the company’s reputation as an employer. So, employers can use different activities and campaigns to stand on the top of the list of competitors in the growing war of talents.


In other words, employer branding consists of all of the projects and solutions by which companies can extensively interact with their followers. In addition, employer branding guarantees companies’ reputations among talented job seekers. So, managers make their concerted effort to prompt their organization’s employee value proposition.


Recent studies acclaimed the importance of the company’s reputation for job volunteers. Findings represented that about 86% of employees do not tend to apply or continue working for a company with an inappropriate reputation for public-minded or former employees.


Why employer branding is a pivotal factor for staff?

Well, it makes all sense that working in well-known companies has considerable advantages such as using their job support schemes. As a result, near 59% of employees argue that employer branding is a significant indicator of general Human Resource (HR) strategies.  


What are the common employer activities?

Nowadays, employers follow and invest in activities to promote their brands’ fame in public views. There are common activities including:

Designing employer strategies, defining their various aspects and implementing them step by step.

I worked in a startup with brilliant ideas and special financial support. Although team management analyzed and implemented these opinions, their traditional strategies had unfavorable effects on their competitive behaviors. In less than a year our company filed for bankruptcy.

Creating an attractive career web page

Companies show their tendency toward designing a website to represent and emphasize their brands, services, purposes, and job descriptions. A new survey showed that company websites, online job databases, and social media are crucially important for both managers and job seekers to recognize each other. About 50% of managers can implement their employer brandings’ strategies, while it was possible for relatively 40 to 46% of recruiters to find famous brands to apply for a job opportunity.

Sharing current and former employees' stories and bright experiences. 

LinkedIn has become an appropriate platform to share Company wide content including employees’ experiences. However, the platform has proven to be a great opportunity for employer branding activities.

Providing and managing advanced profiles of the company on some job boards such as Indeed and Monster.

Indeed reported that over 250 million unique visitors per month surf this database to find appropriate companies for finding job vacancies. So, the advanced profile of every company plays a key role in attracting talented job seekers.

Preparing attractive job descriptions to inform occupation volunteers about the duties and responsibilities of every job opportunity.

Jobvite resulted in a survey in 2019 that “about 29% of workers left their job within the first 90 days because they were dissatisfied about job descriptions.

Participating in the local events and fairs.

National and international fairs either podcasts, online webinars and events are the best places to introduce the brand to the public mind. Different companies that are experts in electronic, computer, and electronic commercials participate in the annual Iranian fair called Elecomp.

Despite the above activities, some various strategies and steps enhance your company’s reputation and develop communication with highly talented job volunteers.

What are Employer branding strategies?

Employer brand strategy is a documented universal attitude by which you can describe your organization’s values, policy, and your followers’ personality. You have to offer your determined strategies to be capable to measure your employees’ performance, customers’ feedback, and profit. For planning strategies, you should pay attention to some points such as:

  1. Determining your specific strategies and separate them from your competitors.
  2. Paying attention to the jobseekers’ ambitions and current purposes to work in your company.
  3. Clarify different ways to develop and strengthen your brand during the next decades

Why implementing employer branding strategies are important?

It is debatable that how influential is an employer branding strategy? As I mentioned, the reputation of a company is a key factor for job seekers. The best volunteers will be selected after interviews and about 52% of these candidates search the website and social media of the company to be sure about its reputation. Now, I classify the long-lasting effects of employer branding strategies.

1- Increasing the number of top-notch recruiters.

Your company’s reputation has positive effects on candidates. Some studies showed that 90% of candidates join the company when trust its employer brand. While 80% of managers believe that employer brand plays a significant role in hiring job seekers. It is better to notice that LinkedIn prefers more than 50% of high-quality job seekers to first-class companies.

2-lower Turnover rate.

Your concentration on employer branding strategies is an important reason to attract high-quality candidates. This point emphasizes on values, missions, and visions of your company more and more

It is interesting to know that your employee turnover is reduced by about 28% due to the negative impacts on your company’s reputation.

3-Decrease the cost

An inappropriate reputation can cost your company an extra 10% per recruitment. Therefore, It is beneficial for you to invest in your employer branding.

4-More trustworthy customers

When your employer brand and staff work with positive correlation your interactive marketing becomes more influential. So, you can raise the number of your potential customers. As CareerArc reported: “about 64% of customers stopped their perchance because of unqualified staff’s maltreatment”

5-Growth acceleration

When you have an acceptable organizational reputation and attracted talented job seekers, you can experience faster growth in making a profit. One of the recent studies of LinkedIn represented that famous companies with a strong TBI (Talent Brand Index) grew 20% faster than other companies.

6-Variety and involvement

Companies with pure and apparent employer branding strategies can recruit various talents. So, managers can strengthen their diversity and inclusion. About 57% of employers argue that talent acquisition strategies cause to attract various employers.

What are the successful employer branding strategies?

According to the pivotal role of companies’ reputation, I tried to explain the main strategies of employer branding.

1-Define your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

 EVP is a vital factor to stand at the top of the list of competitors. Furthermore, you can experience that your employees raise their loyalty to your company. Findings of some studies disclosed that about 44% of CEOs do not know that their companies use EVP. On the other hand, 61% of organizations pay careful attention to the EVP rules to attract top-notch talents.

2-Understand current and coming challenges

During the implementation of employer branding, you should observe all dimensions and difficulties of the process of hiring new employees. Moreover, it is necessary to make your company ready for subsequent needs. For example, Printfeed Company is a new startup that provided different workshops for staff to learn modern technologies of cartridges and printers in order to present customers with branding different guarantee services and consultation. However, printfeed Company supplies facilities for new staff to be ready to do their duties.

3-Explain your purposes and responsibilities

One of the first things is defining your goals clearly. You should publish these goals and objectives on your career website and social media platforms. After that, describe your organizational hierarchy, job descriptions, and work experiences.

4-Describe your candidate personas

 The other employer branding strategy is explaining your desirable candidates and clarify the best candidates’ personas. For this purpose, it is enough to talk about their age, the importance of using social media, the values of accepted employees, organizational culture, work environment, and job flexibility.

5-Optimize your primary channel

There are various channels in your company by which staff can do their tasks and communication with each other. Its optimization improves your employer branding. Furthermore, it helps you to provide high-quality candidate personas.

LinkedIn reported that 91% of employers asserted that career websites, online professional networks, and social media are the most beneficial channels for enhancing employer brand. However, their impacts could be 69%, 61%, and 47% respectively.

6-Occupy your employees

Cooperation is one of the priorities that promote your employer branding. It is helpful to share practical new ideas and improve the psychological conditions of your company. I can remember the days that my supervisor encouraged new staff to accept responsibility in current campaigns. It was useful for our team to improve team-working, employees’ loyalty, and meeting the deadline of projects.

7-Verify positive candidates’ experience

Employer brand is a steady factor that positive candidates’ experience has long-lasting impacts on its quality. Talent Adore claimed that 78% of candidates emphasized the role of their experience of interviews on the public view about companies’ reputation.

8-Measure the quality of your implemented strategies

One of the indispensable employer branding strategies is measuring the performance of implemented ones. Results of different studies showed that 96% of companies confirmed the beneficial impacts of employer branding strategies on improving the reputation of their companies. However, just less than half of them (44%) could monitor this phenomenon considerably,

9-Talk to your staff regularly

Your employer branding is an ongoing process and employees’ satisfaction plays a significant role in this trend. Regular meetings strengthen your relationship with staff. Meet their team workers 2 times per month. While they had the best time to share their ideas, challenges, and new lessons for the future.

10-Improve your payment equality

If you want to increase your employees’ job satisfaction and promote your company’s reputation steadily, you can promote equality of their income without any prejudicial behavior. UN Women asserted that the average salary among women is lower than men’s income relatively in all countries. While 20% of women felt that they have lost their payment equality in the workplace.


Conclusion

I explained the definition of employer branding and its practical strategies to know that how different strategies promote your company’s reputation. It is your turn to share your opinion and experiences about various influential strategies to recruit high-quality talents

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